get 'em off...
Fascinating to note that one of my old theatres still hasn't learned its lesson;http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4589308.stm
Way back in the nineties, when I was chief electrician there, we had a one night gig booked in that we knew nothing about. Some sort of american outfit called 'The Chippendales' apparently, when it became evident that they were in fact, a troupe of male strippers this caused not a little bit of consternation amongst the crew. It is important to point out that at this time the Alex crew were so thoroughly unreconstructed as to be legendary, not to say notorious on the No.1 touring circuit, that and the prodigious quantities of ganja that was consumed in the crew room didn't make for an easy get-in for any one if they took agin you. There was a muted rumbling of protest at having to staff this filth (you'd not have heard a peep if there had been naked women involved), and certain men refused to work it.
It wasn't an auspicious start, as we started unloading the props and off came a pool table on wheels, and a mobile shower unit, use your imagination...
It was only when the artistes turned up that the atmosphere began to improve, because instead of the willowy shirt-lifters that the collective imagination had created; these were all-american muscle boys, and they brought their girl friends. In fact the only non-heteros in the troupe were the two little english boy dancers, who kept their clothes on, but provided the choreographic visuals that most of the lumbering americans were ill-equipped for. Rehearsals were a bit of a learning curve for everyone, this was the first venue they had toured into that had a raked (sloping) stage, and the runaway pool table heading for the orchestra pit necessitated some hasty re-choreographing.
There were some members of the troupe who were better suited to the dance element of the show, these guys were african-american and seemed to be well up on the street dance moves that were popular at the time, indeed, one of them was spinning enthusiastically on his head when precession and the slope caused him to spin off into the orchestra pit. Our pit was deep and large, about three feet below the carpet level in the auditorium, and about eight feet below stage level, fortunately he was unhurt.
The audience was separated from the pit by a low wall, about three foot high, topped with a brass rail, this was in sections so that it could be easily removed if required. As the venue used also to do rock gigs, there was a steel reinforcing structure to prevent the crush of the audience from collapsing the pit-rail. In this particular case, the response had been, 'oh, it's only a load of women, what can they do?' and the decision was taken not to put the reinforcing in, nor had they hired the two security guards specified on the rider to prevent people from getting up on stage.
As the day progressed, our performers had their tea onstage, some of them eating a dozen hard boiled eggs (something to do with body building I believe), and we began to get an inkling of what was about to occur.
The first incident(s) started about 5.00, when we heard a muffled scraping and cursing from outside the building, when we eventually investigated, we discovered several sensibly clad middle-aged women shinning inexpertly up the drain pipes on the outside of the building, with an open dressing room window as their target. Subsequently,we evicted several more women from the dressing rooms, and our technical manager got on the phone and dialled up some security guards.
Come the gig, I was only there in a supervisory capacity, as they had their own board operator, so I was able to hang about and watch the audience. It was my habit to stick around front of house and chat to the ushers and other front of house staff, the lighting box was in a former ice-cream sales booth and I would frequently be interrupted by confused punters trying to buy sweets and suchlike, so it was easiest to hang about and point them in the right direction.
It was immediately apparent that us males were distinctly in the minority, I think there was one poor bloke in the audience, and the male members of the crew were hiding. There was an extraordinary atmosphere in the room, a sort of hormonal expectation, and everyone was very excited. The demographic was not what I'd have expected, middle class, respectable, well dressed and good humoured, I was propositioned and groped several times, an interesting experience I suppose.
Once the show actually started, the atmosphere changed, an excited buzz turned into a full throated baying that explained the need for a large PA system. The boys certainly knew how to work an audience (one of them had said to me, in a charmingly self-deprecating way, 'we think of ourselves as bimbobs') and by the time the interval came they had the punters nicely on the boil. A lot of drinking went on in the interval, the troupes' management had loads of merchandise to sell; from t-shirts to nylon thongs, videos to calendars and had specified a half-hour break. As it was, it took about 40 minutes to get them all back in and sat down, and it was with considerable relief that I watched the show up, and made my way backstage to wait for the end.
I had barely sat down when everyone in the building who could still stand was called to the stage; a group of women, inflamed by drink and the relentless come-on being presented to them, had got up and charged the stage, but, instead of going for the steps (guarded by terrified looking security guards), they had diverted to the pit rail, not realising there was a large gap between it and the stage. The pit rail was unable to withstand a determined charge from some twenty women, and had promptly collapsed, and when I got there the orchestra pit was a struggling mass of tweed and wiggling legs. We stopped the show, briefly, to extract the women, check them out and dust them down. It was obvious that there would be a riot if we didn't continue the show, so it was decreed that all available crew members would stand in the gap left by the collapsed section as a human barrier, thus was created, uniquely, the Alex's tweed mosh pit, as during the rest of the show, every now and again, another woman would have a go at getting onstage, and hurl herself porpoise-like over us (bear in mind that we were three feet down). Our retrieval techniques got quite polished, and nobody was hurt, which I think was something of an achievement in the circumstances.
posted by Lampy @ 1/11/2006 12:04:00 pm
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