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Theater Spotlight
“Whenever that stuff
happens, you know
there are 1,300 people
who also know that it’s
happened.”
— Scott Sanders
to crawl under the desk, but I just
told her yes and that we had to
replace the computer. So she sat
on the edge of the stage. I left her
mic open, and she talked to the
audience while I made the computer
swap. The audience loved it.”
Sound effects can also wreak
havoc for a live engineer, such
as when Ford worked on the first
national tour of Beauty and the
Beast in the mid-1990s. She was
the sound effects operator for the
show, and on the first leg of the tour
in Minneapolis, an unexpected and
unanticipated problem arose. “I was
set up in the basement backstage
to run the show,” she says. “I had
a rack at the end of my table that
had all my mixer modules for LCS
and my MIDI interface for the sound
effects system. On top of that rack
there was a spare computer that
was not used for the show, and it
had some games on it. Occasionally,
an actor would come by and play
on the computer for a few minutes
before going on stage.”
During one of the shows, a
member of the cast came by to
play games after donning his costume.
“I wasn’t paying any attention
because he would always be
on that computer,” continues Ford.
When she got to the scene where
the Beast meets Belle for the first
time, “there was supposed to be a
big roar.” But nothing came out, not
even a whimper. “I went to hit the
next cue, and nothing happened.
I’m looking everywhere, trying to
find out what the problem is. This
being a Disney show, a costume
had some kind of appendage hanging
off of it. Whatever it was, it had
hit the power for my MIDI interface,
and it killed everything. So I had to
reboot the entire system to get back
online. I’m not sure how many cues
were missed during the reboot, but
it felt like a lot.”
www.stage-directions.com • November 2007 27