Almost a year ago, West London teenager Alice gross went missing. Alice was a student at my friend Ollie’s Forecast Academy, a Saturday performing arts school.
A while back in the Spring, over dinner and drinks, Ollie told me that he was planning on producing a West End gala in memory of Alice. I remember thinking ‘that sounds like an amazing idea’, but the scale of the ambition didn’t really sink in.
Fast forward three months. Three months of intensive planning, organising and hard work, and on 21 July we were staging ‘a unique charity gala evening of live performance in memory of Alice Gross and in aid of Alice’s Youth Music Memorial Fund’ at The Ambassadors Theatre in London. A proper theatre, in London’s Glittering West End – eek!
A few weeks before I had offered to help, unsure really what use I could be, but knowing I wanted to offer what I could. I’ve done a fair bit of event management, I organise stuff for a living, I’ve timed a two-championship winning race team with a cool head and spent 7 years in the music/video industry. I wasn’t sure what, if any of this was relevant, but I knew I wanted to help and support.
So that’s how I ended up Stage Manager on the night!
We put together a small crew. Small, considering the task ahead, at least. Luckily the core of the crew work together usually, so we didn’t all have to get to know eachother and our strange ways 🙂
We had a production meeting the night before the show and armed with clipboards, passess and running orders, we did a full page-turn and chatted through the artists and performances. With 17 separate performances, plus two speeches, there was a lot of sheer logistics in getting acts on and off stage, especially with The Ambassadors having such a small backstage and dressing room/green room area.
After a fortifying breakfast on Tuesday morning, we assembled at the stage door at 11.45 ready for load in. The first point we could get into the theatre was 12pm, and that was the first time we got to see what we were faced with. The Ambassador’s is a lovely, small, intimate theatre, and is currently home to the London performance of STOMP. This meant that we were working around the STOMP set and around their backstage set up, and the area behind the stage was extremely small.
We had several areas ‘in play’ at the same time – the backstage area, 3 dressing rooms, a green room at the top of 3 flights of stairs and some space in the cafe area of a theatre down the road. Somehow we had to organise a flow-through of artists to ensure that we could get the acts in the theatre, on the stage and off again like clockwork. And bearing in mind some of the acts had up to 20 people in them and completely different sound and set up requirements. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy.
Luckily we had radios and headsets (and a very well organised production running order). Without them we’d never have been able to co-ordinate getting everyone where they should be at the right time. Or randomly bark at eachother or still issue instructions for cable ties when someone was half a mile away in the hardware shop!
Once the sound guys had set up we were able to start the first soundchecks. The set up was complicated, due to the number of acts involved and the different requirements. We soon realised that clearing down the set for the dance act ZooNation part way through the first half didn’t make sense, and we needed to move the running order to make sure they closed that half. This caused a bit of confusion during the actual performance but we styled it out!
The sound checks took ages and we very nearly ran out of time. The fact we were still on stage at 7.15 with curtain up at 7.30 was a bit hairy, but somehow we were ready to start when we should. We were on a very tight schedule and couldn’t afford to run late.
It was terrifying giving the instruction to the theatre to dim the lights and curtain up. The guys from the theatre were lovely and so helpful and saw me through the opening bit, but after that we were pretty much on our own and our compere for the evening Eddie was on stage. Paul and I, who were backstage, quickly got into a rhythm, and thankfully Eddie was amazingly good at filling the gaps when we had technical hitches or when an artist wasn’t quite where they should be on time. Madge and Rupert were helping out with people flow and stage changeovers, and Mel and Lauren were looking after our wonderful artists in the 3 locations we had. Chris was filming, Jody was directing, Mark was PR’ing and Ollie was rightly out front, enjoying the performance.
The backstage area was roasting – and obviously very dark. There wasn’t enough room and we were a bit ‘stuttery’ in some parts with some of the technical stuff. It was stressful and it was emotional, but none of that mattered. We got every artist on stage, and they all wowed the audience. We were 10 tickets off a full-house on the night and everyone seemed to be having a great time. Most importantly, we were doing something for a great cause and for our production crew, we had delivered a show that 12 hours earlier none of us had really known how it would go.
A second career in event production awaits us 🙂 After quite a long rest…