WITHOUT A SAFETY NET?

Economic necessities have forced managements to shorten setup periods for many productions – artists, equipment, crew and venue hire has all gone up in costs while production budgets have, by and large, been cut. Everyone wants more bang for their buck. 

When last did you do a show where you did not look at the schedule and think, “Oh boy, this is going to be extremely tight”? You still take it on, you need the money.

This is understandable and necessary, but carries some risk.

In nine out of ten productions everything goes according to plan, but there is that one show that Murphy is employed on – if it can go wrong, it will!

Take two recent shows that fell into the one out of ten category. On the one, the set was late, which meant that it could not be lit on schedule and there was a flying accident (fortunately nothing more than wood was hurt). The other one had some artistic differences between the lighting console and the programmers and the extremely tight schedule did not allow for a complete run through of the show with lighting before the audience was seated.

Whoever was to blame for the above two situations and the details are really irrelevant here, the point is that there was no time scheduled for possible problems – the production schedule had no safety net built in. The general rule seems to be “three days of work in two days”, it should be the three days of work in three days with a day “just in case”.

This worries me. 

A lot. 

We are relying on technology more and more to put on our shows and while this is mostly a good thing, it is a very bad thing when it fails us – the higher the technology, the bigger the failure (like the other “F” word…). The upside is that the higher the technology, the easier it is to fix, provided there is time to do so. And the issue here is really time – enough time to do the work and enough time to save the show when Murphy is on the crew payroll…

I don’t have a solution, only a warning to those that control the money – build in a safety net, allow for delays in delivery and those “Acts of God” - they will happen when least expected and wanted. Spend the extra money as insurance, hoping you will never need it, but then you don’t have to regret not having it when that brown stuff hits the fan. 

Seriously, is one day’s extra cost really worth more than your show?