First Professional Show? SpongeBob: The Musical

Throughout the course of January, I was hired by the Education Theatre Collaborative (ETC) to lighting design their production of SpongeBob: The Musical. The job consisted of making a plot, making a cue orchestration, hanging extra lights, patching them, setting up the board, and programming and running all the cues. I was essentially acting as a Lighting Designer, Programmer, Board Operator, and Electrician, (all of which are things I am trained in and I enjoy doing). I used the plot from the previous designer as it was a trusted plot that they had used for the past couple years. The venue we worked in was The Flying Monkey in Plymouth, NH which is an older theater. Throughout the process of patching the lights I would communicate with the previous designer to get advice on how things around the theater worked, so that I could efficiently run everything in the month-long timeframe I had. I ended up hanging everything with minimal issue adding a couple lights to their two electrics and I setup four booms in their two in-house balconies, which acted as side lighting. Once the lights and board were setup I had to turn my attention to the actual design of the show. I made a cue orchestration for the stage manager which I then used to make the actual cues.

While I was programming the actual cues, I had discovered that the front lighting that was hung in The Monkey was not cooperating properly and wasn't safely fixable with the tools we had available. So, I ended up relying completely on the side lighting with the help of the in-house movers which did the job. The hardest part of programming was using the movers as follow spots on the actors which took a lot of trial an error throughout the tech process but it ended up looking awesome. Once the cues were completed and the show began running everything went great except for the second night. Right as the Narrator began his opening line the entire street blacked out from a power line accident. So, we all gathered around and made the best of the situation by having fun and hanging out with each other until the power proceeded to come back on around a half hour after it went out. We proceeded with the show as intended and everything went perfectly from then on out. This was an excellent experience as my first show as I learned so much and got to have the "community theatre" experience which was so fun and amazing to witness and be a part of. Thank you to the Silver Center For the Arts for providing us with some tools, thank you to the Stage Management team of Max Shanteler and River Doumato for helping me hang, and cable everything, and thank you to Fran Page and Jule Finley for being amazing and patient directors, and finally thank you The Flying Monkey staff for letting us put on this production and providing help whenever we asked for it. This was the best first professional show I could've asked for, and I'm excited to come back next year!