Practice makes perfection, people. If I screw up and hit a light cue early, it may throw off everyone else’s timing. And it creates a domino effect. Often it is the light cue that signals the performer when to make an entrance or a band member to hit a drum roll. If I miss a strobe light cue, the soundman won’t hit the recorded thunder roll that signals the start of the next musical number. Then the dancers don’t enter from behind the curtain. Then the singer is lost because he’s waiting on the dancers. Then we are all involved in an amateur production. Without practice, we cannot prevent these problems. A lighting crew must check the spotlights in every venue prior to the show. One of my pet peeves is when I start a show and find that one of the lights is a lot dimmer than the others. This means one of the performers who needs to be lit won’t be. I don’t care that the venue owns the spotlight and not the company that is providing the traveling lighting system. I want to know that my crew chief has my back and has checked them in advance. In the afternoon you have time to fix these sorts of problems. Finding an intercom fault five minutes before show time is unacceptable.
From “LD-at-Large” by Nook Schoenfeld, PLSN, Dec. 2009
