I am happy to report that the opening night of “Touch(ed)” here at PTC was a great success. Despite all the craziness of the past few days I think that the cast and crew of the show deserve a hearty congratulations and so does playwright Bess Whol on the premier production of her new play. The audience was very responsive last night despite the plunging temperatures in the theatre due to the fact that the heat had been off for over two days due to a burst steam pipe on campus. I have been told that six buildings on campus are without heat until Sunday at the earliest, and we have heard on good authority that it may take until Tuesday to be back up and heating. So even our audience deserve a round of applause for sticking it out through the cold!
The show is an amazing piece of work and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something to see over the next two weeks. There are plenty of tickets available and we are happy to fill more seats! The show, as I mentioned in my last post, tells the story of two sisters, one diagnosed with schizophrenia and the other, younger sister, trying to care for her and get her out of the hospital and back into society. It is a very moving show with many light-hearted sections that have made our audiences, laugh, clap, and “awww.” In my personal opinion, this is a show that I would come to see multiple times if I were not working it! There are so many nuances in the text that I keep picking up new ones every performance.This has certainly been an interesting opening weekend though with the heat being out. I was forwarded a message direct from the artistic director asking if I could come in around 4PM on opening day to turn the lights on to see if that would help warm up the theatre. I got a couple crew people in and we deployed 16 2kW fresnels around the space to help out as I didn’t wan to burn the show light for too much extra time to save lamps and color. Amazingly we managed to bring the temperature on stage up to almost 70˚F and in the house it ranged from 65˚F to 68˚F.
I apologize for the lousy quality of the photo, I took it with my iPhone and I couldn’t get the whole place in the shot. The really bright spots are the units themselves or what they are pointed at. After the show we left six of the fixtures on overnight to help keep the temperature up, and apparently we have kept it up enough to do the matinee this afternoon. It is definitely colder here today and it feels like we are still bleeding heat. I am wearing my wool coat in the booth and we even have a space heater in here! Our intrepid stage manager is keeping the glove-warmer industry afloat by keeping a whole bunch of those chemical hand warmers out and warm all the time. I have to give the cast of the show amazing credit for being able to do this show in the cold, especially given that some of them are on stage in tank-tops and running shorts.
It has just not been a great week for the University of Utah. Earlier this week they had issues with payroll and all of us employees who get direct deposit did not get paid on time. Thankfully I was not relying on my paycheck to come in to pay bills on the same day, but apparently a lot of people were put in tight spots. It was a big enough issue to make the breaking news and be all over the papers the next day. They managed to get everything sorted out within a day and we all got paid, but it was a bit of a bummer. That coupled with the heat thing makes it a bad week in my book. We are pulling through and making do though. We might be all bundled up, but the show is going on.
In other news, my parents are in town visiting. Yesterday was their anniversary so I had the hotel send them up a bottle of wine and a fruit and cheese plate on their arrival. They were happy to get it, and they said that it was good. We all went to temple this morning as I was leading services. It was a nice service. We are still getting our footing now that the rabbi has left. People really enjoy listening to me lead though, which is nice to hear. We will be heading up to my uncle’s place in Park City for a few days (well I will go back and forth) to do some skiing and visiting. It should be a nice week.
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