Australian Tour Journal

Saturday, January 8
How ya going mates? This morning I flew back to Melbourne. I have to say that Virgin Blue is a pretty nice airline. The flight was only an hour and fifteen minutes but it was quite enjoyable and everyone was extremely friendly and helpful. There must have been some arguement between Virgin Blue and the Sydney Airport at some point however since they there is a tombstone in the sidewalk showing where they "buried the hatchet".

I went straight to the theatre to meet the group. We had a tech rehearsal scheduled for 3 - 7pm. After resolving some power issues, we got into a rhythm writing cues for our show. All of the tech crew, Will, Patrick, Aaron, Nick, and Ned were great! Everyone knew their stuff and was on the ball. We even learned a few new theatre vocabulary words like "hazer" which is a smoke machine, and "bump in" which is moving the show into the theatre space...essentially what we were doing today. One exciting thing for us was the opportunity to use several moving lights that have gobo patterns in them. By programming the focus of these lites, we can change the color and focus of the lights for separate cues. What a luxury for us!

Another interesting thing about today's exercise was the fact that we were setting up all of these light cues in the late afternoon with all kinds of ambient light streaming thru the windows. So the space, though draped in black curtains, does not get very dark for a blackout. So we call it a grey-out. Often it was difficult to see the lights on the actors because the sun was so bright...but we pushed on.

We were able to run thru the show completely once with tech and had time to clean up a few rough patches at the end. We were the first ones to tech today so hopefully we made a good first impression.

Tomorrow, we will do some rehearsal on our own for a couple of hours, then make our way to the theatre for a late night tech/dress rehearsal that STARTS at 10:00pm.

By the way, the group tells me that there was much fun to be had on a visit to a local winery and to a local attraction that boasts miniature penguins. But when I ask for pictures, they say "What happens in Australia, statys in Australia"....hmmm, I'm reminded of a recent tour to Vienna Austria where a vineyard was visited and afterwards no one wanted to talk about it. What's up with these vineyards?

OK...they gave me some photos. Very lush...the scenery too.

Stay tuned...

Beautiful rolling hills	The group with a glass in their hands...again.
A wine bottle pool	Astad frolicking on the beach
Wonder what the beef was about?	Myra sets light cues with the Aussie crew