Editor's Note: This is Monica Hooper's second choice for top stories. It originally ran June 19, 2022.
Before the tip of the first gold-glittered hat, Dan Sher will be clocking lights, music and more at the Walton Arts Center as "A Chorus Line" prepares to take the show to Japan after a short four-show run June 24-26 in Fayetteville.
The president of Big League Productions Inc. says that when the technical team does their job right, no one even notices.
"The show doesn't even exist without teching it," Sher posits. "It's like a car nowadays without the computer system. ... You have the parts in there, but if they don't talk to each other, the car just won't go."
Sher says that people think that live shows are "more spontaneous" than they are when, in reality, there are hundreds of moving parts that have to be choreographed before the curtain rises.
"You have maybe 200 lights in the air, and they're all going a certain direction and pointing at something and then moving in time to go to another actor or 17 actors who are moving in one direction" while the sound to each microphone has to be calibrated to project three voices over five others -- which is only the tip of the musical iceberg in terms of coordinating the stage show alone.
"Even if it is spontaneous and live and happening, it's all thought through with a microscope," Sher says. "It all has to be dissected. You can see a moment that might take two minutes to show -- a section where all sorts of dancing is happening, all sorts of singing and lights flashing and scenery moving. That two minutes sometimes can take an entire four hours on the stage just working through," before audiences see it, he explains. "It's a very, very involved process to technically rehearse a musical, which you don't realize, thankfully, when you watch it, or you'd be really bored. ... We hope you barely realize that lights are programmed to do what they're doing. You just think it's kind of just all happening. So that's the magic of theater, I would like to think."
When getting a show ready to tour, teching involves planning the show for other spaces too.
"There is a specific way that you have to put a show together so that it can pack up to go on a truck," Sher explains, "because [when] you get to the next venue, and you open the trucks, you have 50 individuals who don't know what's on the truck, and you have your maybe 15 people telling them what to do." He goes on to say that "it takes a very specific, scrutinizing kind of process to diagram out and create a show to tour."
This is the second time for "A Chorus Line" to have technical rehearsals at Walton Arts Center. It was first launched from Fayetteville in 1997. "It's a wonderful place to mount musicals, it's a wonderful place to just bring musicals to full stop, and particularly wonderful place to put them together from a production and tech standpoint," Sher enthuses.
UPDATE
For an update on this story, we asked Curt Owens, director of programming at Walton Arts Center, about the local impact of having a technical run at the Walton Arts Center.
"There are myriad ways teching a show benefits both Walton Arts Center and the local arts scene," he says. "In addition to providing longer periods of work for local crew members, it also educates both audiences and crew members about how national tours are produced."
To date, 13 Broadway-sized shows have had technical rehearsals at the Walton Arts Center including "Legally Blonde," which ran tech there in October.
"Teching shows can also bring incredible Broadway talent to Northwest Arkansas, such as Baayork Lee, from the original Broadway cast of 'A Chorus Line,' who directed the production that teched here," Owens says. "When top-tier designers and creative teams have a good experience at Walton Arts Center, they share the experience with their colleagues, boosting our reputation and ability to attract more productions.
"Just as important is the effect on the local economy, as teching a show brings in twice as many people as would normally be required for a national tour. For the two weeks they're here, they're staying in local hotels, eating at local restaurants, shopping in local small businesses and exploring Northwest Arkansas on their days off, pumping tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars into the local economy."