Red, Red Wine
© William Olson, 2011
‘There is something wrong with the acoustics! There is this terrible bludgeoning sound. My voice sounds awful.’
These words were soon relayed to me, distorted and filtered, much like the acoustics of the old theater. Nevertheless, it fell on me to do something about it. I met with the engineers and sound guys, and they told me what needed replacement.
‘And you think I can find one of those around here?’ I asked a stagehand.
I always get nervous during the sound check. For the plays and comedy shows, it’s seldom an issue, but for the music acts it can devastate a performance. One of the engineers had told me I might be able to find the broken part at a place that sold instruments. ‘And if not, you may be able to find something at Office Depot,’ he had said, ‘that we can jerry-rig as a temporary fix.’
I called for one of the runners. Then for another. I couldn’t get one of them to answer their phone. It was cold outside too, and I didn’t feel like running all over town hunting one of these things down myself.
It had taken me months to bring in Regina. Her last gig in Chicago was a dud, and so her manager was reluctant to try it again. ‘That was four years ago,’ I pleaded my appeal. And so he finally acquiesced. ‘I’ll give you one night,’ he had told me, ‘and you’ll owe me one.’ And so I put it on the Othello’s calendar: Christmas Eve.
I love my job. I get to travel around the world and scout the theater scene for programming at Navy Pier’s Shakespeare Theater. Most of my trips are to Broadway, but I’m able to get to Dublin, Stockholm, London, Oslo, Madrid, Paris—all the big European cities—at least once a year, sometimes more often. I had first seen Regina in London, and I had only recently heard of her.
Regina, during her early days, had been a bit of an Internet sensation. She was one of the first artists to make Myspace payoff. But from there, her popularity mushroomed. Just after I had executed the contract to bring her to Chicago, I checked the number of views one of her videos had received on Youtube, and it boggled my mind. It caused visions of ticket sales to dance in my head.
As her date in Chicago drew near, though, pre-sales were hardly impressive. My venues are not especially large, and so I had lobbied for an obscene premium for the first ten rows of seats in the Othello—I set the first row at $420 a pop. The theater is, I should add, a very intimate one. There really isn’t a bad seat in the house. And I had presumed the tickets in the remainder of the theater would go like hotcakes at less $200 each. For all my good planning…
It was three nights before the show, and we still hadn’t sold out. Something like a fourth of the seats were still on the block. There was some blowback sent in my direction for the lousy sales too, but I’m sure it had more to do with marketing than pricing. Regina’s fans were wild about her, but they were young. Maybe I had erred after all; maybe mommy and daddy weren’t so willing to pony up a grand for their two daughters to have dinner at Riva and see Regina afterward. In any event, we had to discount the remaining tickets during the last forty-eight in order to get rid of them—and nearly half of the front row wound up going for about $300 per ticket.
Regina had found a place in my heart ever since I had seen her in London. Her voice—O, her voice. The Chicago Tribune had described her as the reincarnation of Clio. I can’t say I much disagreed. Cute girl no less—short, but curvy, and she has the most infectious laugh. Big breasts too.
I had wanted to meet her personally. Typically, I’m able to get in a few words with the stars we bring in. Rub some shoulders, nothing much though. But I didn’t even get a glimpse of her until all went awry during her sound check. And by then, she was pretty miffed—though I’ve seen worse, much worse. I had brought in Robert Plant a couple years prior, and he too had issues with the acoustics—only it had nothing to do with the technics of the place. He was used to playing much larger venues, and so the intimacy of the Midsummer Theater, which is slightly larger than the Othello, just couldn’t accommodate his specs. He bitched and bitched. Relatively speaking, Regina took it pretty well.
But the clock was ticking now. I decided to make the run myself. And I was able to find the part I needed at music store right on Madison Street. The guy working there seemed to get quite the kick when I told him from where I had come. ‘Who needs this?’ he asked. And he was a fan of her too. ‘She’s amazing,’ he had said, ‘I didn’t know she was in town.’ I knew it was marketing’s fault.
It’s these small-name, big-talent acts, like Regina, that I like most. The theater-goers who take in the plays notwithstanding, it’s only those with a refined sense of taste who seek out the musical entertainment at Shakespeare. It’s a totally different experience than taking in a show at one of those gargantuan outdoor behemoths. I really can’t fathom why people waste their money at those shows—there’s no intimacy to them, like Shakespeare. Certainly not like the Othello Theater.
Regina was scheduled to take the stage at nine o’clock that night. The opening act began at eight and played a set for about thirty minutes. They weren’t bad either. And they had been a last minute replacement for another group that bowed out. Fortunately, one of my colleagues at Shakespeare pulled a few strings with a record label based in Kendall County operated by an attorney out there, to fill the vacancy. We had to change the credits page of all the programs to include ‘The Rogue Barrister’ as one of the producers—or we faced the threat of litigation. As they say, there’s no business like show business.
I had been looking forward to seeing Regina. It’s one of the several perks of my job—getting to have a say in who comes into town to perform, and then being able to enjoy the show as well. But just as she took the stage, I received a call. One of the runners had become sick and vomited backstage.
At first I thought I would just ignore it. I was the ‘quarterback’ of the theater’s production team—it’s really a small group we have there—and this sort of thing seldom made it as far as my phone anyway. Only by the odd inflections I heard on the other end of the line did I think it worth my time to look into it. As it turned out, I’m glad I did. A few of the theater’s runners had decided to get the party underway a little early. They had knocked off several bottles of wine, and this, I surmised, was behind the sudden sickness. I was correct.