helen hayes 2014

The Monday after Easter was the Helen Hayes Awards, an annual award ceremony that I've worked on for the last 2 years.  It's like the Tony Awards, but for Washington, DC instead of for Broadway.  There are 97 theatres in the DC area, and the Helen Hayes Awards is THE theatre event of the year. I was the assistant production manager again, and loved it even more this year than last year. We totally changed the format, which was both frightening and exciting. There was no precedent for what we did, or example to look to, and it was amazing to be part of the creation of such an event, starting at the ground floor and figuring things out as we went along. The ceremony used to be a 2.5 hour show at a theatre, followed by an after-party in a nearby convention center. But starting next year there will be twice as many awards (they are splitting the categories by theatre size), and making people sit through a 5-hour show isn't really feasible. So we decided to experiment with a new format, hoping to find something that will work for future years. We combined the show and the party, making the whole thing 5 hours long (6 for the nominees/VIPs, as they were invited to a special pre-event reception). We held the event in the National Building Museum (absolutely stunning space!). We had 3 half-hour Acts for presenting the awards, during which people could watch from almost anywhere in the building - live video was projected on 6 screens around the hall. Or they could continue to mix and mingle and enjoy their conversations. Intermissions were about 20 minutes long, which gave us time to get the next Act set up and ready to go.

Sunday evening (Easter) I went down to the National Building Museum, ready to spend the next couple of days there.  The production manager, Cary Gillett, was staying in a nearby hotel (many of the production team members had planned to do this, as it was significantly easier), and I crashed in her room Sunday night.  Because the NBM is open to the public during the day, we had limitations on what we could set up on Monday.  So most of the load-in had to happen Sunday night, after 5pm.  We had a crew of about 75 people who worked most of the night to get it done.



This gives you an idea of what the space looked like mostly empty, though it is not actually curved like that -
I couldn't hold my camera still enough to get a straight panoramic shot!
So imagine the building is a rectangle instead of whatever shape that is.

 

Progress of load-in, from top left to bottom right
 

I didn't do any physical set-up on Sunday -, I was there to oversee and be available in case any problems arose - so I worked on paperwork on my laptop and made sure snacks were available. Cary was in tech rehearsal for a show at the University of Maryland, so she arrived around midnight and I met her at the hotel to check in, and then we made our way back to the NBM for a couple more hours of work.



The Hotel Monaco, where we stayed

I walked Cary around the building to show her the progress, and we checked in with the producers of the event to see how they were feeling about it and if we could be helpful.  Progress wasn't quite as great as we had hoped, so the 4 of us had a pow-wow with the stage manager and technical director to adjust the schedule accordingly.  We opted to have the crew stay longer and finish up certain tasks, so we could call most of them back later the next day, rather than sending them home for a few hours and having them come back at 8am to test the equipment before the museum opened at 10.  Then we left Dan Wagner (the technical director) to oversee the rest of the load-in, and agreed to come in for the piano drop-off in the morning so that Dan didn't have to be there, and could sleep an extra hour.  No matter what we did, though, we knew that we would all be exhausted by the end of the event.

(We already were, and we had 24 hours left to get through!)



They had started to play with lighting, so this is what it looked like when we left.

The next morning Cary and I got up and went back over to the NBM.  The piano had been delivered a couple hours earlier than scheduled, so it was already there when we arrived.

As was this gorgeous morning light:

We ran and grabbed breakfast, then waiting for the staging assistants to arrive so we could have a short rehearsal.  Once that got underway, Cary and Ruth (one of the ASMs ) went to Woolly Mammoth Theatre to start the band rehearsal over there - we were using their rehearsal space for the day.  The rest of the day included more loading in, various rehearsals so everyone would know what their job was for the evening, tech notes, and a walk-thru of the show.

And the load-in continues!  Almost there...

"Backstage", which was on the first balcony

When 5:00 hit and we had the space to ourselves again, we did a sound check with the band and the singers on the stage.  In other parts of the building, the final touches were being added and everything triple-checked for readiness.  The volunteers had a meeting upstairs, and I met with my team (one of my assignments for the evening was to captain a team of volunteers we were calling "nominee wranglers") to give them their paperwork and the rundown of duties.  And then we waited for the shindig to start! 

We had about 1800 people at the event, and a few thousand more watching via webcast.   Some things went just as we expected (the awards show itself came off particularly smoothly!), others were challenges but we worked through them with grace and poise (the nominees didn't get the stuff they were supposed to at registration, but I gathered a small team and we got to as many people as we could during the reception), and other things were a little bit of a disaster (the credit card machines didn't work).  What an ambitious event to pull off - it was all really incredible (and exhausting). We're now in the feedback/debriefing phase, where we collect all the praise and the MANY suggestions on what we can do differently next year. But overall, the response has been very very positive!  Can't wait to do it all again next year.

Here are a few pictures from the evening:

 

Me and one of my best friends, Jose!

An awesome actor I've had the pleasure of working with a few times, James Konicek

Isn't the lighting exquisite?

Me and Cary Gillett, relaxing our feet for a couple minutes while we waited
for the clock to strike midnight so we could kick everyone out and start cleaning up!

 


Finally at home!  Couldn't resist a mirror selfie.