Then came the serious business of restoring the lighting systems on the five stages that - while not directly damaged by the fire - suffered the secondary effects of smoke and water. DesignLab's CEO Larry Schoeneman reports, "We were already working on an architectural design for them, so we put a rush on bringing the stages up to code. After the shows closed each night, we would bring in new plugging strips."
"We needed to come up with dimmers in a hurry, and fortunately we now stock a lot of Unison packs, so we were able to come through quickly," says ETC Midwest regional manager Sylvia Sinclair.
The total turnaround from order to commissioning was less than two weeks. The job of fitting it all into Second City's show schedule fell to DesignLab's project manager, Andre Flowers. "To say it was a rush job was an understatement - we had a deadline of three weeks from fire to reopening," describes Flowers. While most damage was to the Mainstage Theatre and E.T.C. Theatre, the two training stages (the De Maat and Donny's Skybox) also needed work. The Main and E.T.C. stages each required two ETC Unison rack enclosures and 10 Two-Port DMX/RDM Gateways. The training stages each got 12 channel SmartPack Wall-Mount units.
Second City's technical director, Kyle Anderson comments, "We have been dealing with DesignLab for decades and we called them even while the firefighters were still in the building. We knew that between them and ETC, we could pull this off."
(Jim Evans)
