Village Halls and Fairy Lights

Well this is one thing Music College doesn't teach you. How to pin up pink fluffy fairy lights in the shape of a large heart.

I'm with Hatstand Opera on a touring scheme that takes professional companies into rural venues in Cheshire. Part of Hatstand's ethos is to bring opera to those who do not normally watch it, and we certainly succeed in that! Wives who might know the British airways ad (the flower duet from Delibes' Lakme) will drag their husbands kicking and muttering. Ironically, at the end of the night it's often the husbands who come up and say how much they have enjoyed the experience.

Back to the fairy lights. One of the perils of village halls is the stage. We are happy to work on the floor or on stages of most descriptions, but most village hall stages are vertiginiously high, small boxes with ancient or incomplete lighting. For this particular show, Love, Lust and a Damn Good Chardonnay, Hatstand always request a black box set-up (black curtains on stage all the way around to hide the sides) and a lighting rig. What we found at the hall was an off-white painted box, no curtains and four spotlights at the front of the stage, all resolutely pointing in the wrong direction. So we had to come up with something pretty amazing - in under an hour.

In the Pink
For this show, Hatstand always carry two long pink dining room curtains, so they went up at the back across the doors. Two magenta feather boas normally worn during the last number were commandeered and wrapped around the curtain rods, then draped down for effect. Did I tell you the visual theme of the show is pink? The two lengths of fairy lights (pink hearts with feathers attached) normally bedeck my digital piano. Instead, the soprano and I wrestled with white electrical tape, attaching the fairy lights to the back wall in the shape of a large heart, to be switched on at the top of Act 2. There was a wonderful moment in the show where the mezzo, having forgotten to switch them on, managed to hit the button on the line "So you say you like the apartment? / I’ll have you know that I've furnished it all myself", which got a big laugh. She was playing the part of the Jewish mother-in-law from hell, in the trio "So Much In Common", a musical about a transvestite serial killer in New York. Nice…