The Gammage Auditorium. It’s an iconic space really. Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s often called things like “the birthday cake theatre” because it is round and looks like it has decorations on the top edge.

When I first started touring this is a space I really wanted to see. I studied Theatre Architecture in grad school and always thought this was an interesting space.

The biggest challenge here is the loading dock. It is one story down a curved ramp. The curve is such that nothing bigger than a 20’ box truck can navigate driving down it. As a result everything is unloaded in the parking lot and you walk or forklift everything down the ramp.

Because the theatre is on the campus of a university, the parking lot is prime space. This means that not only do we need to share the lot with all the folks that park there on a regular basis, but our audience does too. So, it means we cannot have matinee performances. It changes our load-in schedule to starting on Sunday and opening on a Tuesday. Ultimately for me, it means a couple less hours of time to focus the movers for the show. Amazingly, the opening was good. I still needed a work call to finish focus on Wednesday, but the show looked good on Tuesday and was great on Wednesday.