Veni, vidi, vici

Well, the concert is now in history and what a week! I never left the park from Monday morning until my first night home Saturday evening, the day after. It was quite a haul. Never having done such a large event (even for Domingo!) it was a stretch of my abilities and sanity. But something to put on a resume, fer sure!

Here are the riggers, 18 of them the first day assembling one of the large LED support structures. The guys (and one woman!) were awesome and rigging gear is way cool. They climbed and hauled in the sun and got that thing up. The tower was about 30' or 35' tall with a 18' by 24' LED screen hanging on it. It also contained our speaker array for the front of the field.

Here's one of the scaffold structures with our green banner on the left side and a bit of the enormous LED screen on the right. You can see the speaker array hanging behind the green banner. There was a second array hanging to the right of the LED to fill the area on either side of the stage with sound. However, if you happen to walk around the stage from backstage to front, the fill was so powerful your ears were ringing.

I had over 100 people on site working for me on Monday and the coffee break bills will prove it. We needed a u-haul to get the Boxes O'Joe back from Dunkin' donuts. Next year we have to look into a craft service to provide everything, but, the cost of the service is quite high. However, I practically needed to hire a PA just to run back and forth to the food store so it would be worth the expense.

We had over 50,000 people at the event. The program, a mixed bill of opera highlights, was so incredible everyone enjoyed the beautiful music and singing.

Our stars were amazing. Not only did they sing the night away but then hung out backstage to sign autographs and speak to every single person that waited. And I mean every single person. Angela looked incrediable in her gowns (she did a costume change half way through the event and then changed again after the concert). And Roberto is such a European charmer. I couldn't believe the patience they both displayed speaking to everyone to came. I just have no idea how all those people got backstage!

The Long Meadow of Prospect Park is a jewel in Brooklyn. It is a buccolic expanse that rolls along as if you are in Cotswold or some other verdent English valley. You can not see any buildings from the field. The field LED's didn't look large on the plan and I was uncertain how the image would appear to the patrons. My uncertainities were ungrounded when, during the show, I walked the length of Long Meadow and saw the crystal clarity of each screen. Once out of the main length of the ballfield area, each screen had it own pod of people, watching as raptly as if in their own living rooms. Amazing.

This photo doesn't really show you each screen, although perhaps if you can imagine that the teeny dot in the middle is the stage, you can see how far out the audience progressed down the length of the field, about 3/4 of a mile. This shows 2 of the four screens that we installed. Once past this point the stage was not visible but this didn't deter a large number of people who extended past the "picnic house".

Now all I have left to do is the paperwork, which I'm sure will take me into the next few weeks. And then VACATION!!!

To read the NY Times article about the show, click on this link, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/arts/music/20oper.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1, the results of my interview are on the 2nd page.