#rwcmd

The final week working on Grimm, was truthfully, the easiest one so far - due to the nature of the show, all the actors never came offstage and there were no quick changes for us to deal with as dressers. Therefore, I could arrange the schedule so only two of us had to be on each night, and nobody had to work both the matinee and the evening show. I also made sure there were three of us for the first and last nights, so everything kicked off smoothly and we could start preparing for the get out.

The main assistant tasks pre-show were hair and makeup - Lila had her hair in french braids with two smaller plaits on either side, which either I or Layla did as we had the most hair experience; the ASMs also needed eyeliner moustaches. We also had to hand over Jerome and Seb’s smoking caps to the ASMs each night, as they wore them at the beginning and end of the show and were kept on the props table. The ASMs made this much easier on us after the third show by bringing in a props box for the actors to put any leftover props in after.

There were three major emergencies in the middle of shows that we handled well - Lila’s skirt tearing near the hem, Alex’s shoe sole coming apart, and Seb’s left trouser hem falling down. We sewed together Lila and Seb’s hems between shows, while for Alex we had to tape the boot together for the second act and source a replacement pair for the next evening. We were split across the millinery workshop on Monday-Thursday, so we stayed on top of laundry with whoever was in university during the day putting the shirts, tablecloths and socks/tights on to wash and tumble dry. 

We went into tech for Grimm Tales on Tuesday 30th November, with three full-on days from 9am-10pm scheduled, as well as two dress runs. I’d previously created the schedule for the assistants across these days, working around an Opera Meet and Greet that myself and the MA1s had to attend on Tuesday evening, as well as Arianna’s tech sessions for the other two shows. This made the intense few days a bit easier to handle, as we all had an opportunity to sleep in at least once after a late evening - I even took a small nap myself on Thursday afternoon before going into the first dress run (pictured above)!

Tuesday and Wednesday of tech were mainly taken up with finishing off the Thousandfurs coat, which I already covered in a previous post. During the Thousandfurs tech on Tuesday, Izzy was clearly struggling to do up the front of the ballgowns with the hook and eye tape - so the next day Hazel and Katie had to remove them again and go back to using the stronger magnets we’d ordered. There were a few essential jobs we had to attend to throughout the tech period; namely, we had to arrive between 8:30-8:45am to open the dressing room for the actors, and also at least one assistant had to be in the theatre during the tech sessions to make notes on anything we’d missed in the production weeks or needed last minute changes.