I've been here in the oh-so-glamorous North Chicago, Illinois for two weeks now and I am having a BLAST! Apartments here are expensive, so I'm living in an old hospital on a nearby naval base with about 80 other people-- it's a lot like living in the dorms except half the people are international staff and the WiFi is really sketchy. Apparently Six Flags hires a lot of South Africans, so most of my friends here are from Cape Town. We grilled out the other night and have epic ping pong matches every few days. I'm slowly learning Afrikaans..... very, very slowly :) In any case, there are a lot of really fantastic people around all the time which makes it look like it will be an awesome summer!Work has been a lot of fun so far as well. We'll finish setup work next week which has been mostly wiring together different light fixtures (strings of 'circus' lights, giant stoplights and a very large "Fun-O-Meter" for one of the parade floats) and putting up traveller track. For the most part it's stuff that I've never really worked with before so I'm learning a lot of practical skills. The other people in my department are fabulous, which makes the more tedious tasks go by quickly.
It's interesting working in a theme park since it is a very different atmosphere than my experience last summer at Great River Shakes. I've really enjoyed them both for completely seperate reasons. Six Flags is a very corporate, high budget, 40 hours a week, get-the-job-done environment. While there is certainly less attention paid to acting craft or equity points, the tech for the shows is really fun-- I get to work with intelligent lights, a HOG light board, a fly system that actually functions (oh, Fisher Theater), etc. It's been good for me to really be challenged on the production side of things and I feel like I'm becoming much more well rounded, which is exciting.
Bonus: I get into the park free whenever I want (plus one other person gets in free with me as well), so I've spent two of my days off riding rollercoasters all day long! My favorite one is called Batman and it's really intense!! I live next to a metra stop so I've spent the rest of my time off going into Chicago to hang out with friends from high school as well as ISU Theatre alum Kim Chelf.
Anyhow, the show I am working on opens in a few weeks and then I'll fall into a backstage crew routine each day, followed by driving a parade float at night. And I have to admit, driving the trolleys/floats/antique cars in the parade is a whole shit ton of fun :)
This is a clip from last year's version of the show to give you an idea what I'm working on. It's pretty much what I expected theme park entertainment to be.
Another clip from last year. This year's show is 40 minutes and includes "Circus", "Single Ladies" and "Love Story". They were rehearsing "Single Ladies" onstage today for four hours and I don't think I'll ever get it out of my head.
