The British Theatre Guide: The South Tyneside Story III

School & Youth Theatre

The South Tyneside Story - 3

South Tyneside schools perform at the Millennium Dome.

A couple of weeks ago we had the official launch of the project in the North East at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle. Basically it was just a bit of advertising for McDonalds, but I suppose we shouldn't complain: after all, they are putting up a helluva lot of money and we're getting the benefit of it!

On 22nd October, Celia, the Choreographer, and I went down to a meeting for project directors at the Dome itself. It was a technical meeting, to give us full details of the performance space and the theatre itself, and to give us the chance to ask questions. We'd hoped to see the space, and that's what we did see - space! They haven't started building the theatre yet!

As the first performance will be on 5th January, they seem to be cutting things a bit fine! Still, when you compare what was on the site of the Dome less than two years ago with what is there now, there's no doubt that fantastic progress has been made. It really is most impressive.

At the moment, of course, it's a massive building site but everything is taking shape and there's no doubt that visitors are going to be mightily impressed. Tickets may seem to be expensive, but if you think of it as providing a full day's entertainment - and there'll be more than enough for a day - you begin to realise that it's actually very good value for money.

Anyway, back to the theatre.

It's pretty big , with a width across the front of 18m, a depth of 7m and 3m wings on either side.
There's a cyclorama (20m x 5m) and blue tabs on a rack (22m x 5m). There are tabs downstage which can act as house tabs.
There's one FoH lighting bar, three on-stage bars, a cyc bar with 6 four-cell batterns, and one bar each side for side light.
Lanterns are primarily par-cans, with four Coemar CF1200 and two Clay Paky stagelights. All Par-cans have colour scrollers.
The control desk is a Wholehog 2.
Sound is handled by a 32 channel Soundcraft K1 desk, with eight amplifiers (C-Audio) feeding 18 speakers (JBL) and four MS112 Wedge monitors for foldback.
There are minidisk recorders, a DAT recorder and a CD player, plus 10 stand mics and 4 radio mics.
A Barco 9300 projector (VHS video, scanned images, CR-ROM, Powerpoint) sits on the advance (FoH) bar
There are four dressing rooms designed to take 100 people in all, including showers and toilets, steamer, ironing boards and irons.

In other words, it's pretty damned impressive! All we need now is an equally impressive show!

>> Part IV