Remember when I talked about people not knowing what “Go F12” meant due to it being from an older system? Turns out Grandeur was one of the last 2 ships in the fleet upgrading to the current ship standard. I was happy to know the old system so the adjustment period was shorter than it could have been. Upgrades on these older ships are not completely out of the question. Even Radiance is looking to upgrade its automation control system in the Fall.

Often times, theaters will buy the best equipment they can when the theater is being constructed. Once that happens, a lot of theaters keep the systems as long as possible as they still work. The community center in Sunnyvale kept their reel to reel player well into the era of cds because it still worked. My old theater company, The California Theatre Center, had some reels from their older shows archived. I don’t know why they kept it since they lacked any device with the ability to play them as far as I knew. The real challenge comes when you wait too long to replace uncommon equipment. Light boards have gained a lot of power which is necessary for controlling the moving lights. Conventional lights need only one address to control the brightness of the fixture. Moving heads need an address for each axis of control such as direction it’s pointing, the size of the light, and what color you want. Our most powerful lights need 31 addresses to get full control of the fixture. The stage on Majesty had only 2 out of 4 hydraulics working on the stage, and they leaked hydraulic fluid like crazy. The problem was that the company that made the original system went out of business. There were rumors circulating that the company was thinking about custom ordering new parts to make the stage work again. If they were thinking about it, the parts weren’t ready by the time we entered our month and a half dry dock in preparation for taking guests to Cuba.

Besides the theater, other systems on the ship are being changed. Last time I was on this ship, my emergency duty was to operate the life raft crane known as a davit. We now have a fancy new Marine Evacuation System which means I don’t have to crank the davit into position and we don’t have to spend extra time showing new crew members how to operate one. I’ll report back about this system some time in the Fall when I’ve been told they will do a test deployment of the system.

I can’t wait to work on a new ship. I’m curious how different the systems are compared to what I’m used to working with. It may be a while until they put me on one. I keep needing to request longer vacations which means I can’t request where they send me next. I guess I’ll get there eventually if I keep working on ships.

A common question we get asked is how often does the show change on the ship. While the cast changes out, the shows stay on the ship for years. Every time the cast changes, we go through a process we call “Install” which I have mentioned earlier. The entire cast does a swap out to keep the integrity of the show. A director will come on to ensure the original vision is still there. In some of the minor details, the new cast can change things, but the show should be pretty much the same today as it was when they first put it on the ship. Us techies come and go piecemeal as our contracts start and end. Our production shows end up costing millions to install on a ship from set pieces and costuming to licensing the music and any images used. Everything needs to be designed and placed deliberately on the ship. One of the primary concerns is storage. With how big some of the set pieces can be, there is a battle between shows on how much space any given show can take up. On Explorer, they have a massive set piece which basically separates the orchestra into giant cubby spaces. That is an all hands on deck kind of set up. You need a lot of hands to push the pieces, people to page the curtains and at least one person whose sole job is to be a spotter in case we snag on something. While that show takes a bunch of floor space backstage, the second production show on that ship uses a lot of batons to fly backdrops in and out but has fewer physical pieces. Since we have 3 shows on the ship, our third show, Tango Buenos Aires, takes up the least floor space as well as uses the fewest unique backdrops. I still think Tango Buenos Aires is our best show and I would enjoy it more if I didn’t have to concentrate so hard on running it. Interestingly, this show is a rented show, which I didn’t know we did until they installed it on the ship. This means the show is more akin to a guest performance that has an extended stay on a ship. In fact, we are down to only two guest entertainers brought on instead of three. Usually we bring on a comedian and two performance acts for our week long cruises.

I’m fairly certain our current shows have been here for at least a decade and there are not indications of the company wanting to change any of them out. I only feel one of the sections in the shows we have feel irrelevant, but the rest seem to be going strong. My best guess is that these shows will stay on the ship until it retires in who knows how long.

Anyway, I’ve been rambling. I’ve been told to wait a bit longer to hear back about extending. I miss the days when you knew pretty soon after you made your request if they were going to accept it or not. They seem to be struggling a bit since a lot of techs never came back after the pandemic. I can’t even tell if they’re leaning one way or the other.

Most nights we have some live entertainment in the theater, which I’ve talked about before. Even if an entertainer is somehow not ready for that night, we have backup plans which may include switching the night’s entertainment with another night or having the singers do a backup show. Every now and then, we do get a dark night. This is usually done on a night when we know the ship will be pretty empty for most of the evening or to try to increase the variety of things to different things to do in the evening. We have had to have a few dark nights because of technical difficulties, but those were very strange circumstances. Now when most theaters say that they have a dark night, that means nothing is happening in the theater that night. When we have a dark night, that usually means we show a movie instead.

The movies we get to show are actually pretty specific. As it turns out, we actually don’t need a large number of movies licensed to us. Because most people are on our ships for less than two weeks, the movies simply get put on rotation so the crew may see the same movies over and over again, but the guests do not. Because our viewings are not considered private, we have to get permission to show any movies to guests on the ship. These movies are usually not newest releases, so don’t expect to see the latest block buster on a ship. There have been a few movies I’ve seen that were newly released, but those were unusual cases including one movie that was filmed on one of our ships. If we get a newer film, they tend to be just after the theatrical release is over or when the release is starting to wind down. I’ve actually seen quite a few big movies this way. There have even been movies I didn’t know existed because I was working on ships and not paying attention to movie releases. We don’t get all of them, though. I have no memory seeing a Pixar movie on the ship, but I have seen several Marvel movies. We also show a number of slightly older movies as well, to keep the variety of movies up. We tend to play movies for a few months before rotating them out for another one. We may get back ones we’ve played before if they are popular enough, but there are no movies that just stay on the schedule all the time.

We got a new cast this past cruise. This means we went into cast install. This past cruise we had both the old cast who were here when I signed on in September as well as the new cast. The reason for this is that the new cast is not completely ready to shows when they arrive. While they have been given rehearsal time before they get to the ship, they need to adapt the shows to the space. Some shows take a morning to install such as the various dances in Centrum. The production shows tend to be the real problem. The old cast actually performed their last production show earlier on in the cruise. The new cast had their debut with the second production show at the end of the cruise. Everything went mostly smoothly with a few hiccups here and there, but it was a great opening for them. The only downside is that I was not allowed off the ship due to rehearsal. I actually lost track of the days because I couldn’t look forward to any of the ports. It wasn’t until we started our two day sail to Florida that I realized the cruise was almost over.

In the past, I’ve been fairly lucky when dealing with cast installs. I have heard stories of long hours and shows that should be farther along in the process. There was very little drama getting the first show up. They still have another production show to finish, but I don’t foresee them having too many problems. My first cast install was during a dry dock, so I wasn’t going anywhere anyway. For those that don’t know, dry dock is exactly how it sounds. The ship is lifted out of the water so repairs to things below where the water would be becomes possible. Things such as the propellers and stabilizers are good examples for that. It also helped us that there wasn’t very many elements that required all stage staff to attend every rehearsal. On the next ship, the only cast install was in Studio B which I had nothing to do with. I even left the ship with the cast so I really didn’t have to worry about install. Even this time, I keep hearing remarks from people who have seen many terrible install experiences that this install has been oddly easy. Perhaps one day, I’ll experience how bad an install can be, but this is not that day.

On the way to the Mediterranean Sea, we passed through the Suez Canal. It made me think of my time on the ACL ship Independence. Part of my duties on that ship was actually steering the ship. Mostly that boiled down to the captain or first mate telling me what course to take. Because we were traveling down the east coast of America, I got to experience the joy of steering in canals and channels at night.

For those that don’t know, channels and canals are two types of waterways you can use. They both serve the same purpose, but canals are completely artificial. This does not mean that channels are necessarily competely natural. In order to maintain waterways, dredging is sometimes required to keep the depth at a certain minimum to ensure vessels can pass through. Depending on the size of the ship, this may not be enough for the route chosen. There were times when we left in the very early morning or arrived later in the day simply to make sure it was high tide when we passed through certain sections. And when I say very early morning, I do mean it. There were times when my sleep was interrupted at three or four in the morning so I could help the ship dock or set sail.

Locks are basically water elevators used when the elevation of one section of water is drastically different from another. I’ve only had to go through one and that was on the Independence. I believe the captain mentioned something about an eight foot difference in tides between the two channels we were crossing. At one time, the Suez Canal was thought to be impossible due to the lock technology available at the time and a miscalculation as to the elevation of existing bodies of water that the canal would have used. It was later discovered that the bodies of water were actually more or less at sea level so construction on the canal was able to begin. As there are no locks in the Suez canal, convoys of ships are able to pass through without much difficulty and without having to stop halfway through. It did take us about fifteen hours to go through. That still saves us the month it would have taken to go around Africa.

 

It’s the home stretch to Southampton! I’ve got a week until we arrive at our new home port.