Technical Director Ross Rundell is back to share his blog series, On the Road With Ross! Follow along for monthly updates of an insider’s look at the production rental world of Glimmerglass. To read his previous blog posts, click here.
Now that the summer season is over, our rental season is picking back up. Blue has already been sent out to Lyric Opera of Chicago for the fall, and last week, we sent a truck off to Detroit. Our friends at Detroit Opera are actually doing two of our shows this year. First up this fall is La Traviata and then in the early spring is Rinaldo. Since they are doing two shows, the truck that departed last week had the props and rehearsal supplies for both. The logistics involved with shipping shows is often one of the biggest challenges when renting out a production–it’s not quite as easy as raising the flag on your mailbox.
Several companies handle shipping in some capacity. Sometimes it is what we call an LTL load. LTL stands for “less than truckload”, which is a shipping method that transports multiple shippers’ freight on the same trailer. LTL is a good option for smaller shipments that don’t require a full truckload. The freight is then transported along with other products from other places, and often switches trucks at some point during the trip. This is a possibility for contained things like costumes and props, but not ideal for scenery. The other option is a direct, dedicated truck, in which the entire trailer is dedicated to our show, and the truck goes from our warehouse directly to the theater that is receiving the show. While this is more expensive, it is ideal for scenery.
In the case of the recent truck to Detroit, we worked with them to combine the two shows so that it was more cost effective to get a dedicated truck. Rehearsals often start before most companies have access to their venues, so sending an LTL load with props and costumes and later sending dedicated trucks with scenery is common.
The other challenge with shipping our productions is the labor needed to load and unload the trucks. Some of our shows require 4 dedicated trucks to ship, and the scenery can sometimes be quite heavy. It’s not quite as simple as dropping off an Amazon package. Typically, we use anywhere from eight to eighteen people to load and unload a truck. Why so many, you ask? Well, a general rule of the trucking industry is that a loading/unloading window is two hours, and we are not simply rolling pallets off a truck with a pallet jack. Pieces of scenery are irregular, and oftentimes some combination of both heavy and fragile. So in order to move things safely and efficiently, we need a lot of hands on both sides of a transport.
That’s a quick look at some of the logistics of renting scenery, be sure to check in next month to hear about how the Traviata load-in went in Detroit!