NOT Singing in the Rain – Adventures With Bruce Kirle

LeakAfter several incidents on the gig with Bruce, all of the musicians – including the subs, were just fed up with him. There were a relentless barrage of insults, nasty looks, and condescending attitude towards all/any of us. Honestly, although this was a second-rate theater, all of the musicians in the orchestra were top-notch players. This was a gig that paid, ended early enough to play club gigs, and was easy to sub-out. Why sit on the couch at home and make nothing when you could at least get a little bread! I digress, I’m not sure what brought Bruce to this lowly place called Florida, but I can tell you that it wasn’t my fault and I wasn’t going to suffer without a healthy dose of retaliation. Unfortunately, the genius of the following scheme wasn’t my brainchild, but I did willingly participate!

We were playing “Singing in the Rain,” in a small dinner theater in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. The theater was a renovated historic fire station that was refitted as quite an interesting venue for a theater. The ceilings were very high and the building was, essentially round, with no obstructions over the audience, other than the lighting rigging. Once, we did “Barnum,” a musical about the late P.T. Barnum, and at the beginning of the show, the person who played Barnum would slowly zip-line from the back of the theater down onto the stage. The point is, there was lots of space. Acoustically, it was a bathroom, and yes, you could hear Bruce swearing at the orchestra during the show. The pit orchestra was located above the stage and off to stage left.  We were easily 2 stories up – if not, a little higher. The audience could, at best, see the top of the piano/conductor’s (Bruce’s) head. So, we were essentially invisible, which was nice because we literally could wear anything from business suits to beachwear. Nobody really cared, but Bruce always wore a very threadbare tuxedo that reeked of stale cigarettes, body odor, and alcohol.

The stage setup for the show was actually quite ingenious. The theater had a stage in which the lip of the stage that protruded out from the curtain, was a huge lift, so it would go from ground level to about a foot above stage height. The stage manager, who was a super guy and a great stage manager, had a great setup for making it rain on the stage for the “big number.” He had modified the lift so that it was basically concave. In the lift room below the platform, he built a pool to retain the water and hooked it to a pump that would eject it to the outdoors. Nobody wanted the “dirty water” pumped back onto the stage after they had kicked it around, so they used fresh water. Above the stage, there was a network of PVC pipes, sprinkler heads, and pressure regulators that made it rain using a garden hose from the outside of the building set up on a solenoid switched valve. So we were essentially “up in the clouds,” but the rain setup never any closer to the pit than 8 or 10 feet. I would say that there was NO WAY that water could ever get in the pit from the rain rig – just not enough pressure.  Not even the piping for the rig came anywhere close to us. The water supply was run from the other side of the stage.

One evening, Bruce was being particularly profane with the band. Our drummer, who was mentioned in another post (Over the Edge – Adventures With Bruce Kirle), decided to play a little experiment. If you read the aforementioned post, you will already know that it was necessary to keep small aqueous firearms (water pistols) in the pit to put out fires that would erupt from underneath the piano bench due to Bruce’s constant smoking during the show. Bruce knew that he was forbidden from smoking during the show – Fire Marshall rules in Florida, so he kept his head down when he was smoking so that the stage manager couldn’t see the glowing tip of the cigarette from his booth across the stage from the pit. Incidentally, he and the stage manager would play a little game of cat and mouse with the smoking thing. Every time Bruce saw the stage manager leave his booth, he would put out the cigarette and fan the air around him to get rid of the disgusting plume that surrounded him most of the time. Given the theme of the show, and the smoking, and the particularly opprobrious way he related to the orchestra – more the latter – Ken decided to make a little rain of his own. The “big number” in the show starts with a short scene with dialogue before the music starts. It’s dark in the theater, because it’s supposed to be night on stage, so you can’t really see the rain rig or the water droplets too well. So, when the rain started that night, Ken squirted a very tiny bit of water up in the air onto Bruce. He looked around to see if anyone else had experienced this. Mind you, Ken didn’t tell anyone but me that he was doing this, and Bruce couldn’t see my face unless I was looking at him from between my music stand and the clip light on it – especially if my stand light was off, which it usually was at this point in the show. Nobody was even paying attention. You know, nobody really looks at the conductor unless the music is about to begin. They’re reading magazines or making reeds, or whatever. After a while, Bruce gives up and ducks back under the piano to smoke. Ken shoots a little more water; up comes Bruce looking around like a chipmunk…nada from the pit. He shakes it off again and goes back to his cancer practice. Each night after that, Ken would do a little more and a little more until it started to drive Bruce crazy. He would stare at the pipes on the ceiling, stand up and lean out of the pit – I wish I could have seen that from the audience, he even went as far as to bring opera glasses to inspect the pipes. Every time he looked, the water would stop! After the first few nights, we let the band in on it. It was hysterical! Sometimes we felt the rain, and sometimes we acted like it had never happened before.

Bruce was a man of action, so after the first week or so of “living with it,” he approached the stage manager. The stage manager had the stage hands inspecting the pipes, standing in the pit, running the water, over and over. Of course, the found nothing and Bruce was still getting wet every night. There became a point that Bruce started becoming threatening to the stage manager – I mean threatening by he would become irate and threatening to the stage manager, but the stage manager could probably have killed Bruce by just thinking about punching Bruce, so we were certain that there was no real danger. We did feel badly though, because the stage manager was going crazy looking for leaks. It just didn’t seem plausible that water could get that far off base. Hoping that we wouldn’t get in too much trouble, we decided to fess-up to the stage manager, in confidence. His reaction was surprising. He told us to keep it up, and that it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen. After that, stage-hands would go up to the manager’s booth during the number just to see Bruce getting crazy. Bruce was becoming so irate that he was swearing out loud during the number and hanging out of the pit waving his hands at the stage manager. By this point in the joke, most of the pit musicians were hiding water pistols and periodically spritzing him during the number. This went on for at least 3 weeks, until one fateful night Bruce came into the pit with a large fire extinguisher, sat it on the piano and said, “The next motherfucker that wets me, gets a face full of this!” I guess the story leaked. We found other ways to drive him crazy! Stay tuned…

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