Lyric Opera 2022-2023 Issue 1-Ernani

15 | Lyric Opera of Chicago and lower nearly 150,000 pounds. The machine should ably serve Lyric’s needs for years to come—an investment mostly invisible to the audience, but absolutely essential for almost everything that takes place on the stage. The new gear resembles large-scale, mechanized Legos and, in truth, it isn’t much to look at. Still, in the eyes of the dozens of backstage individuals who help make the curtains rise on time, it is a true thing of beauty. Lyric owns about 450 shipping containers, each 40 feet long by 8 feet high, and typically the company houses around 70 different shows. Stacked three-high, the metal behemoths live on a lot at 95th and Halsted, where Lyric also keeps its own crane and its dozen truck chassis. From the outside, the boxes look like any others. Inside, of course, they hold splendid elements of the world’s greatest art form. The movement of these objects in and out of the building, says Lyric Vice President and Technical Director Michael Smallwood, provides “the lifeblood of how we function on stage.” Smallwood started at Lyric in 2007, right out of university. But he arrived with a wealth of experience. During his college years, alongside numerous freelance jobs at Chicago’s storefront theaters, he had stints with Chicago Shakespeare Theater, The Hypocrites, and Steppenwolf. “I would make sure all my classes were finished by noon,” he says, “so I could go to work.” On “day one” at Lyric, he realized that the company’s hydraulic scissor lift, installed in the early 90s during what is known around the company as “The Renovation,” would need to be replaced. Along with the routine wear- and-tear on a mechanism involved in every production, a hydraulic scissor lift is sensitive to other indignities such as temperature fluctuations and the variable weights of its load. The platform carrying containers and scenery would sometimes tilt precipitously, and the wall alongside the route bears numerous scratches as a result. Over time, and especially in the past few years, it was not uncommon for Smallwood and his team to be waiting hours, sometimes in the middle of the night, for emergency repairs. “I wouldn’t say that happened every day, but it happened a couple times a week,” he says. “And sometimes it cost us time and money and sometimes it didn’t.” In May, immediately after the Joffrey Ballet’s final in-residence performance of its season, the old truck lift performed its last duty, lowering its gleaming replacement down to the backstage work area. Its 180,000 pounds of steel were then dismantled, and placed into dumpsters sitting right onstage, leaving the building in 20,000-pound increments, over a brisk two-week period. A crew member cuts away at the company’s old scissor lift. In all, nearly 180,000 pounds of steel were removed. Lyric Opera of Chicago