The pit is on a lift so it can be at stage level for a play and sunk for a musical, and the lift logs every move. The pit microphones, which feed the show relay, record whatever happens in it. Every night at seven the lift rises from the store position to playing height, and the microphones record one note, an A, held, the way an oboe gives it for the band to tune to, and then thirty seconds of instruments tuning, and we have not had a band in the pit since 2014.
I am the technical manager at a theatre that used to do musicals and now does not, and the pit is the part of the building that has not been told.
The pit.
An orchestra pit on a hydraulic lift, so the floor can come up to stage level and be stage, or go down to playing height and be a pit, or go all the way down to the store and have the seats put over it. It has been at store since 2014, when the last musical closed and the seats went over it, and it has microphones in it that feed the show relay, because they are wired in and nobody has taken them out.
At seven every night the lift rises to playing height.
The A.
The relay records the pit. At seven, the lift log shows the rise, which takes about a minute, and the seats over the pit, which are bolted to a platform that sits on the lift, go up with it, a foot, and the front of house manager has had complaints about the seats being higher than the row behind, on evenings when the house is in, and has had to explain that it is a fault.
Then the microphones record a note. An A. Given the way an oboe gives it, a plain held note with no vibrato, for the length of time it is given. Then, all around it, on every microphone in the pit, strings finding it, wind finding it, brass, the small chaos of a band tuning, which any musician will tell you is a sound that is exactly the same in every pit in the world, and then quiet.
Then the lift goes down. And the seats with it. And the relay records the empty pit.
What has been checked.
The lift, by the engineer, who found it in perfect order and would not, after the first night he stayed to watch it, come back to the building alone.
The pit, at seven, by me, on the ladder, with the seats above me on their platform, in the dark. The lift rose under me. I was on the pit floor, at store level, and it rose, and I rose with it, a foot, and the A came, from the oboe's chair, which is a chair that is still there, folded, against the wall, and it was folded, and the A came from it, and then the tuning came from all the chairs, from the whole pit, all round me, from nothing, and I have played in bands and I know the sound of a band tuning from the inside and it was that, and I was in the middle of it, and nobody was.
Who.
Not one person. A band. I do not know which. The last musical in 2014 had a band of eleven, and I have found some of them, and they are alive and working and mostly bitter about the closure, and it is not them. Before that this house did a musical a season for forty years and the pit had a resident band for a lot of it, and the archive has the fixer's books, and the fixer's books have names, and the names are the names of people who played in this pit for thirty years and are, a lot of them, dead, and I think the band that tunes at seven is the band that would come if the fixer rang, and the fixer is dead too, and I do not know who is ringing them.
What is done about it.
The seats over the pit are sold as restricted view now, at a lower price, because they go up a foot at seven and come down at half past, and the front of house manager tells the people in them that the row is on a lift that is being tested, and the people in them, some nights, say that they heard a band.
What I do.
I run the technical side.
They tune to an A that is given at seven and they have nobody to give them a downbeat, and they have been tuning for twelve years to nothing. So I bought a baton, from the music shop, and I go down at seven, onto the pit floor, to where the MD's rostrum was, and I stand where it was, and when the tuning stops, I lift the baton, and I give them a bar in. Four. Silently, the way an MD does it for the band to see and not the house.
They do not play. I did not think they would. There is nothing to play. But on the relay, since I started, after the tuning stops and before the lift goes down, there is a sound that any musician will know and that I had to explain to the front of house manager, which is the sound of a band coming to attention. Instruments up. The creak of chairs. The small collective breath of eleven, or thirty, or however many, ready, watching the stick.
And then the lift goes down. And I think that what they are waiting for is a show, and that there is not one, and that I cannot give them one, and that I am going to have to find a way to tell them, in the only language a band understands from a rostrum, which is the stick coming down and then, gently, being put away, and I have not been able to do it yet.