Sep. 22, 12:44 EDT
Sheltering Shania
Twain's in town at Copps Coliseum. And Dave Kelly's team makes sure all runs smoothly...
Graham Rockingham
The Hamilton Spectator
It's Friday, mid-morning. Dave Kelly is standing near centre ice at Copps Coliseum. He's barking out directions to workers and taking calls simultaneously on a hand radio and a cellphone.
A few members of Shania Twain's crew are still packing away the remnants of the superstar's rehearsal gear.
They started taking apart her circular stage before midnight and have worked throughout the night so that the arena would be ready for the Keith Urban-Carolyn Dawn Johnson-Jimmy Rankin show that night.
The Keith Urban crew arrived at 7 a.m. The Urban stage, a conventional rectangular one that stretches across the rink's blueline, is being assembled by a Copps Coliseum crew. Unlike Twain's, this stage belongs to Copps.
Twain's round state-of-the-art stage has been broken down into modular sections and rolled into the beer garden where it will remain throughout the Urban-Johnson show. Her mammoth arced speaker columns will remain hanging from the roof scaffolding, hidden from Urban fans by curtains.
A red carpet has been rolled onto the rink to welcome a Commonwealth Games delegation from Oceania. The delegation arrives in an hour. Kelly has to give them a tour, showing them what a good facility Copps is.
The cellphone rings. The driver for Carolyn Dawn Johnson wants to know where his reserved parking spot is located. Another call.
The CMT television crew wants to know where to park their trucks. Kelly delegates the chores. He can do that. He is manager of events delivery for Hamilton Entertainment and Convention Facilities Inc. (HECFI).
Kelly's got a staff of more than 300 people. He and his team are in charge of making sure all the touring acts that come to Copps, Hamilton Place and the Convention Centre are kept happy. It takes a real team effort. He's just the quarterback, he says.
He's been working at Copps since it opened in 1985. He's seen just about everyone come and go: Frank Sinatra, U2, Reba McEntire, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead. But nothing has quite compared to the past two weeks he's spent working with Twain.
"What a week," he sighs. "We've been pretty much going 'round the clock the whole time."
John Elder, HECFI director of programming, stops by to see how things are going. Elder's the guy who persuaded Twain to open her worldwide Up! tour in Hamilton. The Thursday night concert sold out (17,600 tickets) in 45 minutes. Elder worked on it for about a year before finalizing the deal a little more than a month ago.
He not only got the opening show, but he also convinced Twain to rent the building out as a rehearsal facility for the three weeks prior. To do this, Elder had to keep the hall empty from Sept. 8 to Sept. 25.
Even the Bulldogs were forced to rearrange their training schedule. There's no ice. The Zamboni room is being used to store Twain's pyrotechnic props. About a dozen tour cases packed with things that go boom fill the room. A fat red fire extinguisher sits in the middle of the pile.
The only thing Elder couldn't rearrange was the Keith Urban concert. It was scheduled more than six months ago to make up for a February concert Urban was forced to cancel because of illness. Elder's philosophical about it. He says the intrusion of the Urban concert has actually benefitted Twain's crew.
"That's what they came here for, to rehearse," Elder says. "They needed to practise getting that stage up and down. The Urban concert gave them the opportunity. When the tour goes on the road they're going to have to do that every night."
Kelly leaves the rink and turns down a hall, retreating to his office. The halls are lined with hand-written signs directing people to dressing room areas. Jimmy Rankin this way, Keith Urban that way, Carolyn Dawn Johnson over there. Shania dining area, here.
Kelly's office is a Copps basement cubby hole lined with music and sports memorabilia. He and his staff call it the "fishbowl." Commemorative hockey pucks and autographed photos are everywhere.
His favourites are kept in a special folder. He pulls out a black and white glossy of the Grateful Dead from 1990. Every band member has signed it. "That's my pride," he says.
The radio and the cellphone are now lined up beside his desk phone, which is programmed to ring like an alto saxophone. The number of interruptions increases by a third. People are looking for electricians, caterers, security guards, forklifts.
One can only wonder what it would be like when the full Twain contingent is in the building.
"It involves an awful lot of work," Kelly says. "We want to make them feel they're at home. With the Shania rehearsal, they've been going 24 hours a day. Her shift will be about 10 or 12 hours. Half-songs here, full-songs there. After the band finishes rehearsing live with Shania, they'll keep rehearsing by themselves. Then the band will go home, and the lighting guys will take over and work for most of the night, adjusting lights and getting the right effect. We've been going pretty much 24 hours a day since she arrived."
Yet through all of this, Kelly and his staff have been unable to take in a rehearsal. It's all done behind curtains, strictly forbidden to those without special picture ID cards.
"No one goes out in the hall when she's rehearsing," Kelly says.
www.hamiltonspectator.com
I had no doubt that Shania and the band were working hard....I cannot wait for the show now!
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