Mainstage Theatrical Supply, Inc. participates on ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition™, After the Storm series!

This episode (air date April 14, 2006) was filmed in Sabine Pass, a Hurricane Rita damaged town located on the outskirts of Port Arthur on the southeast side of Texas. The Frankie Schexnayder Auditorium which doubles as the Sabine Pass K-12 School and community theatre, sustained a great deal of damage from the hurricane. Mainstage's role in this recovery effort was to outfit the theatre with a complete stage lighting system, stage curtain and track system and door curtains for the lobby.

In addition to it's regular Sunday show, EMHE™ has been running a special After the Storm series, featuring repairs in the hurricane ravaged Gulf Coast. In this segment, Mainstage had only 4 days instead of the show's usual 7, due to a shortened time line and parallel EMHE projects being performed in Sabine Pass. In the "real world" this would have taken the same size crew about 10 days to accomplish.

Mainstage was first contacted by the producers of EMHE™ early this year and asked to provide lighting systems, complete curtain and track systems and the sound system. After pondering the logistics (primarily the very short time line), Mainstage consulted with the Bose representative and recommended All Pro Sound of Pensacola to the EMHE team to provide the sound equipment. Once the decision by EMHE to select Sabine Pass was made, a beginning date of February 26 was determined and things started moving at breakneck speed for a project of this scope.

Mainstage Owner/Vice President Dean A. Sternke met and with EMHE designers and began working on lighting and stage curtain layouts as well as calling on leading industry manufacturers for commitments on donations of top of the line equipment and supplies; the lighting design was later finalized based on those donations.

The curtain layout was built based on the existing stage space. Rose Brand very early on committed to donate the complete front curtain and valance as designed by the Extreme Designers. Rose Brand also donated the fabric for the borders, legs and rear curtains, cyclorama, scrim and drops. These were sewn by Irene Hansell of Mainstage Pensacola, based on Extreme Design Team specifications. The track system was supplied by H&H Specialties, Inc. with 172 feet of 100 Series Walk Along Track with carriers and 50 feet of 200 Series Complete Draw Track. Fastenal provided hardware such as eye lags, eye bolts, shackles and chain.

The sophisticated lighting system was accomplished using a Electronic Theatre Controls (ETC) Smart Solutions™ lighting gear package. ETC SmartBars™ provide the overhead distributed dimming of lights while three compact wall mounted Smart Packs™, each containing six 20amp individual dimmers, power the remaining stage and house lighting circuits driven by Smartlink™ control stations. An Ethernet Control Rack and ETCNet2™ networking nodes handle the distribution of DMX.

Ty Prewitt, General Manager of Mainstage Memphis, hand made custom mahogany plates to dress up the 2 house Smartlink™ stations.

In the front of the house, three lighting bars are placed over the auditorium and consist of 5, 6 and 5 ETC Source Four™ Ellipsoidals respectively. Two lighting bars are on the front of the house side walls, left and right. Both bars have 2 ETC Source Four™ Ellipsoidals. All fixtures are connected to ETC SmartBars™.

In the back of the house, right and left, 2 Strong Canto1200 followspots with tripod and color changers are on platforms to provide excellent spot coverage. Effects are controlled by the student friendly ETC Express™ 250 lighting control console, housed in the newly remodeled control booth at the back of the theatre.

	Five each of twenty different gel colors were provided by Rosco Laboratories, as well as an Alpha 900 fog machine and fluid and sets of "Designing with Gobos" and "Setting the Stage" training videos.
Kryolan provided "The Big Kit", a delux makeup kit and case, along with 40 comprehensive makeup instruction booklets. Ben Nye sent the school a $300 gift certificate for future purchases. Additionally, both theatrical makeup companies donated colorful posters.