Junos a hot ticket
CANADIAN MUSIC’S BIG NIGHT: Setup for Sunday’s show in Calgary underway
It was a moment of staged, showbiz levity in an otherwise all-business tour of Calgary’s Saddledome.
It was during a behind-the-scenes look at the early stages of preparing the Dome for Sunday’s broadcast of the Juno Awards. As the dozen or so members of the media approached what will eventually be the dressing room of co-host Jann Arden, out popped some masked“dressing-room fairies” who were apparently busy adding some surreal decorating touches — rubber chickens, giant lollipops — to Arden’s room.
“You might have to do that again, ladies,” said one of the tour guides, upon noticing that not all the cameras caught the gag.
Besides those exuberant fairies, the Dome did not have a lot of glamour on display yet as of Tuesday morning. It was still in the early stages of transforming into a venue for the biggest night in Canadian music.
Granted, the tour included a look at the dressing rooms — well, mostly the doors of dressing rooms with paper signs indicating what celebrity would be assigned where — and placards that will apparently be placed in the seats where the hosts and performers will eventually sit.
If nothing else, it was a nice reminder of some of the star power that will be on hand for the festivities: Bryan Adams, the Weeknd, Alessia Cara, Arden, co-host Jon Montgomery and others.
But for the most part, the tour offered an early glimpse of the massive undertaking that is underway. Riggings, massive lights and audio equipment was being loaded into the Dome. Dozens of workers were hard at work with the preparations.
“Right now, this week is a bit of a marathon,’ says Allan Reid, president and CEO of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) and the Juno Awards as he watched the work being done. “It all becomes very real when you walk into that room. There’s no turning back now.”
Just how big are the awards? Well, for one, as of Tuesday it was well on its way to being sold out, which means roughly 10,900 tickets were spoken for. According to stats released by CTV, the broadcaster of Sunday’s awards, the setup involves 3,850 square feet of stage, 750,000 watts of lighting power, 250,000 watts of audio power and 250,000 watts of video power. It will also involve some innovative hightech video setup with 41 million pixels of video LED panels.
It’s all a part of the coming of age of the Juno Awards, which started life in 1970 as the RPM Leaf Awards at St. Lawrence Hall in Toronto. The first ceremony attracted 250 people. Only half of them had been invited.
In the mid-1990s, the Junos moved from the soft-seat theatre confines of Toronto’s O’Keefe Centre, now the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, to Hamilton’s much larger Copps Coliseum.
“Executive producer John Brunton really encouraged CARAS to move the show into an arena setting,” says supervising producer Lindsay Cox. “We were one of the first big award shows to take that path, and it makes such a difference. This is where the artists should be performing with a show of this level. They can play to 10,000 fans. Being in this size of venue is a dream for the artists and a dream for the producer to have so much space and have such a beautiful show in an arena like this.”
And when the stars arrive Sunday to walk the red carpet, the Dome will likely be transformed for an appropriate air of glamour.
Still, in typical Canadian fashion, Cox said none of them had any outrageous rider demands for backstage.
“Not this year,” she says with a laugh. “We have actually got a few in the past. I can’t name names. But they were hilarious. We love them. It’s the show lore we all talk about and tell the next generation of people coming. But this year? No. I think we have so many artists who know how the show happens, they stop asking for things. They know they are going to be well taken care of.”