PRG

PRG, short for Production Resource Group, is a major theatrical rental house, best known for being the primary rental house in the NYC area. Located in scenic Secaucus, New Jersey, PRJ also has locations thought the US including Chicago, LA, Las Vegas, and Orlando.

What’s it like? Well, it’s basically a big beige warehouse.

Driving in to the lot

The main entrance, complete with concrete ramp

The inside. Like I said, basically a big warehouse

PRG Secaucus is divided into 4 sections, Inbound (where gear coming back from clients is received, depreped, and sent away), Testing/Bays (where incoming gear is tested, repaired and reset as needed, and stored until the next rental), Prep Bays (where clients prep, check, and test their gear before backing it on the truck in…) Outbound (where things are loaded onto trucks and shipped away)

Inbound

Some truss coming back from the bus and truck tour of Once

Testing/Bays

Not the worlds best photo, but there are basically 2 aisles that run the depth of the warehouse that provide access to the different areas of gear, such as hardware (rigging/hanging equipment), truss (truss and pipe), conventionals (anything without a moving head. So yes, in this case “conventionals” can include LEDs. Every Source 4 that comes back gets painted flat back and bench focused), Movers (moving fixtures and accessories. Every unit gets tested and reset to defaults before storage), Speakers & Amps, Cable, Dimmers (power distribution and dimmer racks), and Control (consoles and networking).

Between groups of bays are Consolidation Bays, where PRG will prep batches of gear to go to the prep bays.

Prep Bays

Clients are provided with a prep bay (there are 9) to organize the gear, test, and address as needed. This can make for a more organized load in (as every unit is labeled, addressed, tested, etc), and cables can be packed by what is needed by position, as opposed to by type and length.

A largely empty prep bay

Beginning stages of prep. Note the truss laid out and some instrument cases around. Eventually units will likely be hung inside the truss and the truss sent off.

Outbound

When items are done being prepped/swapped out [in our case, we were picking up some adds and swapping out some broken VLs with working ones, something that is pretty common with big rigs. PRG provides the gear, so they will swap out anything broken with a functioning replacement over the term of the rental], they go on the outbound dock. Boxes then get “shot out”. Every unit and box has a PRG barcode on it, which a dock manager will scan with a portable scanner which makes a “swoosh” noise (like the sending mail sound) every time it records an item as checked out and good to go.

2 box trucks slowly getting loaded (one of which was ours). Many of the cases will get stacked (by the forks) to save space. (Hence the wheel wells on the top of the cases)

Goodies

A few inbound cable boxes from Spoleto (Hi Aja!)

From Glimmerglass Shop prep a few weeks ago, the prepped VL cases with cable boxes in foreground

A Mormon instrument case (which would’ve carried conventionals) in receiving waiting to be emptied and repainted

5 of the 6 Glimmerglass instrument cases getting loaded up as we prepped units (again, during our shop prep)

Blurry pic, but a road case with 2x Clay Paky Sharpys that had just come back from the Tonys