Act One Entertainment

I was very pleased by DJ Hammer and Alma. I think Alma went above and beyond her duties and acted almost as the wedding planner during our wedding. She made us aware of what events were coming up and where we needed to be which made our wedding very smooth. No complaints!

By far, this company provided the most stress for me during my wedding day.
Firstly, I want to say that my opinion does not reflect upon our MC that night. Hammer (I do believe that was his handle…) seems like a great guy and was super nice to both me and my husband. He’s friendly and seems to know what he’s doing. The DJ was very non-​descript, so I unfortunately have no opinion of him. No, the brunt of my stress and distaste fell on to the management, Alma.
Towards the beginning of our wedding planning stage, I had mentioned to the owner of my venue that I was still in need of DJ-​ing services. She offered up Act One Entertainment as they typically perform there during events. The price was right and I liked the idea that I’d have veterans of the venue.
Being a bride who’s never dreamt about weddings before, I wasn’t too sure about procedure. What I did know was what I didn’t want: my father to walk me down the aisle (I would walk alone), no father-​daughter dance, no garter toss and no dollar dance. This was all due to personal family situations and my personal taste. Fast forward to my first meeting with Alma, their manager, and I felt like I had to argue and justify my decisions. If this was a one time only situation, that would have been fine; I realize that my choices may have been outside the «norm» (whatever that is), but this line of questioning («Who’s walking you down the aisle again? What song did you want for the F-​D dance? You’re not doing a garter-​toss/​dollar dance?!») happened during every meeting with her. Additionally, she was super unclear about using our own music at first, and insisted that she wouldn’t want to use music with «swearing» in it. I think I have enough common sense not to introduce inappropriate music at a wedding where my 80-​year old grandma is attending!
Anyway, the worst part is yet to come. During our last meeting, we had agreed to provide a CD with the tracks we wanted to include that «weren’t available on iTunes». (Jeeze, I’m sorry we like foreign and independent music…) We had agreed to meet up before the reception so that she could get our CD to the DJ for him to incorporate into the timeline. Ah yes, the timeline. She was so late in producing one that my vendor and photographer provided me with one. I emailed her their timeline and she called me later, sounding offended, that it was HER job to provide the timeline and she would have one ready for me to review at the reception. I never got a timeline.
Back to the CD, we had promised to meet at the McDonald’s near my house before she had to run errands later that day. She wound up canceling and saying she’d pick it up the next day during the rehearsal. She never showed up. We had no music to practice to during the rehearsal, and more importantly, no one could get a hold of her. Panicked, I had the venue owner called her up in-​between her apologizing to me. All we got was her voicemail.
Later that night, I got a voice mail from Alma during the rehearsal dinner. I called her back, quite upset and hoping this wasn’t an indicator of her performance (or lackthereeof) during the big day. She promised she’d be down that night to pick up the CD, or the next morning. Apparently some sort of emergency happened. Look, I’m not an ogre or anything, but there are priorities. At least CALL me and leave a message! Don’t have me fretting the entire day before my wedding! Though honestly, at that point I was like, «Forget it! We’ll make our own playlist!» And we did; we had completely lost faith that our music would be there.
The day of our wedding, I was at my venue early to get my hair and makeup done and there was no DJ in sight. Thankfully (?), Alma came in about an hour before the start of the wedding saying that her DJs were setting up.
The ceremony thankfully went through without a hitch, and we swore we heard some of our chosen music playing during cocktail hour while we were taking photos outdoors. We thought we had dodged the bullet, but we didn’t realize that not having a timeline, or even being able to discuss what was expected with the DJs themselves was a problem!
The first sign something was up was when we heard the music for our «exit» playing during dinner. There went that music. Then the song that my grandmother wanted to dance with my husband to was played during a «couple’s dance» that we didn’t even know was supposed to happen! We quickly realized what was up and my husband ran over to my grandma to ask her to dance. The majority of our CD was also not utilized and that was a problem since it was filled with slow «oldies» for the older generation to dance to. 90% of the songs we’re too fast and so the dancing for the majority of our guests were at a minimum. My husband’s grandfather told my grandmother that he’d dance with her if another slow song came up… but it never did.
Overall, I would not recommend this DJing service and I hope for Hammer’s sake that he finds new management.

We used Act One Entertainment to book our wedding DJ. We dealt exclusively with Alma. She offered the additional service of wedding coordinator at an additional cost, but we decided not to go for it.
She was nice the whole time, and very cool in the first meeting. She expressed that she wouldn’t pressure us to do things any certain way, and that her main DJ was experienced enough to make anything work. We met her main DJ, DJ Hammer, and he was a very cool guy that made us feel confident. We were told DJ Hammer would be DJing our wedding unless something crazy happens. We liked him so we booked with Alma.
Alma was usually available and returned emails and calls within a reasonable amount of time. We noticed that she was always «mid-​crisis» so she seemed to have very serious excuses for every minor mishap. This didn’t have a very big affect on anything. She also seemed very stressed.
Fast forward to the wedding day. She called to say there had been an accident and that DJ Hammer would not be able to show. She didn’t say if the accident was a car accident with injuries or if she had accidentally booked him at another event. No info. She said that she would provide another DJ and that she would show up to make sure everything would go smoothly.
The other DJ was pretty good, but made quite a few mistakes. The dancing segments were awesome… totally fun, but some of the wedding «stuff» was kinda botched. He didn’t have the equipment to mic the ceremony, the music was too loud during dinner (despite a bunch of people, including the bride, asking them to turn it down). He got the wedding party names all jumbled and mixed up so we came out in a mess. Alma never showed up like she said she would to smooth things out.
I wrote her after the wedding to follow up and find out what happened. No response.
In Summary,
Alma was nice, kinda high-​strung. All in all, the DJ wedding situation turned out pretty good, but we didn’t get the professionalism of the experienced DJ that we were expecting. We also felt like Alma could have followed through more when things went wrong.
UPDATE:
Behold the power of Unilocal!After finding this review (the content has been changed) she finally got back to us to follow up (almost 1month later). She insisted that this has never happened before and there was a very real crisis. Considering this and that the DJ performance was ok, and that this is the only review for this company, I changed my rating from 2 to 3 stars. Hopefully the next few reviews can show that this is totally a fluke.