The Hunt for Work, A Cold Adventure

Although I had several jobs in the Fall of 1980, like most people working freelance I spent most of my time looking for the next job.
Like many others I would read through the "Trade Papers", Back Stage and Show Business, looking at the want ads.
Although both magazines deal mostly with acting jobs, there were a few tech and design jobs mixed in.
Today most Theatre tech jobs are listed in Artsearch published by the Theatre Communications Group.

http://www.tcg.org/artsearch/index.cfm

TCG also publishes plays and American Theatre magazine and also supports theatre productions all over America.

I sent out many resumes and dropped others off at theatres all over the New York City area.
There are theatres in all kinds of spaces, some good and some bad, and one long and narrow theatre that I interviewed was planning a double bill of staged versions of Frankenstein and Dracula.
They said that I could design the lights if I also built and painted the sets, ran the light board, sold tickets and gave them $50 a week.
I did not take the job.

At another theatre I was given a script to read; came back a few days later talked with the director but in the end I did not get the job.

Many old hotel ballrooms have found a second life being used by various theatre groups because rehearsal and performance spaces are very costly and hard to find in NYC.

I remember showing up for an open interview for jobs on a cruise ship and saw a line coming out the door and going down the street.
No one would ever mistake me as a Broadway dancer and as I got near the line I was told that those there for “techie” interviews could go right up so I squeezed my way up the stairs.
When I got to the top of the stairs I saw a large room full of hopeful dancers trying their hardest to make a good impression and get a job.
I remember thinking at the time that there were so many in the room that those in the back row could be naked or on fire and the director would never see them.
My interview was actually in a large storage closet and like many others I never heard back from them.

It does not seem to matter what work you have done in other places or where you have studied, when looking for work in NYC all they care about is what you have already done in the city no matter how small or bad it was.

I interviewed for a job at an out-of-town Theatre and was offered a three production contract to design the sets and lights for The Merrimack Valley Theatre Company in Manchester, New Hampshire.

The plays were to be A Christmas Carol, Oklahoma! and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
So right after Thanksgiving I packed up my special hammer and got ready to move North for three months.
After a long bus ride to New Hampshire I checked in at the theatre office and soon found out that things were not going to be as planned.

First of all the rooming house where they normally put up most of the cast and crew had just burned down and they had to scramble to finds rooms for everyone.
As I noted in a recent post my room was in an awful “Welfare Hotel” that was a long walk from the shop and theatre.

The scene shop had no staff, just my “Assistant” who had been cast in the show and a friend of the lead actor helped out once and a while.

To add to the fun it was a record cold December and it was 20 below zero several times.
I did not think that I was going to enjoy my time there.

One big positive was that The Palace Theatre was very nice, opened in 1915, it had a long and interesting history of productions and had been renovated a few years before I got there.
http://www.palacetheatre.org/about-us/

Old postcard of Palace Theatre

I have already written about the death of John Lennon but there were many other special moments that made my time in New Hampshire memorable and I will detail them in the next posts.



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August 1980, Transition

My Thesis review went well and after a few re-writes I would have my MFA in Lighting Design.
It was time to pack up and head on to the “Real” world.
Even leaving Ann Arbor was an adventure.
I had to buy the largest portfolio case I could find; 32” x 42”.
I called the airline to make sure that it would fit if I carried it on, as I was not going to check my artwork.
They said it was 747 and that it would not be a problem.

I got to the airport and went through security (not the same X-rays and chemical tests of today, but they still hand checked most bags) my agent looked puzzled and called over his supervisor.
He said: “Hey this guy has sword in his bag!”
The supervisor looked in and laughed; “It’s just a T-Square, let him on the plane”.

Of course the portfolio case was too big to fit in the over head compartment and they were not sure what they were going to do with it when one of the stewardesses found room behind one of the seats.

So at 24 years old I was done with college and graduate school and moving home with no idea what I was going to do next.
I called some of my friends who were already working in New York City for some help on I what I should do next.
One friend was working over in New Jersey and my first job after college was going out there and helping him strike the set for “On Golden Pond”.
I spent a few days on my friend's couch and do not even remember if I got paid or not.

Another friend gave me the names and phone numbers for two scenic studios that he had worked for and I called the shops and told them who I was, that was just out of grad school and that my friend had worked for them.
Both places said that they had no idea who my friend was but I sounded good and to please come in for a job.

I did two jobs for The Theatre Machine, both on location and I never saw their shop.
This first job was in the Guggenheim Museum down in the theatre in the basement level.

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york

Like the museum, the theatre is round.
I helped to install a set, most platforms for the seating, and had a few interesting moments.
New York City has strict fire codes and all of the wood is fireproofed.
One day I got some sawdust in my eye and it burned for hours and I lost a half a day’s work.

Another we were moving in sheets on Masonite to cover the floor when about 20 to 25 sheets of it fell against me pinning me to the wall.
It was very hard to breathe or yell for help, but I was soon free.

The best thing that came of this job that one day at lunch I had the best piece of cheesecake that I have ever eaten.
Nothing has ever been close but I have no idea of the name or location of the restaurant.

The second job was downtown a bit near Union Square.
In an empty space that had been an Athletic Club, we built a mock-up of a boardroom for 3M.
They wanted to test the size and shape of a new big table they were going to have made to make sure they liked the shape and that it would serve their needs.
It must have been a very expensive table if they spent the extra money to have us build a mock-up of the room and table.

I worked next for Crawford Brother Studio in Brooklyn.
Their shop was in the neighborhood that is under both the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and it was cool to see them way above the buildings.
It is a popular view and I have seen it many times in movies over the years.

I was hired to help build the set for a tour for a production of “Oh, Calcutta!”

http://www.broadwaymusicalhome.com/shows/ohcalcutta.htm

The show is famous for two things; Lots of naked people onstage and that it ran for a long time.

We built many acting cubes and small platforms that would make the set and loaded them in the bottom of a tour bus when we were done.
They did not too much room for the costumes.

So this was my start and working in the “Real” world, just a few months out of school and more adventures where just ahead.


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Six Characters in Search of an Author

Every once and a while I go back and re-read my blog, fix mistakes and add new photos when I scan more or find some new ones online.
Well it seems that I left out an important play from my senior year at SUNY Buffalo.
I was asked to design the lighting for a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello that was scheduled for December 1977.

Six Characters in Search of an Author , 1977

The play is an odd one and we did a good job making it even odder.
The play begins at an audition for a play when the “Characters” step out of the play and talk with the director.
The real director changed it from a play to a magic and circus act audition.

As the audience came to the theatre they were divided in half and brought into the Theatre in two groups.
As they would pass through the lobby they would see the “Characters” from behind some glass doors.
As they stepped into the Theatre the lights would come on with a Linda Ronstadt’s “Heat Wave” blasting through the speakers and the magic and circus acts performing onstage.
After everyone was in the music and action would stop and the second group would be brought in and the same things would happen to them and then the play would start.

As you can see from the show photos the set was unique with a hole in the floor center stage.

For the first entrance of the Father and Daughter “Characters” several flash pots were set off in the hole and the two would come up through the smoke.

I had worked with the director before; he is the one who cast our introduction to Theatre class as extras in his play the previous year.
I went to an early rehearsal to start thinking about the lighting when the director asked to read a few lines for someone who was not there and I said sure I would help out.
After the scene was over he said “Good, you now have the part.”
I said wait, but it was too late.
The part was for a stage hand, so I guess it was type casting and that is how I got into my second play at UB.

For some reason the play was delayed until after Christmas break and because the lights were set I felt that I did not need to be at every rehearsal.
I left one rehearsal early and turned off the stage lights and put on the work and house lights.
When I came back the next day the director said that he liked that look so the house lights into one section of the play and I had the crew gel all of the house lights with good old R51.

Speaking of gels I had to change all of the back lights because I had originally chosen a pale green that made it look like the actors were walking in mud.

As part of the publicity for the play the cast would roam about the campus and do parts of the play, hand out fliers and run off.
I was in the Student Union one time when they did this and was very funny to see the reaction to the other students as most had no idea on what had just happened.

The play was well received and I really enjoyed working on it, even when I had to yell my two or three lines out of the control booth window each night.

All We are Saying is Give Peace a Chance

 Thirty years ago today I was working in Manchester, New Hampshire on a production of A Christmas Carol.

This story jumps ahead six months in my blog timeline and I will come back to it in more detail, but I wanted to talk about what happened that day.
I was the Scenic Designer and Technical Director and was also suppose to be the Lighting Designer but the company had hired too many Stage Managers so they let one of them design the lights.

I worked alone most of the time because my assistant had been cast in the play and was rarely there.
They said: “Oh, he has a small part; he won’t have to be at many rehearsals and will be in the shop with you most of the time”.
That of course was just one of many lies they told me and his part kept getting bigger each day.

After working all day in a very cold scene shop, I walked back through the cold to my very cold room in what could best be called a flop house, welfare hotel or just a big dirty dump of a house to unwind and watch some TV.
The regular place that the theater company used had recently burned downed and they struggled to find place for everyone to stay.
Again more details about my wonderful time in New Hampshire will follow.

That night my assistant and I were watching Monday Night Football on TV in my room when the creepy guy from across the hall walks in and says that John Lennon had just been shot.

Shocked, we both turned to look at him and almost at the same time Howard Cosell announced Lennon’s death on the TV.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n73GFvAyIjs&feature=player_embedded

I worked alone in the shop the next day listening to nothing but Beatles and Lennon songs on the radio and thinking about what had happened.

As it turned out my assistant is the youngest person I know who ever saw the Beatles play live in concert.
When he was about five years old his mother took him to see them and all he remembers is that all of the girls, including his mother, screamed for the whole concert.

When I catch up to this time in my blog again you will see that this tragic moment was just a small part of a very crazy five weeks in my life.






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101st Technical Commando Brigade, Ann Arbor, MI

Working in Theatre can be dirty, hard work, long hours and lots of fun.
Always looking for some stress release we are always joking among ourselves, having parties and poker games and each year while I was at Michigan someone made T-shirts for everyone.
Based on one of the teachers sayings, and a T-shirt he had, the T-shirt that was made my first year was red and said in big type “ Blow Me Dogface” with “Survivor of Winter 1979” below it.
One day we were all told to wear it to that teacher’s class who topped us all by having the original under his sweater.

The T-shirt from my second year was in the Michigan school colors of Maize and Blue.
I still have it, although it is a bit too small and fabric is a bit thread bare as it has been washed few too many times.
What did it say? See below:

We would wear them whenever we needed a boost after working long hours and I would forget that I had it on when I would next door to “Olga’s Death Gyros” for lunch.
I would get some odd looks from the “normal” or civilian people outside of the Theatre building.
“Olga’s” had the worst coffee in Ann Arbor, at least according to Dick Block one of our design teachers.

In August of 1980 I submitted my thesis with set, lighting and costumes designs for Marlowe’s “The Jew of Malta”.
Included with my 60 page paper were several light plots, working drawings, set renderings, costume plates and other related materials.

Set Rendering and Light Sketches

After the faculty reviewed the work I had to go in for an oral review and defend my work.
All of the other MFA students would always wait outside the room to see how you did.
The first question from everyone when I came out of the room was that they wanted to know what designs I had to redo.
I was very proud to tell them the faculty accepted all of my design work and all they wanted were a few changes and corrections in my paper.

Costume Plates

When I get all of my thesis scanned and posted online I will let my blog readers know.

College was now done for me and it was time to go back to Long Island and begin a new phase in my life.



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Richard III

During my second year at Michigan we did Richard III with the late actor Nicolas Pennell as the lead.
He had worked regularly at the Stratford Festival in Canada and brought along a young fight choreographer who was in some of the battle scenes.
We used a stock platform for all of the Shakespeare plays and the designers just added pieces to the unit for each play.
For Richard III the scenic designer just took the set for Richard II from the year before and basically smashed it.
All the nice detail and trim pieces that had been added to the original set were broken off to help show the decay of the kingdom.




Richard II set before it was smashed for Richard III


During one of the fight scenes the fight choreographer was in a sword fight on the upper level, he was stabbed, spun and fell off the platform into the waiting arms off four soldiers who carried off his dead body.
Opening night all went well and the audience loved it.

On the second night the fight choreographer was in a sword fight on the upper level, he was stabbed, spun and fell off the platform into the waiting arms of two soldiers who dropped the fight choreographer who broke his arm and the two late soldiers helped the other two carry off the fight choreographer writhing in pain.

On the third night the fight choreographer was in a sword fight on the upper level, he was stabbed, and fell dead on the upper level and stayed there until the end of the scene.

It always seemed that I was working on one play or another, doing class work or working my thesis but somehow I managed time for a few dates while at Michigan, but no romance would come of it.
The second summer brought four more shows in rep and working to finish my thesis.
I would work only 100 hours on the set up of the lights and then work full time on my thesis, taking only short breaks for a weekly softball game and monthly poker game.

Two non-Michigan students who came to work on the summer rep were assigned to work with me on the electrical crew and they were both nice enough and I have a few odd memoirs of them.
One day while working in the lighting shop I had one of those moments when you feel like some mild electrical shock has gone through you body that causes you to shiver when it happens.
The girl working next to me, Martha, had the same experience and when we turned to ask the other guy if he had felt it too we found him on the floor having an epileptic seizure.

Another time I was working up in the catwalks of the Power Center with Martha when she begin talking about some major surgery that she had recently had done and I almost fell 30 feet from shock when she lifted up her shirt to show me the scar that ran from the middle of her chest to below her belly button.
I was not at all ready to be flashed while working up at that height.




Bio from Summer 1980 Program


I often found reasons not to work on my thesis.
One of my favorite excuses was just waiting until it got dark before I would come in to work.
Because Michigan is in the western part of the Eastern Time zone it stays light much later than it did back home on Long Island.
From time to time I found myself playing Frisbee with guys in the street until well after dusk at 10:30 PM.

A week or so before my thesis was done my parents and younger brother, who was 17 at the time, stopped by at the end of a cross country camping trip that had taken them to the Grand Canyon.
This was the longest trip that they had ever taken.
They collected most of my belongings to bring back home and left with me with just the bare essentials.

My thesis review was near and my time at Michigan was almost done.





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The Master Builder

At one of our weekly graduate seminars the faculty noted that no one was assigned to design the set for one of the showcase productions and asked for a volunteer.
It seemed that everyone just melted down into their seats, looked into their armpits or out the window and avoided eye contact with the faculty.
Always looking for a new challenge I raised my hand and said that I would be willing to give it a try.

Scene Design for "The Master Builder" Act I - 1980

The play was the Master Builder by Henrik Ibsen, the father of modern drama.

I had read all of Ibsen’s major plays and wrote a term paper about his design ideas for my Contemporary Drama class the year before and I had just designed the set for the play for one of my scene design class projects so I felt confident that it would be an easy job.

Needless to say it was not.

Act II

At the first design meeting the director stated that he did not to have any walls in a play about an Architect who, of course, uses walls to design his buildings.

He also had an idea that today would be very easy to do, but thirty years ago I had to come up with a workable solution.

He wanted, what in effect today would just be the effect of a simply laser pointer being wiggled on the sky drop behind the set.

I had seen a rippling water effect that used broken mirror pieces in a pan of water, a fan blowing on the water and a light reflected off of the pan onto the stage.

I replaced the mirror and water with a piece of silver Mylar that was slit, a small fan and a red light aimed up on the sky drop.

I painted two projections with translucent dyes that were used in a pair of old Linnebach projectors.

One was a stormy sky and the other a sunburst both based on paintings by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch.



Act III

The set had several platform levels, two about 8’-0” x 8’-0” that played in different positions during each of the three acts.
Additional railing pieces were added to the set during the two act breaks.
Drafting tables and a desk were built specifically for the show and additional expanding foam railings were made from plaster molds.



I enjoyed working on the play and this was my last design project before the final push to finish my MFA Thesis and final summer at the University of Michigan.

 

Set Model



 

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Dance tours to Interlochen Arts Academy

I enjoyed working with the stagehand’s union and was excited that the Grateful Dead where coming to town and when the business agents asked who wanted to be on the crew I quickly volunteered.
Unfortunately I was not called for the crew and ended up just buying a ticket and going to the show anyway.
There is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert.

In the spring of my first year at Michigan I was called, twice, to help on The New Barbarians concert, a benefit tour put together by Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones as part of his plea deal for a drug bust.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Barbarians_(band)

Ann Arbor was to be the first night of the American part of the tour and they were expecting many trucks with equipment from all over the country to arrive with the various guest artists for this all-star band and really needed a big crew.
As fate would have it I had a final exam in a Psychology class early the next morning and there was no way I could work the concert and expect to be ready for the test.

The course was called Perception and was about how our body’s senses work and react to things like color and light, and I still use some of what I learned back then when I teach today, so maybe it was a good idea that I did not work that concert.

I really gave it some thought, but I had to pass on what could have been a very exciting event.

Although disappointed in missing these two events I still had plenty of other productions to work on in addition to the regular department productions.
I worked on a re-mounting a production of Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, a music/dance event that had been staged before I got to Michigan and I also got design lighting in the Power Center one more time when I was asked to do the lighting for a joint concert of the Wisconsin Singers and Michigan’s Amazin’ Blue, a “Wild” concert of college Glee clubs.

My lighting design teacher asked me to serve as his assistant for a tour of two dance faculty to the Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan.
http://academy.interlochen.org/

It was a nice trip and I ended up being the stage manager, master electrician in addition to being the assistant to the lighting designer.
Interlochen is a wonderful place, isolated, but even in the middle of the winter it was a very beautiful and peaceful place to be.
Because Interlochen is a high school and not a college, the local town was pretty quiet and did not offer too many options but our first night there the four of us went out to a local bar and had a good time even though we knew that everyone in the bar was looking at us.
The staff treated us very well and had a nice reception/party for us after the show.

Odd memory: it was on the drive up to Interlochen that I remember seeing my first salad bar in a restaurant, although common today, it was still a new idea back then.

Later in the spring I would return to Interlochen as the lighting designer for a tour of the Michigan Dance Ensemble.
I drove up the day before the concert with my assistant, an undergraduate design major, and worked to ready the theatre for the concert.
It was nice to see Interlochen in the spring and it was a welcome getaway just before the craziness of my last few months at Michigan as I finished up my MFA Thesis.
Evidently there had been some incident involving a student and teacher during the time between my visits and there were no students are the party for the dancers after the show this time.

Of course Theatre is a small world and I would run into the woman who was the Technical Director at Interlochen about 10 years later.
I was on a search committee for the Dance Department at Brockport and she was a finalist for the job.

Also I know that Susan, the girl who was my assistant back then, has been working as a company manager on various Dance and Theatre tours over the last 30 years and about twenty years ago I saw her name in the New York Times as part of an article reporting on the stupid and dangerous things that construction workers in the city do.
The idiots were doing things like throwing the lids of 5 gallon pails off of buildings like Frisbees into the people and street below.




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Elton John Concert, Fall 1979

I got a phone call from the business agent for the stagehands union and he asked me which of two concerts the same day that I wanted to work on: The Police or Elton John.
I choose to work the Elton John concert.
The concert was to be in Hill Auditorium, the large and wonderful music hall on campus where I got to Carlos Santana  in concert the year before.
http://www.music.umich.edu/about/facilities/central_campus/hill/index.htm

The load-in call was 6:00 AM!

It was so early because there was a rehearsal for some university music group that could not be moved.

We needed to unload all items from the trucks that had to be flown over the stage, put them together and have them flown out before the Noon rehearsal.

I do not know why Elton John’s people would agree to the break in the middle of the load-in but it all worked out.

After lunch we came back and set up the rest of the sound and lighting equipment and also set up the musical instruments.
It is always fun to move a full size grand piano in a road case, even one that was painted orange.
Gee, maybe it was the organ that was orange and the piano was painted yellow, I forget.

As we continued to unload the truck I noticed that there was this young teenage girl standing at the top of the loading ramp.
Over the next hour or so she slowly inched down the load ramp toward the door.
When she was almost at the door one of the road crew turned to the girl and said “You can’t be here, you have to leave”.
You could see her heart break as she walked away defeated in her quest to see her idol.

I still have this pin I got at the Concert

I got a look at Elton when he came in a few hours later and stopped briefly to say hello to the crew.
He was wearing some odd jumpsuit looked like it was made from several strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups pasted together.

The road crew members were very cool, mostly very tall and thin and all from England.
There was one short guy who was the climber who was up and down the backs of the speaker stacks and up on the light grid focusing lights.
As the load-in was just about done I was asked to stay and help with the light focus as one of the all important ladder holders.
I was not really needed because once he was up the ladder he was climbing all over the truss focusing the lights, all without a safety harness.
Only when he was done did he step back on the ladder as he came down.
It was easy money and I also got to stay and eat with the crew.

The caterer was wonderful, there was a food table stocked with food all day long, but the dinner was even better.
It was November and he made a complete Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings.
For a crew, mostly from England, thought that this was very cool, enjoyed it all, especially the wine.

After dinner I went home during the show and listen to The Police concert which was simulcast on the radio.
When I came back for the load-out there was a small group of people waiting at the stage door waiting, hoping to see Elton, but all they got was me.
As I neared the door it opened and I was let in.
It was cool to think that I had the right look at 25 just to walk right past all the other people.
Okay, maybe it was how I was dressed, the tools I was carrying and the fact that I had just been there a few hours earlier.

The load-out went well and we got done just after midnight.
Just as the last truck was done and the door closed we noticed that the caterer had also just finished packing up.
He saw our disappointed look and opened his van and gave us a six-pack.
I do not know what brand of beer it was or even if it was cold, but it was best tasting beer I had ever had.
It was a looooong day starting with the 6:00 AM call, but it was fun day and I enjoyed it all.


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Concerts and Road Shows

During my second year at Michigan I got to work on many outside projects, some of which even paid.
The local stage hands union (IASTE)  was not large and when a touring Broadway show or rock concert was in town they would often need to hire extra crew.
They would use faculty and staff from the Theatre Department to fill out their crews.

The Ann Arbor local was run by a bunch of cool people who were ahead their time and other locals because they were one of the first to allow women carpenters and electricians into the union.
The first show I worked on with the union was a tour of the musical revue Eubie!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eubie!

The master electrician, Janice, was from Ann Arbor and had worked with the local union and I had just worked with her as one of the three lighting designers for the summer theatre repertory.
Everyone on the load-in crew was excited for her return and wanted to hear how the first part of the tour had gone.
Everything was going well but just before noon there was a loud snapping sound and one of the pipe-end ladders with six to eight lights came crashing down to the floor.
As soon as we knew that nobody was hurt the crew chief called "Lunch!" and most of us were sent away as they tried to figure what had happened.

It turns out the batten pipes over the stage had been welded incorrectly without inner pipe sleeves at the joints.
The batten just snapped at the joint under the weight of the hanging ladder.
During the next school break the college had all of the pipes hanging on the stage cut apart and re-welded properly.
The Theatre had been open for about 8 years and they were lucky that it had never happened before and that nobody was hurt.
It was a relief to everyone that it was not Janice’s fault.

I also worked the load-in and load-out for the tour of the play Deathtrap.
The most interesting part of that show was that the road boxes that held the various weapon displays, an important part of the play, that were lifted up and fitted directly into the walls of the set.
The lockable cover could be taken off as needed and easily put back on and locked up after the show.
There were many knives, swords, axes, guns and other fun props that they wanted to keep safe and away from curious hands and stop them from walking away.

I also got to work to load-in crew for some rock concerts.
I worked on the crew for Chicago and Elton John.
The Chicago concert was held in the large Chrysler Arena on campus and one of the first thing I noticed was that the food was much better on rock concerts.
For the stage plays there was only coffee and doughnuts backstage, but for the concerts they brought in a local caterer who put out a wonderful spread of food.

The work was hard but fun.
I had to laugh when I saw a 98 pound woman on the crew trying to move a large rolling speaker cabinet down the loading ramp from the truck and just watched her slide the whole way down.
Oh course I had my own fun when I was a “Human Bungee Cord” as I held on to road boxes as I rode the fork lift up to the stage platform, unloaded them and then rode back down for the next one.

As part of the load-in crew you do not get to the show but I when I returned for the load-out I did get to see and few songs at the end of the concert including 25 or 6 to 4.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvX_YqiM-hc&feature=related
It was fun to hear the song live because it was one of the songs that my friends and I tried to play in someone’s basement back in high school.
I knew just enough to play the basic bass riff as it just repeats over and over.
Tony and the Tone-deafs never got to play a gig and it was a onetime only experience for those lucky few people in the basement that day.

Coming up next: The Elton John Concert.




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Sound Design

Idiot’s Delight opened in October of 1979 and it was my last major lighting design assignment while at Michigan but I still had plenty of other work to do before I graduated.

Oh course I still had to work on my MFA Thesis which had various deadlines all year long.
A rough draft of my Thesis support paper and preliminary set, light and costume design drawing were do several times before the final work could begin.
As it turned out that the one on the editors of the play collection book from which I got the copy of The Jew of Malta which teaching at Michigan.
The book was one that I had used in my Shakespeare class back at SUNY Buffalo.

I wanted it to look like I really researched the play, which I did, so I thought it would be good to talk with someone who really knew the script and I made an appointment to meet the English professor who edited the play collection and to talk to him about the play and see if he had any insights or thoughts about the play.
In a nut shell he could not care less, he offered some general comments about the period style and the play and at one point he said “I Think the other editor really worked with that play”.
I was able to include a few quotes from him but he was not really any help.

My first year I took costume design classes in addition to the lights ones and the second year I was in several scene designs classes and had plenty of class design projects to work on.
I moved from the scene shop into the electrics shop and I was now the department Master Electrician.
The job came with several duties that included general maintenance and repair of the stage lights and cables, supervising the lighting in the Arena Theatre and creating the sound effect and music tapes for all of the plays.

One of the first things I had to do was to quickly learn how to cut and splice recording tape.
The plays were not underscored with music as much as it is done today.
There might be preshow music, or change music, but it was mostly buzzers, chimes, dog barks and when possible many sounds were done live onstage.
I did some live recordings of actor’s voices, special music and sound effects I could not find on records.
I also had to figure out how to make long endless loop of tape so I could create 20 minutes of rain.
Typically the effect sounds on records last only a few seconds.
I ended up with a 12 foot loop of tape that ran across the electrics work room.

Sometimes I felt like I was doing an old-time radio as I had to make or record my own sounds for a play.
Today it is all done on the computer which makes much faster and a lot easier then back in 1979.
I remember that I had to go to the record shop and was surprised that they still had a listening booth so I could check out a few records to make sure that I got the right version of the music the director wanted.
It took me a while but I found just the right recording of the Lieutenant Kije Suite by Sergei Prokofiev, best known for his ballet score to Peter and the Wolf.

For plays in the Arena Theatre either I did a quick lighting design or most often I would supervise the student designer.
The designers were a mixture of undergraduate and graduate design majors and sometimes a directing student would give it a try.
Usually the small theatre was easy to take care of as there was another graduate student who took care of the scenic elements and I took care of the sound and lighting.

One time there was some excitement when someone who did not know what they were doing plugged the bare end of a speaker cable into a wall outlet thing it was a work light.
There was a big bang and the speaker caught fire.
Opps, you hope that they will not make that mistake again.


.

Funny Incident and Hello World!

After working in Theatre for forty years you would think that I have seen almost everything.
Well in last night’s rehearsal something funny happened.
We were getting ready for our second technical rehearsal for our production that opens this Friday.

Boy Gets Girl, 2010

http://www.brockport.edu/newsbureau/1511.html

The scene designer had bought a new piece of furniture for the set and several students had just assembled it and placed it on the set.
It was a low shelf unit designed for shoes in a closet.

We use students from various Theatre intro classes on the run crews and a girl who was setting up props walked out on the set, across the office platform and stepped on the shelf unit and snapped it in half but kept going up into the bedroom platform without stopping, but when she did she just turned around looked back and said “What!” as everyone was laughing.

Then the student said “I thought it was a step”.

While working on my blog and posting a recent entry I found a button I had not seen before.
It gave statistics on how many people have read my blog and which countries they are from.
I was very surprised and happy to see how many readers that I have from all over the world.
The top countries outside of the US for readers of my blog are: Germany, Russia, Brazil, Czech Republic, Israel, Vietnam, Australia, Finland and Poland, but there are many more.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of my readers and I hope that you will leave comments or drop me an e-mail and let me know who and where you are.

As soon as the current play opens I hope to get back to writing my normal, if you can call them that, blog entries.




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Idiot's Delight

At the end of my first summer and a short trip home to Long Island, I moved into my third and final apartment in Ann Arbor.
It was about three or four blocks north of the Theatre building and close to the Farmer’s Market.
My two housemates were both grad students but not theatre majors.
It was very small, but served its purpose well.

Like my first year, I designed the lighting for one of the first productions of the year.
The play was part of the Guest Artist series in the large Power Center Theatre in which I had just designed in that summer, but now I could design for my play alone.
The play was the Idiot’s Delight by Robert E. Sherwood which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1936.

Idiot's Delight, 1979

I felt lucky that we had a good production team.

The director, Jim, was a young faculty member who I had met on my trip first to Ann Arbor for my interview to get into the program.

While working as an actor a few years earlier Jim had guest roles in Room 222 and The Partridge Family, both of which were still being rerun at the time, and he would be teased whenever someone saw him on TV.

Program Cover

The scene designer was also a young faculty member who was in the "second year" of a one year visiting professor position.

Dick would go on to have some success as he is the Associate Head of the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University.

Nancy Jo, the costume designer, was a fellow MFA design student who now teaches at California State University, Long Beach.

I served as the lighting designer for the play and would go to; well, write this blog and a few other things here and there and maybe a thing or two over the years.



Idiot's Delight, 1979


Early on in the production process Jim invited the design team to go see an old movie playing on campus because he wanted us to see the style that was used in it.
We did not have VCRs back then so you could not just order any movie any time you wanted so it was just lucky that some group was showing it on campus.
We went to see My Man Godfrey from 1936 staring William Powell and Carole Lombard.

The movie is a lot of fun and still is one of my favorites.

The style and design of the play was defiantly affected by the movie.

The large set was Art Deco in style and I was asked if mirrored panels as part of the design would be a problem.
I said that I could work around them and that they should not be a problem, but I was not really sure.
In between the mirrored panels were frosted plastic panels that I lit with blue and white lights.
To add to my fun the costume designer had gold glamee costumes for the dancing girls.
Black, white, silver and gold: it was challenging but fun to do.

Late at night

In the play a war breaks out at the end and we needed an explosion outside of a big window that was rigged to fall apart.
We were lucky that one of the MFA students had just come off the road where he was the pyrotechnic for the band KISS.
Now I do not know for sure if it was Doug who blew Kiss’ drummer up so many times that it became the basis of the joke about killing numerous drummers in the movie This is Spinal Tap, but I do know that his flash pots were so big that they burned the curtains in the set window and had to be replaced each night.
Like everyone else from the show, Doug went on to have success in Theatre and was the production manager of last year’s Christmas Show at Radio City Music Hall.

As with all shows while I was Michigan lighting designers had to give a talk back after the shows open to discus and explain what you did with the lighting to our fellow students.
I felt lucky that people enjoyed my work but I was puzzled when someone said that they liked my lighting especially the little red tint that I had put into the set.
I did not know what they were talking about, and except for the explosion at the end, there was no red in my design.
I thanked them all for their comments and after they left I walked around the Theatre and found out that it was the Exit signs that were reflecting off of the set.

Puttin' on the Ritz

Renovation Update

I have been writing about my life in Theatre and I am about to start commenting on what I did in my second year in Grad School.
I thought I would jump ahead briefly to comment on what is happening right now.
The new school year has begun and we are at the start of the fourth week of school.
Our first production is well under way and opens on October 8th.

http://www.brockport.edu/theatre/current.html

For the past two years we have been dealing with renovations to the Tower Fine Arts Center and its two Theatres and classrooms.
Most of it was supposed to be done by the start of this school year and surprise there is still a few issues.
As of today we still do not have working dimmers in the Mainstage Theatre.
New dimmers were ordered but the New York State budget delayed caused a delay in dimmers being ordered.
I think that they could have been ordered six months earlier but that did not happen.
We did get about 150 new stage lights to replace the old ones that had asbestos wires.
They will be a nice addition to our inventory; that is after we get some dimmers hooked up to run them.

I did use 4 of the new LED Strip lights for a music concert last Thursday.
They work without dimmers and I had them just doing a slow color blend from red to blue in an endless loop that one of my students programmed in the lighting board.

The Lab Theatre has gone through some major work this past summer and should be ready for use some time before the end of the year.

 Roof off and new "I" beams in place

A new SkyDeck lighting grid is being installed.

http://www.iastage.com/skydeck_tension_wire_grid

SkyDeck panels being installed

The Lab Theatre will not look the same as before and the new work lights are very bright.

More photos of the SkyDeck being installed can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=278389&id=560337941&l=2e43ee8003

Other photos of the renovations can be found at the following links:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=236891&id=560337941&l=60dbfb5b1c

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=253517&id=560337941&l=1dd9123715

There is a list of many things that are not yet done with the renovations, some big, some small and some just a pain in the butt.
The new air blowers are very noisy and the one in the lobby sounds like a jet engine.
I had them turn it off for the music concert but the other ones that were still on made it hard for me to hear the concert in the control booth.

We are also getting new pass card locks on the doors in place of keys, of course that is not ready and there are some doors that I cannot get in.

I thought I would take a break from my normal writings and share with my readers what is currently going on with my life in Theatre and I will get back to my regular postings soon.

Geoffrey E. Guja

Nine years ago we lost too many good people and the world as we knew was changed forever.

It turns out that I had met one of those heroes thirty years ago while I was in college.

He was the twin brother of one of my friends and I enjoyed a few beers and many laughs with him during his visit to Buffalo.

Please take a minute to remember all of those who we lost that day.

Geoffrey E. Guja

Age: 47

Hometown: Lindenhurst, N.Y., USA

Occupation: Firefighter, New York Fire Department

Location: Ground, World Trade Center




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Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger

The lease for my first apartment in Ann Arbor ended in May so I needed to sublet a place to live for the summer.
I found a place just south of the campus near the Student Union.
It was a little further to walk but I would suffer as I got to live with three women and one guy who spent most of his time at his girlfriend’s place.

They guy I sublet my room from had several large fish tanks and did not want to move them and asked me if I would feed them over the summer as none of the girls would do it.
The biggest tank had just a few fish including one large Jack Dempsey (Rocio Octofasciata for those who care).

The fish looked cool and was very aggressive.
It would bite onto anything you put in the tank, like the end of a pencil and your fingers should not to go near the fish.

I did not see any fish food and asked what I was to feed it.
The guy just pointed to the other fish tank that was full of goldfish.
Every day or so I was to catch one of the goldfish and drop it in the tank with the Jack Dempsey.
It would be gone in a flash.
Occasionally one of the goldfish might last a few seconds to swim around but soon would be gone.

It was a quiet place and I enjoyed living there and did not mind when the girls would sunbathe on the roof right outside of my window.
This was still a time before microwaves were in every kitchen and our most modern appliance was a toaster oven that one of the girls used to make burnt cheese.
She would just put some cheese on some tinfoil and crisp it up.
It seemed odd to me at the time until I realized that it was the burnt cheese part of real baked macaroni and cheese that I liked best.

They invited me back to the house in the fall for a 60’s party.
Peace

Just down the street from my house was what quickly became my favorite restaurant in Ann Arbor; Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger

http://www.blimpyburger.com/

I was surprised to see Guy Fieri do a feature on it during Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on the Food Network.
You can see the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVTcAkfuRFw

I was glad to see that it still there, with some of the same staff, and that it does not seem to have changed too much in 30 years, but there is little on the menu that I would eat these days.
If you watch the video you will see the same lady working the grill who was there when I was used to eat there back in 1979.

At the end of the summer the Theatre Grad Students had a big party to celebrate those graduating and also to make fun of ourselves.
Gag gifts were made for everyone, many in bad taste and some flat out rude.
I do not know what the girl who got the “Round, Round, I get Around Award” thought about it but I got a flashlight with a little color wheel attached to it.
Guess I talked about working at Lycian Stage Lighting too much, but hey it was just the previous summer which seemed ages ago after the crazy first year at Michigan.

I moved into my third and final apartment at the end of the summer and was ready for my second year at Michigan and all of its work and new adventures still ahead.

The Van Buren Lighting Board

As I noted in an earlier post, in the summer of 1979 I designed the lighting for Ah, Wilderness by Eugene O’Neill and Hay Fever by Noel Coward as part of the Michigan Summer Repertory.
There were two other plays, but both of my productions opened on the same day, one at 2:00 PM and the other at 8:00 PM.
This is the only time that I had two plays opening on the same day and needless to say it was a bit crazy, both plays looked good and everything came off well.
There were changeovers of the sets and lights between each of the four plays that took several hours and everyone in the company worked very hard to get it all done.
As the Master Electrician part of my job was to re-patch the lights.

The lighting control board was an early computer board made by Van Buren and there is a description of the lighting board that was in use in the Power Center for the Performing Arts in the 1970’s is in Linda Essig’s 2002 book, The Speed of Light: Dialogues on Lighting Design and Technological Change.

http://www.amazon.com/Speed-Light-Dialogues-Lighting-Technological/dp/0325005087

I would recommend this book to anyone interested the big changes that stage lighting has gone through over the past 25 years, with discussions from the early computer control boards through what is in use today.

The lighting system in the Power Center was State-of-the-Art back in the 1970’s and had many quirks.
It was one of the first computer control boards, if not the first, was prone to overheating as well as dropping its memory.
The system used a slider patch panel that was up on the mid-level loading floor of the fly system on stage right.
Each of the several hundred circuits needed to be moved to their new assignments in one of the 57 dimmers before each show.
Sometimes the sliders would not click in tight to make a good connection or they would be in the wrong slot so it was important to do a dimmer check after each re-patch as there would always be a few sliders that needed to be adjusted during each change over.

As much work and fun that I had my first year there was to be even more adventures in store for me during my second year at Michigan.
Once or twice during my first year I made a few extra dollars by working as a theatre supervisor when an outside an group rented one of the department’s performance spaces but in my second year I worked on more Theatre, Music and Dance productions as well as several union calls working as a stagehand on several touring professional theatre productions and Rock & Roll shows.
Working with the local stagehands union was good experience, lots of fun and paid more money.

One thing that was omnipresent during my entire time at Michigan was the fact that I would have to produce a Master’s Thesis by the end of my second year.
During my first year I saw how hard the second year MFA’s worked on their Thesis’ and how much time that they put into it.
The first and most difficult task of my Thesis was the selection of the play that I would use.

I would need to design the sets, lights and costumes for the play; producing all of drawings, draftings, renderings and related paperwork as well as writing a paper that tied it all together.
There was no restriction and few guidelines given to us, just pick a play that you like and that you can work on for the next nine to ten months.
Oh course I wanted to pick a play that would be fit all the requirements but I also wanted it to be changeling, but not too crazy or with problems that would make it impossible to get it all done.

Early in my second year at Michigan I started the process of selecting a play.
I went through all of the plays I knew and quickly threw out Shakespeare; and not because the plays are difficult, but because many other MFA students had recently used his plays and I did not want my work compared to what they had just done.
When I took a Shakespeare class back at UB the teacher had us read many other non-Shakespeare plays of the pre-Elizabethan era in order to give us a better understanding of Shakespeare’s plays.
We read such plays as Everyman, Ralph Roister Doister, Gammer Gurton’s Needle and Gorbuduc and then we read the plays of Kyd, Marlowe, Johson and finally on to Shakespeare himself.
I found this very helpful being able understanding the plays as well as reading them with ease as we progressed from blank verse to Shakespeare’s Iambic Pentamer.

I liked both Marlowe’s plays and his mysterious life and death life; I would have chosen The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus except for the fact that someone had just used it for their Thesis two year before.
My second choice, and the play that I selected, was Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, a play that I really liked when I first read it and I enjoyed working on it.

During the course of my second year there were periodic meetings with the Thesis Committee to report on the progress of the work that I was doing.
Research into the play and playwright, basic design research and preliminary design work all had to be done and approved before the final work would begin during my last summer at Michigan.
More about my Thesis will follow in upcoming blogs.

There was also plenty of other design and class work that I would do my second year beginning with designing the lighting for the first guest artist series production in the Power Center in the fall of 1979.
I had just designed two productions in the summer rep, but those designs were part of a basic rep plot, but now I only had to deal with the one production and could hang whatever lights and specials that were needed for the production.

A few more thoughts about my Blog

As I have written about my adventures over this past year, it has been hard for me not to always say “This was the best time of my life”!
Well working in Theatre has been the best time of my life.
Each production whether they were large or small, offered interesting problems and challenges that were fun to figure out.
As I think back to my time in grad school (about which I have been most recently writing in my blog) we had a dozen or more talented grad students working together on the productions along with the teachers and undergrad students, it seemed to me at the time that we were doing great work, having a great time and that we were unstoppable.

I thought the shows were all great and that we were doing the best Theatre ever done.
Well they were good, maybe not the best ever, but for me at the time it was a great experience.
I started to learn how to draft in High School, learned more in college but now I was using my skills to design things.
Things that I thought up and drew out on paper were being built in the shop and lights in the theatre set up and focused using my plans.
People were working on things that I designed, of course I felt great.

As I look back today to my work over the years I can be honest with myself, I know how things really were; I know what was really good, what was bad and what turned out so-so, but it was all special to me.

I have always known that I was lucky to come into the world of Theatre; to be able to stay there and make a living doing what I love.
Of course working on the big productions with lots of money, time and staff is fun; but I have also enjoyed getting the chance to work on smaller and more challenging shows in smaller theatres with limited resources.
Sometimes it is while working on small productions; working alone, wearing too many hats, complaining about the conditions, but still finding a way to get it done - is when I have found the greatest enjoyment.

Back in college and grad school I did not know where my career path would lead me but I was determined to enjoy the ride.
I never have worried too much about if I was working in the right or best theatre or school but have tried to make each production the best I could.
Not every play I have worked on has been a great success, but I have always tried to give my best to every production.

Since becoming a teacher I have enjoyed helping others start their own journey into the world of Theatre and I am happy and proud when I hear of the success of my former students.
As I write about my past adventures I do want my readers to think that I view them as my “Glory Days”, the best years of my life.
I would be nice to think that every moment of our lives are the special golden moments, the best days of our lives, and if you enjoy each moment as its comes and make the best of them you will be happy.

Yes I am proud of the work I have I done, I did enjoy them working on them all, but it is the current play, that always the most important production to me.
I have been asked many times if I am sad on closing night, when I have to take a set down, and my answer is always the same; No.
It is the journey; the research, the designing, calculating and building of each show that I enjoy.
When a show is over it is time to move on to the next one and the start of a new adventure.

As I start the second year of my blog I hope to have more interesting stories to share with my readers as I go back and review what I have done, where I have been and where I still may be going.

My Blog, First Anniversary

One year ago I started writing my blog about my life working in Theatre and I have enjoyed the review of the journey that has taken me to where I am today.
I have only really covered about ten years on working on plays; high school, college and the first year of grad school and there is over thirty years of stories yet to come.
As I have written each blog I have had to stop and review my memories, look through old photos, programs and do some research on the internet and Facebook to find old friends and classmates to see what they have been doing.

It has been nice to reconnect with a few people I have not seen in many years, but the whole process of reviewing events from your life can sometimes leave me feeling a bit melancholy thinking about the days and people of the past.
You can drive yourself crazy if you worry too much about what you did or did not do in the past, it is perhaps best just to remember the good times, smile a bit to oneself and move on.

It is interesting to see where other’s journeys have taken them whether or not they have stayed working in Theatre or not.
An old college friend sent me an e-mail after he found my blog while looking for some information about a play we had worked on over thirty years ago.

I was surprised to find my blog linked from a major computer software site.
It was my book review for “Light Plot Deconstructed” by Gregg Hillmar that prompted me to start my blog in the first place after joking about writing a book for many years.
I needed an online place for my review and a blog seemed like an easy place to put it.
My review is linked from the Vectorworks website: http://delicious.com/VectorWorks/book-review+light-plot-deconstructed.

What started out as a whim turned out to be very enjoyable and I look forward to writing each new entry.
I do not know if the next thirty years of memories will have as much detail as the first ten, but I know that I still have many more tales to tell and hope to add new ones in the coming years.
I have been trying to follow a chronological order in my blog, but have jumped about from time to time, added some of my current adventures, repeated some stories and have jumped off topic and probably I will do it again.

As I have had time and have gone back and re-read my blog, I have found and corrected a few mistakes and I added a few things that I have remembered since I wrote the original blog entry.
I will have to do a complete re-write when I publish the whole blog as my tell-all autobiography after I retire.

A new school year is about to start, the building renovations are coming to an end, but there are still many major things that are not done as of this time.
Whatever building problems there still are they will just be added into the mix of a new academic year with new students and productions and we will all have to wait to see what new, and hopefully interesting, stories develop.

Summer 1979

At the end of each semester at The University of Michigan there was a portfolio review of all of your class and design work by all four of the design teachers.
The first review at the end of the fall semester was a bit scary as I did not know what to expect.
As I noted in an earlier post the faculty kicked one of the scene design students out of the MFA program and was only given a MA for the work already done.
At the review in the spring semester the only second year lighting design student was kicked out of the program.
He had too many prior problems and incompletes in his class work, but it might have been fact that he was very drunk when he fell down the aisle in the theatre on the opening night of the play he designed that was the final straw that finally gave him the boot.

Because there were no longer any second year lighting design students I was selected to be the master electrician for the Michigan Summer Repertory and got to design two of the four plays.
I had to work with the other two lighting designers to draft a master light plot that would work with all of the plays.

My Bio from the program

Three of to four plays worked well with the rep plot but the set for one of my plays was very different from the other three and did not work well and I had to fight with myself to make the lights work for that play.

I designed the lighting for Ah, Wilderness by Eugene O’Neill and Hay Fever by Noel Coward that summer.

Hay Fever

Because we were building four shows at the same time space was always an issue in the scene shop.

The scene designer for the Hay Fever set painted the flats in the small parking lot just outside the shop and of course someone drove over them leaving tire tracks.
At our end of the year party another of the designers made a tee shirt tire actual tire tracks painted on the shirt that said; Hay Fever, Park Here.

Ah, Wilderness

In addition to working on the four plays each summer we also had classes.

The classes were all special topics and sometimes taught by a guest instructor.
One of the classes was a curtain draping class in which we learned how to make and hang various curtain types and other classes were about making props and upholstering furniture.

The most important thing about the summer was that we got to take one day off a week to play softball.
The Theatre Department had two intramural teams, one all male and the other was coed.
It was very important to the general morale of everyone working in the shop as the few hours away helped us all keep sane with all the work being done.
I think we may have had more fun than any of the other teams, but we did not have much luck winning.
Many of the other teams had uniforms, took it all very seriously and had the average age of 19.
Our team with a mix of both grad students and teachers had an average age of 27 and were just there to have fun.
Over the two summers I think we only won one game and we felt bad that we hurt the other team’s chances in the playoffs.

We played a few bonus games against the local stagehands union, usually with a keg near home plate, that were also lots of fun.
I still have the baseball glove that I bought in Ann Arbor and take with me when I go to local AAA baseball games in Rochester.