Thursday, September 30, 2010

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


Monday, September 20, 2010

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.


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.

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:

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


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.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

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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