Some Christmas Thoughts . . . .

Just before Christmas I watched many movies with Christmas themes with my wife.

One of which was my favorite version of A Christmas Carol from 1951 with Alistair Sim.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044008/

 

 

It has been several years since I had watched the whole movie and even though it was the "colorized" version I still enjoyed.

Because of the movie I thought back to the several stage versions of the played that I have worked on.

Three years ago I wrote in my Blog about the first the production of A Christmas Carol that I worked on back in December of 1980.

I have also worked on three productions of it since I came to Brockport and will write more about them as I continue my Blog through the years.

In additions to the three traditional productions we also did a spoof version of A Christmas Carol.

Our department had planned to do the show every other year, any even though the show tends to make a lot of money it put too much of a strain on the technical staff.

The play calls for many costumes and sets.

Our original plan called for reusing the same set each year the same way that our local professional theatre does, but with different directors and new script each time it did not work out.

To really do the play right, special effects such as fog, snow and other visual effects are needed.

It got to be too much for us to do and we stopped producing A Christmas Carol.

I will write about these productions as they are coming up soon when I get back to my chronological review of my career.

Have a Happy New Year.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Hispanic Theatre Festival, 1989

In the spring of 1989 our first production was a Hispanic Theatre Festival which was made up of two one-act plays.

The first play, La Hiel Nuestra de Cada Dia, was performed in Spanish and the second play, Leaves from Hell, was performed in English.

For the first play a simple one room box set was set up in front of the set for the second play and then removed during the intermission.

The Spanish speaking cast was made up of all adult non-students.

Although I asked many times I never got an English translation of the script.

My limited knowledge of French was of no use to help me light this Spanish  play.

I had a native Spanish speaking student who sat with me during a run through of the play whispering to me what was going on.

It was a bit frustrating for me because several time during the play I would ask what is going on and she would say: "Oh it's not important, they're just talking".

Somehow I was able to create the lighting and cues for the play.

The second play was in English so I had a better chance of understanding it.

The entire cast was made up of college students, including our chairperson's daughter.

The play was set in some un-named Latin American country and dealt with a corrupt government, torture and other assorted evils.

The set was a stylized military base with camouflage nets, barbed wire, ammo boxes and real rifles.

Real rifles?

Sure what could go wrong.

We had a student who had several rifles that were kept in a gun locker at the campus police office and brought over for each show.

I do not think that I had worked on a play since high school that used real guns onstage.

Unlike "The King and I" we did not fire any of the rifles but did use a blank gun for one effect.

During one scene a woman is thrown against a wall and shot.

The wall had been prepared with several small holes drilled through it and half of a plastic bowl attached to the back.

As the woman was thrown against the wall and the gun was fired stage blood was poured into the cup.

The effect was very real but the director always wanted the blackout to come too soon and many in the audience never got to see the blood.

After each show the fake blood was washed off the wall.

 

Looking over the program I was reminded of the number of good students we had at that time and the good job that they did.

 

 

 

* * *

Under Milkwood, 1988

I am sorry that my current duties have kept me away from adding any Blog posts in a while.

We just finished a nice production of Almost, Maine at Brockport.

This past week I had two music concerts and the student production opens this week.

Back to my life in theatre, so where was I when we last spoke:

In December of 1988 we did a production of Dylan Thomas' Under Milkwood.

Our mainstage theatre is a standard proscenium auditorium and seats 400 but for this production the play was done in our smaller intimate black box theatre which seats only 100.

The seating which is flexible was set up in stadium style, with two sections of seats on opposite sides of the theatre, like a small football field.

The set was simple with the floor covered with carpeting the was cut to the shape of Wales.

I am sure that most people did not know it was suppose to be except an irregular shape on the floor.

The only other set pieces were several 20" high sections of logs used as seats.

And as with many other show over my 32 years at Brockport, I think I still have a few of the logs down in our Basement.

We are lucky as we have a large storage area and are able to save many set pieces that we can reuse.

For our current production of Avenue Q we pulled up some large old window frames that had not been used in over 18 years and took them apart and then re-cut them to make new windows.

I call easily tell that the windows were made years ago by the quality of the wood used to build them.

The wood is almost know free and not warped too much.

Sometimes when I rip new wood on the table saw you can see the wood curl as the blade splits it.

The new show has a big set and I am trying to save money by re-using whatever I can.

I have to weigh how much time and work it will take to tear apart an old set piece and if we will get enough good wood to make it worth the effort.

The old windows came apart fairly easily and already have been made into six new window frames.

Back to Under Milkwood.

Written as a radio drama it was adapted for the stage in 1954 and called a play for voices.

We were lucky as we had an actress cats in the play who was Welsh and was very helpful with the Welsh language and terms used in the play.

A small cast, only about half of them were students and the rest were faculty and staff members from various department on campus.

Only about half of the play was acted out while several actors read narration standing at podiums.

The same director would use a similar format when we did a production of John Brown's Body some years later.

The lighting was dark, moody and very effective for Under Milkwood but I never was able to get any good photographs of it, but I will post what I have.

This of course was back when we used film in cameras, digital cameras were still years away.

Under Milkwood was very different from most of the plays we had done and I enjoyed it.

I am sure that most of the students who had to see it for class did not like it because they had to pay attention and really listen to what was being said.

But then again even when we do something lighter many of the students who are required to see the plays do not enjoy them either.

I think we might do better with our next play Avenue Q coming up next month.

The plays we did in the spring of 1989 were both very different from  our normal productions and offered unique challenges.

* * *

Remember the 9/11 Heroes

As we come to the twelfth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11 I think it is important to take a moment to remember all the heroes that we lost that day. 

I found out a few years ago that I had once met one of those heroes thirty-seven years ago while I was still in college.

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

* * *

Please take a minute to remember him and all of those who we lost on 9/11.

Geoffrey E. Guja

Age: 47

Hometown: Lindenhurst, N.Y., USA

Occupation: Firefighter, New York Fire Department

Location: Ground, World Trade Center

* * *

Ah, Wilderness, October 1988

I am sorry that I have been a bit lax and distracted on my blog entries of late.

As I progress through the many plays that  I have worked on over the years I find that although I have many stories I do not always have wild tales for every show or season of plays.

Maybe I am getting old but some years and shows do blend together.

I clearly remember the 1987 production of Ah, Wilderness by Eugene O'Neil but I only have a few stories but nothing wild.

 

It was a good production, the first of the new school year.

It was a little hard for me to work on the play as I was pretty sick and had pneumonia.

I have worked through many colds and even the flu but this was different and so bad that I even had to take one whole sick day off.

I knew that I was pretty sick when I bent down to pick up something and I did not have enough air to stand up with great effort.

The set would get done and the show went off well.

I thought it was funny that the young actress who played the Irish maid actually spoke very little English.

She was a Latina but I do not remember which country she was from.

The actor who played the drunk uncle was an recent alumni and I do remember that he spent a good deal of time working with the girl running her lines when they were offstage.

I am sure he was just it for the good of the play and not to hit on her but in any case she did OK during the play and you could almost understand what she said.

The play calls for one of the boys to throw firecrackers on the set and we used real ones that I just happened to have.

I think I got them on the same trip through the south when I got the bottle rockets that I had fired at the Anything Goes set a few summers before.

I think I still have a few of the firecrackers in my tool box and I never seem to through them away because I just like having them.

They make me feel young.

As for the rest of Ah, Wilderness I really do not have much else to say about it.

This is does not mean that it was a bad show but just another one of hundreds that I have worked on.

As I go through the years in my Blog I know that I have left out some of the many smaller production that I worked on.

During a normal school year we would have several music concerts of varied styles and size.

We have had classical trios, quartets and full orchestras, jazz groups, folk groups, singers and even Indian Sitar music.

Oh, the Sitar concert, not one of my favorites.

The first song was nice and so was the second but after a while it all sounded the same and the guy would not stop and he played on for hours.

Additionally there are always many student productions from the full club productions each semester to the many one act student senior projects.

I have overseen most of the shows and my direct involvement has varied from just a few words of advice or encouragement to designing the whole set or lighting for the show when the students have been desperate.

I prefer to just advise them, give them some options and let them decide what do it themselves.

I do not have a clear picture on how many productions that I did "Ghost" design work for but I am always happy when the students can do it themselves with maybe just a bit of help.

In any normal school year we may have bonus events in the theatre that take up my time.

In recent years we have had the college president and vice president give their opening of the school year speeches.

In the past I have worked on various commencement related events the nursing, education and ROTC programs.

It has been a very rare year that we have not had some extra event in one of our two theatres.

As I write this we are going to have a bonus production in the lab theatre tomorrow as part of the college's diversity conference.

When they asked to use the space they never said that it was a play that was coming in, I thought it was just going to be a lecture.  

In short it has been a pain in the ass but I got some of my student workers to run it while I work with others on the main department production.

I try to avoid these type of added shows but I cannot always do it.

I will bitch a lot but will work hard to make sure that it will come off OK.

Tempted as I am to do a bad job so they will not come back I just cannot do it.

I do not want anything that I work on or is in our space to look bad as it will reflect badly on our department even if we did not produce it.

Theatre, always fun.

 

 

 

Change

Working at a college there is always change.

Each year the student body changes as some students will graduate or drop out and new ones come in.

Students stay as little as one semester and stay as long as five years or more.

As I noted in another post I think an average stay for students is about three years.

There are changes in the staff over time as well but not usually as dramatic as when we graduate a large number of students in one year. 

The fall of 1988 was the beginning of many staff changes in just a short time that really re-shaped the department.

At the end of my first year one on the faculty left to become a dean at another college and after my third year the lighting designer left after not getting tenure.

There had been little change until the fall of 1988 when we got a new costume designer.

Don was a very good designer but would only stay for two years and then we got a temporary new designer in the fall of 1990 and she would stay just one year.

The fall of 1991 brought our fourth costume designer in just over three years and luckily she would stay for about six years before leaving and we would get the fifth and current costume designer during my time at Brockport.

In the fall of 1989 we would also get a new scene designer who became very popular with the students but would only stay six years before leaving.
 

We would also get a new acting teacher in the fall of 1990 when long time popular teacher Gisela Fritzsching was forced to retire by state law at 70, a law that was changed the very next year.

As I write this she is still going at about 93.

Over the years there would be several more changes with our music staff and other academic faculty, but that period from 1988 through 1991 with so many design faculty changing was challenging for me.

It always seems to take a few shows working together to get use to how other designers work and get to the point where everyone works as a team.

This does not mean that we did bad productions; it just means that we had to work just a bit harder to get it right.

As I get ready to write about the plays I worked on during this period I thought I would take a minute to figure out just who I was working with.

I think maybe I need to go through all my programs and make a chart of who was here when, but that sounds too much like work and not lots of fun.

As I write this we are two weeks away from the start of another school year; it will be my 32^nd year at Brockport.

We have already had a design meeting for the first fall production.

The 2013-14 season for those who care:

Almost, Maine

by John Cariani

October 4-6 and 17-19  

 

Avenue Q

by Lopez, Marx and Whitty

November 22-24 and December 5-7  

 

Dead Man’s Cell Phone

by Sarah Ruhl

February 28-March 2 and March 6-8   

 

bobrauchenbergamerica

by Charles Mee

April 25-27 and May 1-3

So up next the 1988-89 season and stories from those plays.

* * *

The Boy Friend, Summer 1988

In the summer of 1988 our production was The Boy Friend.

It was a summer of change as it was the first time in many years that Adam Lazarre was not directing the production.

Santo Giglio, the long time choreographer, would take over the directing duties.

The play was chosen in part because it would not be too much of a challenge.

For those who know it, The Boy Friend is not a deep musical, very light and to me it seems very similar to the classic No, No, Nannette in style and plot.

The musical has no show stopping tunes or ones that must people would know.

That summer we also had two outside designers working with us.

Both the scene and costume designers were from SUNY Geneseo, 40 or so miles to the south.

I knew the scene designer as I had worked with him a few times before and became friendly with the costume designer as well and we all had a good time that summer.

Our production was not bad and as always I had fun working on it.

The summer musicals were always lots of work but we always made sure that we had lots of fun too.

Wednesday lunchtime cookouts on the loading dock and of course cast parties after each show, and many of the rehearsals as well.

I do not have too many special stories from this production, good or bad, but as with many other shows I have bits from the shows still hanging about, literally.

Until the recent renovation we had a bright yellow plywood Sun from the show hanging in the shop.

Not sure where it is now, I will have to find it and put it back.

I had enough fun with the two outside designers that we talked about getting together after the show was done.

That fall one of the student assistants and I went down to Geneseo to see one of their shows.

Wrong show.

The play we chose to see was about women prisoners during the Holocaust.

It was sad and very Loooooooooong.

There was maybe 10 to 15 women in the play, all dressed in death camp outfits, very pale grey makeup and a few of them even shaved all of their hair off.

They did a fine job but it took more than just a few minutes to shake off the play and get into the mood to go have a few beers with our friends when it was done.

I guess that speaks to the effectiveness of the production and its very difficult subject.

When I left to go see the play I did not know what we were going to see, I just thought we would see some normal college production and have a few beers and laughs after.

The next school year would be the last for the scene designer and we also be getting the first of several new costumes designers.

We would have four different staff costume designers over the next five years and other staff changes were also ahead in next couple of years.

Through it all we still did our productions, most of them good and had a good time doing them.

 

 * * *

The Last Baron of Arizona, 1988

The Last Baron of Arizona was written by one of our faculty and directed by another.

It was a Youth Theatre piece, which means that it was based in part on historical facts and had to have some great moral or message, which has been lost to me over time.

It had a large cast with some of our better actors of that time and I am sure they did a good job but I really do not remember much about the play. 

We had a student scene designer and if I remember correctly we reused part of another set, the raked stage from Androcles and the Lion, and added a few new pieces to it.

We only did one week of regular shows but three “Creature Features”, student matinees, at 10 AM the same week.

What fun.

I know I have photos from the play; I just have not scanned them.

When I was looking for photos of the play I came across one that I thought was from the play but turned out to be from one of the Children’s Theatre Mini Tour productions that we did about the same time as many of the same actors were in both plays.

The Play was Low Bridge: Stories, Songs and Sketches of the Erie Canal.

The play produced as part of a class and the students worked hard developing the Mini Tours as that spent half of the semester working on a script and the rest of the time they toured to local schools performing the play.

The set had to be simple as it had to fit in the back of a big 12 person van.

I often did the scene design for these plays or helped a student do it.

They would always do one performance of the show at the college which I liked because it meant that I did not have to go out to see the play at some elementary school full of little kids.

Now I do like little kids, but when you too many together they can be scary as they all have runny noses and carry some awful kid diseases.

We do not call the school matinees “Creature Features” for nothing.

I will  scan and add the image program for the Mini Tour here as soon as I can.

.

 * * *