Monday, December 29, 2014

Roshamon, March 1991




Our first show in 1991 was Roshamon, a play based in part on a 1950 Japanesse movie directed by the famous director Akira Kurosawa and staring the well known actor Toshirô Mifune.
The story of the play was the retelling of a murder and rape by several witnesses who each have a different story.


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042876/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon

Traditional Japanese theatre includes several styles including Kabuki, Noh (and Kyōgen) and Bunraku.
Our guest director wanted to incorporate parts of each style in our production.
Most traditional Japanese productions would not use a blend of styles but we had them all in our show.
We had hired a temporary costume designer that year and she was chosen in part because she had experience in Japanese costume design and she did created very beautiful costumes for the show.
We also had to make Bunraku puppets, a life-size horse costume and a very stylized set which included a Hanamichi, a ramp that ran out into the audience.
Although a mixture of styles the play looked nice and came off well.

The biggest problem during the production came on the Sunday night of the first weekend of the show with the start of the Ice Storm of 1991.
The storm caused major powered outages and closed the school for several days and delayed the second weekend of the show.


http://www.progrocher.com/pix/icestorm/ice1.htm

Many branches and whole trees fell that night and a tree fell across the front of my car.
As luck would have it, the tree did no damage to my car it except bending my radio antenna.




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