Thursday, May 17, 2018

Centennial Theatre Festival, 1994


I have enjoyed working at The College at Brockport but my position is a twelve month appointment and I do not have the summers off like those teachers on nine month contracts.
In the early days I was very busy with our Summer Arts Festival with both a musical and straight play production and occasional dance concert as well.
The second play which ran only one weekend was held over and performed again the first weekend of school in September.
After my third summer the second play production was dropped and we would just musicals until the festival ended.
I enjoyed doing the second plays because I got to design the sets for them which included Bus Stop, Wait Until Dark and The Good Doctor.
We often did not start building the sets for the second plays until after the musicals opened and we had only about a week to knock the sets together.

Because of the summer shows and my other duties I have had little time to work outside of Brockport over the years and I found this frustrating at times.
In the summer of 1994 there was to be no summer musical because of planned construction work in the theatre so I wanted to do something else outside of Brockport.
Once I cleared that I could be away I looked for an interesting summer theatre job.
I landed a job as the Technical Director for the summer season of the Centennial Theatre Festival in Simsbury, Connecticut.

The festival was housed in a very nice theatre at a private boarding school, The Westminster School, and the season consisted of three plays, two music concerts and a dance performance.



It was a great summer for me as I got to work in a new space with some talented people and was lucky that I was able to bring one of my recent students as my assistant.
It was one of the best decisions I made, he worked hard and he made me look good.
There was one pesky thorn in the mix, but I went with it, had some fun with it and went on to have a great experience that made me better in the long run.

Every production I have worked on is unique but I have found many stories in my  recent posts may have gotten a bit repetitive, but I had many new and fun experiences that summer in Connecticut.
I have an outline of things I may write about with over twenty topics so I am sure I will have several posts about the summer of 1994.
To begin with I had to make plans to be away for the whole summer, having my mail forwarded and other such things.
I loaded up my car with everything I thought I would need for the summer and headed out for my new adventure.

I was impressed by the look of the school buildings when I arrived.
Most of the classroom and dorm buildings had a classic Tudor style architecture look on a sprawling wooded campus.
There were no students there in the summer so it had an odd feeling with most buildings closed for the summer.
The actors and technical staff were housed in one of the dorms.
As I moved in I had the choice of any of the rooms but was advised I might want to try one of the rooms on the lower level (almost basement level) as there was no air conditioning.
The rooms were indeed cooler but they were prone to mildew.

Being summer theatre there is always little time to rehearse and build the shows so after moving in and meeting everyone it was time to get to work.
After two simple music events it was time to get to work on the first show of the season: Pump Boys and Dinettes.




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Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Biloxi Blues, 1994


Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues was our last play of the 1993-4 season.

This was a multi-scene play that had several smaller set pieces rather than one large set.




We had a student scenic designer and it was of the first plays that I did all of the working drawing on computer using a simple CAD program.

I would receive a grant for a new computer and AutoCAD program and takes AutoCAD classes in the Fall of 1994 but this was my first try at computer drawing.
Drawn with AutoSketch, this was also one of the last shows that I would use traditional flats before transitioning to Hollywood hard-covered flats.







The mostly male cast show was set in the 1940’s during World War II.
The need for period looking hair lead to a fun publicity opportunity when all of the cast were photographed at a local barbershop getting crew or “buzz cuts” as the actors had almost all of their hair cut off.
The photoshoot was also a good bonding experience for the cast who worked well together and put on a good production.

At the same time of the production of the play I was planning my first time away from Brockport in a long time as I was going off to Connecticut to be a Technical Director for an Equity summer stock Theatre company.
It had been eighteen years since I had first done summer Theatre as a twenty year old crew member but now I was going to be in charge of the crew and building the sets.
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