Getting Started

I had work to do even before I left for Connecticut.

As Technical Director I needed to help hire a shop staff for the summer.

The producer sent me several resumes of people who had applied to work at the theatre.

I was told I could hire two additional staff as there were several others that had already been hired.

I had tried to hire one of my recent students but he told me he already had plans for the summer.

There were not too many great choices in the resumes but one stood out as a promising prospect from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and I offered him a job.

Dickinson College is a very old college with a long history including a former president and the early home of JenniCam a ground-breaking website in the evolution of the internet.

If you do not know about JenniCam you need to Google it as it is not the subject of this blog.

I was having a hard time finding another person for the shop as some of the candidates had taken other jobs but I was lucky that my former student’s summer plans had fallen through and was available and willing to work with me.

Soon after driving to Connecticut and moving in I met the rest of the staff and began work on the summer season.

I  had only two full time shop staff workers but the were both excellent and worked very hard.

They would make a little extra money serving as the run crew for some of the productions.

I will talk about them in more detail and what happened to them in a future Blog post.

Dean Adams, the producer of the festival and director of one of the plays, was a teacher at the host school and had run the festival for several seasons.

An interesting and talented man, he was originally from Seattle and went to high school with Bill Gates.

Dean’s sister-in-law was his assistant and kept the budget in line among other duties.

Like most theatres it seemed that everyone had duties beyond their job description with the goal of putting on a good production.

The scene designer, Ellen Waggett,  was a talented young woman just out of college who had been a student at the Westminster School some years before.

Ellen went on to work in NYC and continues to have an excellent career in  Theatre and Television and has designed for both the Tonight Show and Late Night with Seth Meyers.

Summer Theatre has little extra time and I had to start right away on the first two music events and the first play.

I worked with my staff to set up the shop, order supplies and ready the stage for the first music events by day and did set working drawings at night.

Although I had just started working a bit with CAD I drafted my working drawings by hand.

The opening Gala event was very simple with just a grand piano onstage.

Watching from the back of the house I was shocked when I saw the condition of the piano as it had many small chips in the paint, so much that it looked like it had been hit with birdshot.

Before the next event I spent my free time coloring in as many of the chips as I could with a black sharpie.

It was not a proper fix but it looked a hundred times better the next time it was onstage.

There were a few local recent graduates of the school that worked with us that summer and we would get a bonus worker later in the summer that I will talk about in future Blog posts.

Finally it was time to build the set for  Pump Boys and Dinettes.

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