"Anything Goes", summer of 1987

My first three summers at working on the Sumer Arts Festival at Brockport I had designed the sets for the straight plays.

The summer of 1987 was the first time I designed the set for the musical production.

I had run the lighting board for a production of Anything Goes about 15 years before with the Sayville Musical Workshop.

A much younger me working on the 1972 production

My design was typical of many other productions with a multi-story view of the cruise ship.

Anything Goes, Scene Designer 1987

I was surprised a few months later when the set for the Broadway revival with Patti LuPone opened and it was very similar to my set.

The set for the most recent revival with Sutton Foster in 2011 the main view of the ship was from the side.

Of note here, Jessica Stone, an actress who appeared in several of our summer musicals was a featured actress in the 2011 production.

The main section had three levels but the third was only for looks.

The two large staircase units were designed to pivot out of the way for the stateroom platforms that rolled in from the side.

In keeping with its Art-Deco design, the set was just black and white with silver accents.

I remember that I wanted to use blue on a small set piece but happily I stayed with my tight palette and did not use it.

My set model

The nightclub scene was fun as I designed a number of white flats that were flown in around the staircases and in front of the main section of the boat unit.

 The flat had a simple black line design and silver panels of Rosco slit drape filled in between the flats.

Like many other set pieces, we had bits and pieces of the slit drape for years after the production was over.

I was very happy with some of the design ideas and solutions that I came up with for this show.

For the Bon Voyage number I had ramps up over the orchestra pit and onto the stage and actor would run down the house aisles and up onto the ship.

We also made Art-Deco railing piece that ran across the front of the stage and were easily removed by the dancers at the end of the number as the ship set sail.

I was sad to see the last of the railings in the dumpster during the clean-up for the renovation.



Stateroom Sets

I know that down in our basement storage we still have the two main doors that I made that have round portholes in them.

Adding some gold panels we use the draped a few years later when we did 42^nd Street.

Like many pieces from the past, the last bits if it were thrown during the recent renovation.

We now have a large “Rain” curtain, similar to the Rosco slit drape that we used in The Rocky Horror show hanging in the theatre.

The Rocky Horror Show, 2012

I wonder how many years we will have this and when it may be used again.

For the nightclub scene we wanted to use classic bentwood chairs but did not have enough.

I remember looking all over trying to find some used ones but the only ones I found were too expensive.

Today a few clicks on the internet and you can have as many as you want in a few days.

Not finding what we needed I had to find a way to fix some that we had and found that I could use pieces of garden hose to fill in the backs on some of the chairs.

It worked well for the show but over time the hose pieces have drooped and have become misshapen.

Although I did not design the poster I gave to campus artist an idea that he used and the poster came out great. 

Some years later I would do even more work on all four posters for school year season.

I had some research examples and did some rough sketches that were used to create the finished posters.

Like most of the other summer musicals at Brockport I had a good crew, we worked hard but had a good time working on the show.

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Master Harold . . . and the boys

In February 1987 we did Master Harold . . . and the boys by Athol Fogard.

The play calls for only three actors but we used only one student and two outside actors from Rochester to fill out the cast.

Normally I do not like it when we have to use too many outside actors but there was no way we could have done the play with the college students we had at the time.

Colleges produce plays for many reasons and giving acting opportunities to our students has always been one of the top reasons.

On occasion we try to produce plays that we feel will challenge the audience and Master Harold . . . and the boys was one of those plays.

Set in South Africa in 1950 during the height of the Apartheid era, the story follows a seventeen year old white boy and his relationship with the two adults black men who work in his family's tea room.

The play is powerful in its depiction of institutional racism and how it destroyed the relationship of the young Master Harold and the two Black men he had known most of his life.

 

Master Harold . . and the boys

 

The simple box set for the play offered some interesting challenges for me.

The designer chose not only to use vinyl flooring on the floor but to cover the walls as well.

It was not hard to use but I made a few mistakes on how best to attached it to the flats but in the end the final set looked good.

The set called for large windows in the front of the tea room.

We never use real glass on stage when we can avoid it and there was not plexi-glass big enough to cover the openings.

I ended up using large 3-M window insulating kits; the plastic sheets you put on in the winter and use a hair dryer to shrink tight.

The script calls for it to be raining at the beginning of the play.

Making it rain onstage is not impossible to do but does have many obstacles that you need to overcome.

The water falling on the stage is not as hard as collecting the water that falls is.

With the water flowing around the stage one has to worry about the water not leaking out and also the stage has lots of electricity about and electrocuting someone is not a good idea.

We could not afford to have a real rain curtain, the collection system and pumps needed to do it right and had to come up with a simple solution.

All the designer wanted was some indication that it had been raining and some water on the widows would be enough.

So the easiest thing to do was just to use a "Hudson" sprayer, a common tool used in most theatres, to spray some water on the windows just before the play started.

The problem that we had was that the water just ran right down the plastic and was gone almost as soon as it was sprayed on.

Having drank a few cokes in my lifetime, I remembered that I has noticed that regular Coke would stick to the side of the bottles or glasses and that diet Coke would just run down quickly.

Sugar, we needed to add sugar to the water.

There just happened to be some lemonade mix onstage and I mixed up a big batch in the sprayer.

The sugary mix worked well and after several coats there were trails of sugar on the windows and the water would slowly drip down during the beginning of the play.

I do not know how many people could really see the effect but everyone was happy with it.

I was glad it February and not the middle of the summer because flies and other bugs would have been a problem.

The set had two hanging lamps but I wanted to add a third wall light. We had nothing in stock that looked right so I made my own wall sconce.

I wanted a similar shape and size as the two hanging lights and somehow I got the idea to cut a plastic colander in half and use it.

It worked and looked good.

 

Well this is Blog post number 150, I still have many more stories to share and will be posting them soon.

 

 

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Working a Musical, 1986

The musical Working , based on Studs Turkel’s book of the same name, was in the final five for selection for next year’s season of plays here at the College at Brockport but it lost out to another show.

Actually three of the final five were musicals we were considering were ones that we had done before but we chose to go with a new show that is still running in NYC.

We have not officially released the show titles for next year so I will have to wait to tell you.

Hint: Puppets
 

We did Working in December of 1986 and I thought it was very well done.

By the time I sit through the technical and dress rehearsals for most plays I have seen them more than enough, but there are a few shows I like to see every performance if I can.

Our production of Working was one that I watched it several times from the theatre and also the control booth.

The show had a cast of 15 and I think I am still in contact with about half of them as well as some of the crew through Facebook.

Working, 1986

 

The set was simple, an eight foot high scaffold type platform with staircases up each end.

The 2x4 wood legs were covered with carpet tubes and painted to look like metal pipes.

One of the tubes was used as a smoke stack on the upstage side of the platform.

We had our fog machine attached to it and puffed out smoke several times during the play and because it leaked there was always just a little smoke drifting out of the pipe.
 

Instead of standard acting cubes we used wire milk crates, “borrowed from the local Wegmans”, for the actors to sit on.

I made Lazy Susan pieces that fit on the top of some of the crates and three actresses used them to spin back and forth during their section of the play.

 

Back in 1986 we did not have motion lights so I used a color wheel without any color but with added tape crisscrossing the openings for a special effect.

I used this effect to suggest truck headlights in the Brother Trucker number.

I would use the same effect 15 years later for the play Guppies part of the Festival of Ten, II.

For that play I used the effect to simulate air bubbles in water.

Today I would use one of our motion lights or gobo spinners to do the effect.

 

The next play up that season was Master Harold and the Boys in February of 1987.

More on that play coming up next.

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Festival of Ten, VIII

So, I always plan to write more than I can.
So what is the latest delay?
Why the newest edition of our Festival of Ten, Number 8.
The plays open tommorow.
This is a good batch, something I have not always thought of the plays selected for our first 7 Festivals.

Here are a few photos from the final dress rehearsal:

Act I
 

Act II

We got a nice preview in City newspaper.

http://www.rochestercitynewspaper.com/rochester/theater-festival-of-ten/Content?oid=2193874






***

Crimes of the Heart, 1986

I the fall of 1986 we produced Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley for the first time.

We would do it again 13 years later and currently it is one of about 40 plays suggested for next year’s season.

Harlequins, the student Theatre group has also done the play at least once, maybe twice, but I am not sure.

A few special memories from that show that stand out in my mind.

 

The funniest moment of the show happened one night when one of the actresses was alone on the set and a chair broke apart when she sat down on it.

When the actor playing Doc came in he just ad-libed “ I see you broke a chair”.

He picked up all the pieces, carried them off stage and brought back another chair and went on with the scene like nothing was wrong.

Many people in the audience thought it was a normal part of the play and thought nothing was wrong, but of course everyone backstage was dying, mostly laughing.

 

That year I had a student who stayed only half a year because he had won a scholarship that only paid for the one semester.

“Pete” was a good student and worked very hard on the play.

He was very helpful in building the counters and upper cabinets used in the set.

Soon after he left Brockport he got a job with Nic and the Nice Guys, a local party band based in Rochester.

http://www.nikentertainment.com/

During the time he worked with them they took him to the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics in Canada.

I kept in touch with him as he moved on to working for a scenic studio in the Albany area and then he went back to school.

He stopped by Theatre while doing a college internship in the Rochester area, but I lost track of him soon after that.

Of course the Theatre World is small and several years ago when I was calling a Theatre Supply company I was transferred to his phone.

I would see him at a USITT conference the next year.

Just last week when I was on the phone with the same company I was told that “Pete” was still working with them.

 

A few years ago I the son of the actor who played Doc took my stagecraft class and he was my first second generation student.

I did have a student whose father had been a student at Brockport but that was before I my time.

We are still working on putting together next season’s plays and I will let my readers know if we do Crimes of the Heart again.

 

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1986-87 Season

So I had most of my latest Blog entry written and of course my laptop died.

I was going to write about the first play of the 1986-7 season at Brockport, Crimes of the Heart, but now I will have to rewrite it.

 

I do not need any more excuses not to keep up with my Blog between work, the holidays, bad weather (it is 6 degrees outside as I write this) and just goofing off.

 

 

I have all of the programs from that year which that helps me to remember who was in it and sparks some lost memories when I reread them after twenty-five years.

 

 

School starts again on Monday and work on our next production will soon be underway, but I have a few good stories from the plays of 1986-7 and will share them with you soon.

 

 

Stay warm.

 

 

 

Stop by; They'll have a Job for you

When I started at Brockport I was not sure of my long term plans.

I thought I would give it three years and be out and on to something new before I was 30 years old.

Well here I was about to start my fifth year at Brockport and I had turned 30 in January of 1986.

I was pleased that the students gave me a surprise party and a homemade birthday cake.

I still have the birthday card they gave me signed by most of the students and staff of the department.

So the 1986-87 school was just ahead and that season we did the following plays: Crimes of the Heart,  Working,  Master Harold. . . and the boys and  The Dining Room.

For two years in a row we had planned to do an original, up-dated version of Lysistrata, and both years we had to replace the play because the script was not ready.

I still have the season fliers from 1986-87 and 1987-88 that list Lysistrata.

We never did that production but did do a staged reading of the play some 15 years or so later and part of a national anti-war protest when many theatres across the country did readings of the play.

I few years ago the students staged a production of the play.

I did not like the version of the script that they had chosen, but they all worked hard on the show and had a good time doing it.

During those mid 1980’s we also had an active arts for children program that did a touring production each year that would go out to local public schools with a play that the students created with their teacher.

The cast of about ten students would write the script, design and build the set and costumes and run the whole production and I would help the students to build the sets.

The whole production had to fit into the back of the big van they drove to each school.

I was always impressed with how hard the students worked and the seriousness in which they took the show even though it was a children’s theatre production.

They would always do one performance of the show at the college so everyone could see what they had done.

 

Years before I had work on children’s theatre productions where they were just thrown together with little care except for the fact that a quick profit could be made. 

It was nice to see how it could be done right.

Because I was both the Technical Director and the Lighting Designer the powers-that-be saw fit to find money that I might hire a part-time adult technical assistant.

I have always had work study student assistants, many of whom have been great, but there is something having another person with training to count on while supervising the students building the set.

We were not sure who would get the job but we would start looking around.

At this same time a man about my same age was getting ready to return to college after working for a number of years.

He had been a Tech Theatre major in college and had done some work for the then WWF, World Wrestling Federation.

As Jerome is getting to come to school his mother keeps telling to stop by the Theatre Department and see if they had a job for him.

He kept telling her that it did not work that way but would stop by when he could.

Soon after school began in the fall Jerome stopped by my office, told me about his prior work experience and that he was looking for work.

To his shock I hired him on the spot.

I am sure it must have hard when he went home and told his mother that he got the job.

“I told you so.”

Jerome was a good worker, helped me build the sets, hang and focus the lights and supervise the students and he stayed for two years.

It was also nice to have another knowledgeable “Adult” to bounce design and construction ideas off of.

It was a good year and I will have stories about each of the plays, some of which are funny and some are even true.

 

 

 

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