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.

 

***

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.

 

 

 

***

Mauritius

Back in August I wrote about an upcoming play, Mauritius by Theresa Rebeck, and that I was going to be working on and that I was going to be the Philatelic Advisor.

For a play about stamps it offered a number of unusual challenges.

Stamp collecting is not a young person’s hobby and I was not surprised that few of those working I play had any knowledge about stamps.

I met with both the actors and design team to educate then a bit about the stamps mentioned in the play, the world of stamp collecting and what a stamp shop might look like.

When I joined my local stamp club back in 1989 I was the youngest member and now over twenty years later I still am.

 

The director did a good job researching the stamps that “Star” in the play and gave that information to the actors, but I wanted to give the actors a bit more.

I wanted those who were suppose to be stamp experts look like they knew what they were doing.

I spent time with the actors giving them a basic history of the stamps in the play and showing them examples of them.

 I also introduced them to the basics of stamp collecting and worked one-on-one with the actor who played the stamp dealer to give him a little more instruction on how to handle stamps.

 

The scene designer did a good job designing a stamp shop and I provided many of the stamps and related material used to dress the set.

In addition the stamp shop there was a house set that sat side-by-side to the stamp shop on the stage.

The house set extended over to the side stage area and the designer fit the box door openings into the design.

 

My students worked hard and did a good job building the two large and detailed sets.

Perhaps my biggest surprise on this production was just how smoothly everything went.

I planned out the work schedule and it went well, we were finished on time and I even got to go out for dinner on opening night; a feat that I rarely get to do.

There were a few mess ups, some the students fault, some mine, but nothing too bad.

When we were painting the walls I found out that we forgot to build one flat and another was the wrong size, but it did not take too long to fix things and get things back on schedule.

The success that I have on each production is a result of the mixture of the number of students that I have, their skill level and most importantly their attitude.

If the students do not want to work on the play there is very little I can do.

I have found that it is best if I am honest with the students, I let them know what we are doing and why and try to mix up the fun work with the shit work.

There is always a need to clean up the shop, stage and/or the storage areas and moving heavy things from here to there.

If we need to move curtains and mop the floor for a music concert and then move the curtains back the next day to get ready for the next event I just let them know it has to be done and not make it seem I am punishing them.

I always give the students as much credit as I can for it is really them who build most of the sets.

Unlike when I worked on my first plays at Brockport when I did much of the work myself, I quickly learned that the students need to do it even if I could do it faster.

Once the students develop an ownership of a project they work better and harder.

The best example of that is when we do any metal work.

When we did A Midsummer’s Night Dream a few years ago I had a team of students who worked many extra hours outside of the regular shop hours on welding the frames needed for the show.

To get the students excited about the special projects is not too hard to do; the real trick is to get them excited about the importance of the regular work.

 

A group of eight people came from my stamp club to see the play and I gave them a tour of the stage after the show was over.

They were kind and said that they enjoyed the play; even though they found the language a bit rough and were a bit shocked by the fight scenes.

Although the play had very rare stamps as part of the plot, it was really greed and the money that the stamps could bring that drove the action of the play.

Mauritius "Post Office" Stamps
 

 

When I started my Blog I thought I was going to re-tell my life from the earliest plays to the newest, but as I have done several times already, stories of my current work just seem to come up and I want to share them with you.

I want my readers to know what is keeping my busy when there is a gap in my Blog postings.

West Side Story

In the summer of 1986 we did only one play instead of the two shows we had done my first three years at Brockport.

Our musical that year was West Side Story.

I had worked on the same show ten years before at Gateway Playhouse but I was eager to work on it again as I like the story and enjoy the music.

Although we did only one play we also had performance of Garth Fagan’s Dance Company that summer after the musical was over.

I had a good group of student workers and the set offered some interesting challenges.

 

Chain Link Fences.

Putting up a chain link fence is not too hard once you learn the basics, but when you cannot dig a hole and support the posts with concert that you need to come up with other solutions.

We welded up some diagonal supports with flanges that we could bolt to the floor.

Like many other good set pieces I have talked about in this Blog I still have some of them and use them from time to time.

Upstage of the main chain link fence was a structure that represented a bridge with fake “I” beams and steel girders in force perspective to make them look taller than they really were.

 

They were hard to put up but looked good once they were in.

There were small rolling platforms for the Dress Shop, Maria’s bedroom and Doc’s Soda Shop.

I large flying wall came in to cover the fence for the dance at the Gym.

In place of the main curtain there was also a flying fence section that played at three different heights depending on the scene.

For the big rumble scene the front fence was all the way to the ground and the audience had to look through it.

 

The fire escape platform and Maria’s window unit was built into the stage right box closest.

I do believe that I still have some part of that set unit but I know some of it was modified for other productions.

I am sure that there must have been some other set pieces but I do not remember them.

Many in the cast were Theatre or Dance students from Brockport but a few others were mixed in.

A young 16 year old kid from Buffalo was in the show, Jesse L Martin.

He went on to star in Rent on Broadway and then spent ten years on TV’s Law and Order.

More about him can be found at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0552509/

Other members of the cast also went on to work in “Professional” world; Jesse had the biggest success, so far.

After the play was over and while working on the dance concert I somehow found the time to buy a new car.

It was my first really new car, a black 1986 Ford Escort GT.

I liked it, it got 40 miles to the gallon on the highway and I had it until 1993 when I traded it in for a new white1993 Ford Escort GT.

Although the Escorts were small they had more room to move things for work than my 1977 Camaro.

 

 

A Little Night Music

Our last show of the season was the musical A Little Night Music with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by Hugh Wheeler.

It’s a nice show with great music and I think we did a very nice job with it.

Complaints?

I always have a few issues with how things are run and with this my major problem was that all four of the major leads were not students but either faculty or outside professionals.

I always feel that as a college we are here for the students to learn and I like to see them do as much as possible.

I do not think that there is anything wrong with a guest artist or two, but when all of the leads are non-students I wonder if we chose the right play to do.

 

The students did fill out all of the secondary roles and I had a student Technical Director.

But with that said we did not have any students who could have done the parts and the production came off very well.

A Little Night Music

 

 

The set was fun, mostly black and, well not white but more black and a touch of silver and lots of plastic.

The flats and false proscenium were covered with clear plastic and covered with cutout ply in a leaf and vine Art Nouveau style.

There were not too many special things to make for this play but I did make a small fake upright piano that was used over and over many times after the play.

The orchestra was designed to be upstage of the main set behind, yes even more sheets of plastic.

This was a year after The Fantasticks another set that was mostly plastic sheets.

 

This was the first time we ever tried to use video cameras and TV monitors to run the image of the conductor from upstage so the actors could see him and get their cues.

We hide a small monitor in what looked like an old fashioned prompter’s box downstage center.

Each act started with a tableau with the actors behind a black scrim posed in a way to reflect what was going to happen next.

It was not all easy and I know we had a few problems but we got through it and the audience enjoyed the show.

 

So this was the end of my forth year at Brockport and first as both the Technical Director and Lighting Designer.

It was a bit crazy but I got through it and in the following years some seasons would be easy and others a bitch.

The challenges, problems and even the aggravations are what make working in Theatre so much fun.

* * *