Anything Goes, part II

So, the professional that I am I would never do anything stupid in the Theatre.

As I sat in the back row of the Mainstage Theatre this afternoon I remembered something really dumb I had done in the past.

I seem to remember that at some point during the summer of 1987 with the Anything Goes set on stage I got the bright idea to fire some bottle rockets at the set from the back of the auditorium.

No damage to the set or fires started.

Ah the silly things we did in our youth.

I was only 31, just a baby at the time.

 

I would never do anything like that now, BUT wait I still have some of those same bottle rockets at home.

Gee I wonder if they will still work after 25 years.

They are in my basement and every time I see them I think I should try them but never do.

Oh I better not; we got a new super fire alarm system in the Theatre.

I can assure you that I and many other people have done plenty of other stupid things in Theatres all over the world, most of it just letting off some steam after a long days work.

Maybe I will have to make a new list of all my stupid moments, wait that might be too long.

High school, some flash power and a match . . . . . Lucky to still have eyebrows.

 

Please note that I have recently added some photos to some of my older Blog posts and will add more as I find and scan them.

In my next Blog stories from the 1987-8 school year and four very different productions.

First up: Picnic.

 

 

* * *

Everything is wonderful . . .

If you have read my Blog on a regular basis you might think that everything about working in theatre is wonderful.

Well it is not.

There are times that I hate it and think I should do something else, but then I come to my senses and realize that I am lucky to have made Theatre and Teaching my career.

So what is not to like.

Well the hours can be a pain.

During the build for a show I often work a month or more without a day off.

Because of the students limited available free time to work on the productions I have to offer work call hours as much as I can, including nights and several weekends.

 

As we get closer to a production we go into the technical and dress rehearsals which mean that after a long day in the shop I have to sit in theatre for another six hours and get home after midnight.

As long as we are busy it is not too bad, but recent technical rehearsal was driving me a bit crazy.

My areas were fine, the set was done and the lighting was all set but we needed to work on the sound.

Everyone in the theatre had to sit through hours of starting a stopping every sound cue and re-setting the levels or timing.

It was something that needed to be done and I think we could have found a better way to do it, but it was not my area and did not want to butt in.

The hardest part is keeping the cast and crew focused during the painfully slow process.

We got through and the show opened and everything went fine.

Sometimes production meetings and more often faculty meetings make me want to scream.

We go over the same stuff over and over and over again.

No one ever seems to remember things from one meeting to another.

There are times even when something is in the meeting minutes that people will say: “No, that can’t be right, we didn’t agree to that . . . . “.

My favorite example is from a few years ago when we were voting on students awards at the end of the school year.

We had voted not to give out one award but because it was not written down right away we had to have another vote and that time the student was given the award.

Now I am sure that he was a good student who had done some good work but I clearly remember that he had lost the first vote.

Gee is there anything else that drives you nuts Gary?

People from outside the department or college who want to use the theatre.

They never plan early enough; want to know why they cannot use the theatre a week before our production is set to open and that the theatre does not come with a staff sitting there ready to jump to work at a moment’s notice just for them.

I try to explain how things work but they never hear what I am saying, all they want me to say yes to them.

 

Our latest show here at the college and turned out excellent and the students who helped all did a very good.

Of course next week there will be some students who did not finish their work hours and I will have to fine them work.

Fortunately there is always something to clean, sort or throw away in Theatre.

 

Sometimes if I get a bit down I read a few chapters of Robert Edmond Jones’ The Dramatic Imagination.

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

 

You can still find online, it may seem a bit pricey but it is worth it.

Quick, go online find a copy, get it and then read it and then read it again.

There will be a quiz on this . . . .

Robert Edmond Jones

 

 

 

 * * *

"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.

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.

***

 

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.

 

 

 * * *

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.

***

 

 

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.

 

***