Be Skeptical

It has now been a full year since I've received my MFA. I went to the showcase for the class of 2017 last week.
Although he has a hard time getting around these days our dear professor Ming Cho Lee actually showed up to see the work. He uses a walker, stairs are difficult, but he still loves talking about theatre.  At the end of the day, we gathered to toast the graduates and Ming was coerced into giving a toast which he began “I have some concerns…”  Classic Ming. His concerns were mostly that everyone thinks too much and feels too little ; “Stop being so goddamned pragmatic and start finding the romanticism in these stories”.  He also touched on our current political situation. A man who escaped Communist China and lived through the Great Depression and WWII has perspective on this trend of nationalism and choosing sides. On that topic he told us to be wary of concepts, to not easily align ourselves with any one idea. He said “be skeptical, have a sense of irony”.  I miss that man. Some people aren’t patient enough to hear what he’s saying but I am ever grateful that I got to study with him.  

Victory! (part 3 of 3)

Plastic pour #2... neater... actually started to solidify when it was supposed to...

Primer.

Black detail. (a little gaudy at this phase but hold on, it's just a step in the process)

Oooh... more gold... (I'm not going to even get into how much of a fight it was to mount this thing onto a belt)

Bumps in the road to Gold glory (part 2 of 3)

 The foam mold portion of this process went well.  Perfect on the first try... but then the liquid plastic portion of this adventure kicked me down a peg from my feelings of success.
The plastic filled and overfilled the mold until I was left battling an ever expanding amount of sticky plastic goo that thankfully had a plastic container collecting the excess rather than the kitchen table.

 Eventually I discovered that positioning pencils under the mold would keep the flow inside.

 The plastic was supposed to dry in about 15 minutes but the next day I was still left with soft and sticky shapes that began to bubble and expand like cancer had taken a turn for the worse.

This is when you try again.

We are the Champions... (part 1 of 3)

Working with Roma Plastilina for the first time in over a decade. The good news is that now they make a non-sulfur version (because the stuff I used in high school smelled to all high hell)

Today I made this large buckle, tomorrow I make the small side buckles, a mold for it and then from that a positive out of plastic.

...and then I paint it and mount it onto a belt... yes, this stuff is not exactly easy but it is enjoyable. Pray that the foam mold and plastic steps go well since I haven't done that before... but we follow directions and with a little luck it will all work out. More updates to come.

Say What?

"It's kind of amateur, but I think that's Okay!"
 --Overheard at a Bad show, seen recently. 

Yes indeed 'amateur', I think this show was written by the same creative genius who adapted the Pinocchio I performed in summer camp at age 7.  Did I think it was 'Okay'? ... let's just say I will have to go through life not knowing the conclusion of this masterwork.  I will just have to imagine they ended with a gripping rendition of the song I recall singing in an inflatable swimming hoop...

...By the sea, by the sea, looking out to sea

I see sea, you see sea, sea is what we see...

Daily Minutes...

12am; load car for following day of fittings, trunk full, arrange blanket covering costumes in back seat to look more like a sleeping (or dead) body than costumes (hope that nobody breaks into car to hassle the corpse).
1:30ish; sleep?

6:02am; wake sharply with the feeling of having slept in and missed all appointments
6:11; convince self to go back to sleep
8:06; wake up again... decide that it's close enough to 7 hours of sleep to get up.
8:40; oatmeal
10:11; crap! I woke up two hours early and I'm already 15 min behind...

10:35; arrive at rental shop (located next to the methadone clinic) to find that nobody is answering the door.
10:40; make friends with locals
10:48; get into the rental shop
12:15pm; leave rental shop with a new 50lbs of costumes, haul it all back to the car stepping over puddles of unknown origins

12:30; arrive at Shakespeare offices...
1:55; haul another 40lbs of costumes to car
2:15; chicken wrap lunch

2:55; arrive at rehearsal hall and try to pull costumes from the bottom of the pile out into the top
3:30; still sorting fittings on the sidewalk
4:00; haul all costumes up to rehearsal hall in three batches
4:35; finished hauling
4:36; get asked if I "need any help"

5:30-7:50 fittings...
7:55; realize I've left a good 15lbs of costumes I was supposed to fit today in my f***g studio (rearrange fittings for later)
8:02; meeting with director
8:35; hurredly gather everything back into piles and have stage management and director help shove everything into car

9:15; left over pasta and a tangerine (wait for theatre crowd to leave the street my shop is on)

10:17; meet my lovely friend Alisha who helped me reload ALL of the costumes back into the shop

10:45; re-sort costumes for returns and re-load car for following day

10:55; return home.

12:33am; decide to blog because sleep isn't coming any time soon...
Wired.
Can't sleep.


**exact times are mostly guess work with the exception of 1st wake up time and blog time.

Surfacing/Opening

This month I've opened three shows, I've got two to strike tomorrow... I've got a corporate design job pending... Today is the first day I can even think about being human again... laundry, CLEANING, blogging, seeing friends... oof! If you're still checking this or my other blogs I've been taking photos but have lacked the time to load or think about them. Blogging to slowly resume ( I promise)

The photo is from the show I opened tonight! Comedy of Errors at SF Shakes. ok, still exhausted, I think I had better go to bed instead of mucking about on the internet.

Check back in a day or two :)

I forgot my good camera!

In my haste I left my film camera in Berkeley... leaving me to take pictures of Troilus and Cressida with my digital. The digital camera, she screams at me "I cannot do this." "There is not enough light!" "I hate you!" and so on... Thus I have about five photos I think I can use in the actual portfolio. It's kinda crappy but it's better than nothing... anyway here are a few interesting shots (quality aside)

Sitting on Thumbs...

The past two days we have been waiting for the Sweeney Todd costumes to be ready for us. Unfortunately the costumes arrived late and are still at the warehouse being checked in. The designer (Marcy), the cutter (Nancy) and I have done just about as much prep work as we can before laying hands on the actual clothes... We watched the movie, we toured the set, we did some pre-fitting alterations for the Joanna costumes (the virgin being played by a 5months pregnant actress) and then I volunteered on the remaining notes for Sound of Music... all of this waiting will most likely bite us all in the arse very soon so we're getting a bit jittery...
One cool thing is that we're getting the costumes from the iconic Angela Lansbury version of the show. So to do a plot we just watched the video (a clip is posted below)... I love the peasant rags and Sweeney, but the women all seem to be more "Olde Time" than 1856... eh oh well. Lets hope we see these costumes in person tomorrow...

Photos

Publicity photos online for Octopus... getting tired... hope to return to the world soon. This show opens on Saturday, the next begins next week.

No rest for the wicked.

Octopus Postcard

Is the water deep enough?

1st day with water, some leakage, actors sick, heading back to work very soon... no time for complete sentences... 

-TTFN

Where on Earth have I been?

Buried under a heap of costumes.

First I was the costume assistant/coordinator for Sex. A play by Mae West, quite racy for 1926. It's a terrible read, but once you see it on stage with the music numbers, the set, the costumes and the fantastic actors it all makes sense. It's all like watching a cheesy 20's movie. Hard boiled dialogue and all (or was that soft boiled... I always get them confused.) I like it.



Second was Lovers and Executioners. It's a cavalier show based on a 17th C. French play called "La Femme, juge et partie" by Montfleury. Frankly the plot is like a bad Vivaldi opera or an early Mozart opera... bad plot, holes to sink a humvee in, but if the music is good you usually forgive them. Unfortunately this isn't an opera. The whole thing is done in rhyming couplet. Yes, imagine if you will two hours of rhyming couplet along with synthetic music. I cannot comment fully in this forum but let's just say that I love the actors, they're lovely people who are doing their best and I hope the critics are kind.

Next (starting tomorrow) is The Velveteen Rabbit. The ODC dance company's Not-The-Nutcracker holiday show. I've never seen it, I've never run it but I like the people I'm working with and dancers are on the whole lovely self-sufficient people. So I'm hoping it will be a good show. Usually at this time of year I'm working on the Christmas Revels, which I've loved but sadly can't afford to work for the pittance they offer. Perhaps another year. Anyway I'm doing repairs on the rabbit head today. It is both a brilliant piece of engineering and a scary scary bunny head, so here's a video of it. Beware, it will peer into your soul with it's sparkly blue eye...



I've been so busy that Thanksgiving is really going to be great. Right now my plan involves lying around my house. Playing with the dog and watching movies... maybe with friends, maybe just DeWalt. Dinner will include prochuitto wrapped asparagus, a yam, bok choy, and cranberry sauce, maybe I'll make some gravy for the yam... it's going to be great! Day OFF!!!

P.s. If you get a chance check out "Jim's Blog" in my links. He's a talented actor who is currently playing Scrooge at the big LORT A (hot-shit regional theater for those who don't speak the lingo) in San Francisco. Worth the read.

Miracle Worker

Sometimes I am left with a task that I have no idea of what to do. Occasionally it's a fun task like "turn this muslin into tree bark" or "make it so that we can remove this 17th C ball gown in 14 seconds"... Today is not a fun problem. I am so frustrated with the boots you see above that I'm ready to just scream. If we had an extra $1000 in the budget we would have had custom made boots for the lead actress. However We do not, so we are forced to make due with what we have. What we have is an actress with extra wide feet. So basically any shoes that fit the length of her foot are painful across the toes or the arch and the shoes that are "close" are still too short and pull up in the heel when she lunges (as you do in a cavalier sword fight). So today I have been wasting the past hour trying to fanagle foam into these boots but make it so that a foot can still get into them without tearing out the padding. I'm giving up for now. Maybe I'll ask my cobbler if he has a suggestion. More likely the cobbler will ask "why can't you just get a pair in the correct size?" Why indeed. :(

Adendum; The cobbler was brilliant. He knew just the right padding to put in. It wasn't a perfect fit afterwards but it was good enough. SIGH!

Attend the tale...

of Sweeney Todd!

Tonight I saw Sweeney Todd at ACT. It was the John Doyle version that had been the 2006 revival on Broadway. It was BEAUTIFUL. I hadn't known that it wasn't an all new version and had done no research on it in advance so I was mostly curious to see if they had changed the old Eugene Lee set, which is usually essentially a big box where the barber shop is located on top and the pie shop is the lower level. The coolest effect that the box usually does is where Sweeney slices a customer's throat who then slides down a chute while the box is rotating and shoots through into the meat processing room in the back and is promptly moved into a storage unit or furnice or giant meat grinder (depending on the show). The "box" was really a very elegant solution that has been used in countless productions since the original in (1973? I think.) Here is a clip of it, you really only need to watch the beginning to get the idea... couldn't find the throat slitting scene though;


The Revival version is stunning. The whole show takes place in a room made with a slatted floor and back wall. In the center of the back wall is a shelf that reaches towards the ceiling with a piano at the base.



When the curtian rises at the top of the show, we see a room filled with Victorian-esque musicians and a man in striped pajamas and a straight jacket staring out at the house. The man is ungagged and the straight jacket is removed just in time for him to sing the first line... "Attend the tale of Sweeney Todd..." In the center of the stage is a black slatted coffin. The lid is lifted and from inside the coffin rises Sweeney Todd. Throughout the show they use the coffin as Joanna's room, Sweeney's office, the pub table, and so on and so forth.

I had initially been looking forward to seeing a bloodbath that I would not have to clean up but after seeing the very first scene I knew that it was going to be stylized. A throat being slit was made gruesome by red light and a bucket of blood being poured into another bucket, real foley sound.

I was so happy to see this show. There were no "pie" props, there was no literal blood, there were no realistic backdrops or fog. It was all in your imagination. This director actually wanted to take his audience on a journey that engaged the audience and made us meet them on the way there. I get so sick of theater that tries to be as realistic as humanly possible. It's just spoon feeding the audience and doesn't make them get involved. Film does verisimilitude pretty well, theater is a totally different medium and I am of the school that thinks we don't need to try to compete with film. I thought that the new version lacked some of the human connections that the traditional staging did very well. It wasn't as tragic when the beggar woman was killed or clear about the relationship between Mrs. Lovett and Toby (which is usually heart-wrenching). I think that it was partially a little more stilted with connections because the actors spent a lot of time facing out towards the audience rather than looking at who they were singing to. An added element to this production however was that every actor with the exception of Sweeney played an instrument. (The Sweeney in the Broadway version looks like he played acoustic guitar, but ours didn't) The casting was amazing because each performer had to play the appropriate instrument, look the part and sing the range of their character. It wasn't %100 on the money. Antony was a little tubby but had the most amazing tenor that it was fully forgiven, and the Beadle who is usually a 50ish fat guy was played by a drop dead georgious 30-something, but again between his acting and voice, all was forgiven. The judge played a muted trumpet, the lovers both played cello, Toby played violin... this was all live sound and as a former violin student it was obvious that everyone holding a stringed instrument had been TRAINED for years on their instruments, I can only assume the wind instruments were also played with expertise. I'll say it again; It was Beautiful.

Here is the clip from the Tony's of the revival production. I think it gives you a good sampler of the show. I wish I could have taken you all with me because most of you that I know read my blog would have loved it as much as I did. Sometimes it's nice to just be an audience member.

Labor Day Weekend

Well, what am I doing for labor day weekend? You're looking at it. I have three shows this weekend, which isn't so bad really. This particular moment however is a little dull. Usually there are people who hang out after the show but not this weekend. The bridge that connects the east bay to San Francisco is closed all three days so everybody is riding public transit and leaving early because of how long it takes to get home. My assistant is sick and went home earlier... so here I am waiting on laundry, alone. Sigh.

Monday; I get the whole day off! I can't wait!

What were you doing at 3am?

I was surfacing from a trance where in I sculpted this Dali mask. I got off of work at 1am, and had done about half of this work, but then spurned on by frustration and a touch of anger I was motivated to be productive and finish it all in one sitting... mind you I took on this project against my better judgement... I'm not getting paid enough to do fine craft work and I didn't run the manner of execution by the designer... I was just struck that this was a project I wanted to do because it looked like fun... basically even if it doesn't make it on stage I'll still be fine with that, but I love the result. Now we wait for it to dry and pray that it doesn't all fall apart...

Here is the original Salvador Dali photograph the mask is based on.

Here is the mask (drying and in progress)

a couple of detail shots...

Stage Blood

I made the final six blood packs for Richard the III today. No more stained fingers for me! I may even splurge and get a manicure once the pink tinge wears off a little more. We close on Sunday... and I had Way too much fun with my little digital camera and my iMovie program. I think I've almost maxed out my hard drive and will soon have to go through and purge video files... however the result of my play time was this video that I just downloaded onto YouTube... yes I'm posting during the wee hours of the morning but I'm wide awake, sigh. Anyway check out my new video.