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There's a playwriting thread, but that's all I've seen. I always thought a theatre thread was amiss at SA. Right now I'm a theatre minor, but I'm thinking about changing that since I really don't like the bureaucracy of Physics. I've tried my hand at carpentry, but a carpenter I was not made to be. I'm more of a lighting and design techie. I also write and want to direct eventually. Unfortunately I live in Arkansas, so I take whatever I can get (which this year was an Avenue Q tour I missed and Chaim Topol's Fiddler tour). I don't get to see alot outside of community and college theatre, but those are the productions worth seeing.
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Jun 1, 2009 02:03
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The only experience I have during the production is running crew. You have alot of downtime. Being backstage at a show is about a pretty even mix of awesome and boring (and terrifying, when two chairs legs decide to fall off when an actor sits down), but it's a bit disappointing knowing that you never actually get to see your show without looking through curtains that blur everything (our dress rehearsals are private high school shows). We don't have the best theatre at our school either. It's an old gymnasium building that the school gave us. And we only have two thirds of it, the rest is the school's museum. It's a pain with curtains - we only control one of the two air conditioner units and, without fail, the museum one is always blowing our cyc around like a loving sail. The auditorium on the other side of campus is worse. It's a proscenium stage, but it has no wings to speak of and it's a pain getting anything through the really cramped and tiny doors. When we did Penzance we were handing (rather large) set units across the threshold to another crew because we couldn't fit in alongside them. Surely there must be a techie or two on SA.
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Jun 2, 2009 21:02
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Why are the Tonys even televised? How much of CBS's market share has seen even one performance of one of the nominated productions?
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Jun 8, 2009 23:03
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Daddy Two-Coats posted:Ooh, I like the idea of a theatre thread. I'm part of an Atlanta Theatre company, mostly doing improv but I did just do a run of Jez Butterworth's Mojo this year. So yeah, if anyone wants to talk 'prov in this thing that'd be awesome. Also throwing another one out to the thread, what about graduate schools? As much as I'd like to think that my empty portfolio is Yale School of Drama material, I'm going to hedge my bets on some little school that will give me tons of money. It worked as an undergrad.
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Jun 9, 2009 05:48
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Fantasmo posted:Let's talk some more about the upcoming Spider-Man musical. Who thinks Matthew Broderick should play Peter Parker?
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Jun 10, 2009 21:37
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Does anyone have any obscure favorites? Our director's on sabbatical for the Fall semester and our TD is taking recommendations. I've already tossed The Seagull into the pot and I'm not sure about Hamlet because it's hard enough getting a consistent audience when our stuff isn't four hours long. I'm trying to dig through the annals of history to turn up some gems that are overlooked for no reason at all. Die Burgschaft looked interesting, but it doesn't seem to have ever been translated into English.
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Jul 6, 2009 01:37
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We do both. We're not very large, but we can still stage basically anything in four weeks. We did the Pirates of Penzance and Earnest last semester and South Pacific over the summer. Last Fall we did Sondheim's Assassins and Brechted the hell out of it (and the school administrators almost cancelled it because of a gunshot). It was before my time, but we did the Scottish play some years ago. The high school shows were apparently awful for that, there were kids trying to throw coins into the witches' cauldron.
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Jul 7, 2009 23:54
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There's been nothing here in a while. I'm Assistant Stage Manager and Light crew for Alice in Wonderland, Andre Gregory's version (with, thank God, a guest director). I'm going full Jew Stage Manager for our musical and one-acts next semester.
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Sep 11, 2009 06:20
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My Fall production ended up being Alice in Wonderland. Andre Gregory's Alice in Wonderland. It was pretty god drat incredible, especially since Andre Gregory is responsible for my being there in the first place. God, I need to finish The Little Prince. Next semester we're doing Shakespeare, the Music department got kicked out of our budget and they're doing A Little Night Music by themselves (I'll probably stage manage that, though), and then one-acts (I'm writing at least one of them, possibly two). Since one-acts is probably going to be split into two shows, that's four shows I get to stage manage, and train two ASMs, too. That's probably all I'm ever going to stage manage here before I move on to Lighting. I really want to do Pacific Overtures and I really want to do Hamlet and I really want to do a Chekhov. Since our school has three categories of show (play, musical, and Shakespeare), this is what I'm lobbying for until I graduate. I think I've got a shot at it, since I have five more semesters here. Since Pacific Overtures is so minimalist anyway, it'd probably work better as a concert piece than fully staged play. There simply aren't non-singing roles and the book just carries the viewer from song to song. It's not like you can't put casters on a tree and roll it out onto a stage for that one song.
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Nov 6, 2009 01:50
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Four more performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream and it's over. It's my first time as a stage manager (I've ASMed before) and it's been a long god drat show. We had to take a break after our first week for SETC, so I got back from Lexington and then hey it's time for a speedthrough, really early 7am call school matinees, and loving photo call. This show's given me C's in all my classes, but I'll have one hell of a cued script for the next SETC job fair.
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Mar 11, 2010 05:08
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Speaking of Into the Woods, has the pumpkin carraige ever been staged? Like, ever? I can't imagine a TD in his or her right mind who would waste time and money on such an elaborate set unit that gets two seconds of stage time. And I think it was you who turned me onto Pacific Overtures, Magic Hate Ball. I watched the recording on Youtube and it's now my favorite Sondheim show. Thanks. On a more egotistical front, I get to do sound design for our Children's Theatre production (The King of Ireland's Son). What I have in mind right now is working in Whiskey in a Jar wherever I can, into a completely ambient soundtrack. We used to have a Wildlife Biologist grad student hang out with us and he'd play that all the time. We're getting a ten-channel soundboard next semester and I'm hoping to get my own laptop and MIDI controller this summer to run it on. I already have Ableton Live and I've been playing with it some and I want to get our flute player to record the melody of some Irish folk tunes. I'm so excited about this show.
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May 31, 2010 20:41
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What area you work in, Hate Ball?
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Jun 1, 2010 21:01
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I don't like using cardboard. It has its uses, but I can usually find something that works better and doesn't require as much work. Cardboard warps like a motherfucker the second it touches paint or Kilz and you can always see it. For a wagon like the pumpkin, I don't see it working. You could probably do the facade thing with a flat on wheels with a fixed jack for support, but really it'd just be a waste of lumber and lauan. I wish Sondheim, and music theatre composers altogether, would vary ranges more than they do. I have a friend who pretty much can't get a leading role for another twenty years because the only leads in her range require a woman at least in her forties.
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Jun 2, 2010 03:30
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My big problem with grad school is that I have to choose between Writing, Designing, and Directing. gently caress that, it's two years away.
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Jun 15, 2010 10:39
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El Tortuga posted:What's the director scene in this thread like? I was surprised that so few people were really accustomed to things I just thought that I should naturally do, like be there to cue actor entrances, check on people going onstage to see if they have their props, see where people are and how things are going. Just things that I naturally thought a manager should be doing. I did, however, go into it thinking that the job was all record-keeping and pre-production work. As soon as Midsummer opened, however, I knew just how wrong I was. You make or break an SM by the performances and how quick they are to react when something goes wrong.
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Jun 15, 2010 17:59
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Just out of curiosity, how long did your one acts last? We just did ours last semester and the scheduling was all over the place. We ended up doing three nights of all nine directors, it ran three to three and a half hours with one intermission.
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Jun 19, 2010 19:20
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Geschi posted:My theater group is going to be doing The Government Inspector this fall...and I get to costume it. Should be interesting at least. El Tortuga posted:On the subject of OAP's, my college has a one-act festival every year. I don't know how many people here are from Texas, but it was ran as closely to an actual UIL one-act festival as possible. The plays couldn't have been any longer than 40 minutes or the lights go out and the curtain closes, no matter where you are in the show. I mean, there was a bit of a grace period, but if you still had 5 pages left to go, you were getting the lights turned off on you. I think the Shameful thread in CD has inspired me to take a shot at adapting ComFuture by Margarita Sharapova to the stage. It's a Russian road story where circus performers get lost and have to hop from train to train to try and reach the circus train. Wolfgang Pauli fucked around with this message at 23:28 on Jun 27, 2010 |
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Jun 22, 2010 12:14
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Named Ashamed posted:Anybody know some good 10 min plays? I'm going to organize a 10 min fest at my college next semester (hopefully). I was in Arabian Nights last spring, and we also did Soap Opera, Dr. Fritz, Mystery at Twicknam Vicarage, the one with the couple roleplaying and the guy's friend shows up, and probably another one I forgot.
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Aug 1, 2010 10:36
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trans fat posted:How does an actor from Georgia in his junior year of high school further his career? I have a fairly good résumé; I'm a Thespian, been in several productions with my school, including two competition pieces, and I have been in several community theatre (The Henry Players) shows as well. Does anyone have any advice for a college or a troupe or an agency of some sort? I like Columbus State, but that's sort of reaching for the stars, and I liked Armstrong Atlantic as well. Your odds are made infinitely better by being an actor-techie. I have two friends who worked at Pioneer Playhouse in Kentucky this summer and one acted in most of their productions on top of doing props and costuming and such. Actually, you should definitely go to next year's SETC since it's in Atlanta and there's plenty of high school attendance there. And even if you don't get anything, there's a guy from the New York Film Academy who runs a really small 10 minute film contest (like 12 people entered in 2009) that'll get you a free summer there. I don't know who's doing the keynote next year, but this year it was loving Judith Malina. Wolfgang Pauli fucked around with this message at 10:21 on Aug 19, 2010 |
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Aug 19, 2010 10:16
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Named Ashamed posted:Would anyone point me in the direction of some interesting graduate programs for playwriting and direction? I've heard the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Institute is good. The kind of good that means you don't even have to go to grad school. Geekboy posted:We're a community theater group of all volunteers, so theoretically the cast for every show could be completely different but it usually consists of the same core group with a few new faces and stragglers here and there.
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Aug 20, 2010 09:26
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I have no idea what I'm going to do for grad school (two years away starting Monday fuuuuck) since every theatre grad program demands that all programs be separated because only small theatre programs are intelligent and let people train in multiple disciplines and make them unemployably overqualified.
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Aug 22, 2010 08:31
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I just got the best carpenter's Christmas ever: a screw gun, a skil saw, a sawzall, an angled-head light, a solar-powered LED light (well, electrician's christmas in this case), some gloves, and a loving rad toolbelt. I also got a magnetic armband from a graduating friend for holding screws and, more importantly, safety pins. If you ever see a stage manager that isn't a carpenter or electrician or both, they're a god drat spy. (That said, I entertained the idea of Assistant Costuming this semester before I realized how many classes I was taking) Also, I get to direct next Fall. I just spent all of last semester getting really into Brecht and I'm about to finish Boal, so I have in mind a really specific idea and just need to find a play to match it. Basically, my school loving hates the theatre program and, I think, is trying to phase it out. Right now, the head of my school's liberal arts college is sitting on the decision for us to stage Ragtime next semester because of guns and ignorance. He won't turn it down, but he's going to sit on it and run down the clock until we give him something else. On top of this, we're losing our offices and classroom, so inside our found space shop that we turn into a black box for each and every god drat show we do, we're losing our light room and most of our stock storage so we can fit our classrooms inside. We're pissed. We're really pissed. From the perspective of the company, we want action. However, we're the actors and techies, not the spectators. The people watching this will be the ones with their hands around our collective throat. So I'm going to force them to be spectators, I'm taking the action out of their hands and placing it in ours -- but I want them to think. I want them to think about what they're doing to us and to feel that we have a right to exist. To that end, if I could stage Fitzcarraldo in our space, I would. But if you're not actually hauling a 320-ton steamer over a mountain then the message seems a little lost in translation. I have Threepenny Opera in my back pocket and I really want to see the bear from Ubu the King explode into confetti, but it just doesn't seem to fit that precise niche I want to stage. Is this what Piscator was talking about when he said that there weren't any proper plays for him to stage?
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Dec 26, 2010 20:18
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A by no means all inclusive list, but some things you should definitely keep in mind. *Hire a Technical Director and have, at the least, Set, Lighting, and Costume Designers before you even think of rehearsing. Even before auditions, if that's at all possible. A TD that knows how to work with a practically non-existent budget is a thing of magic. Also, your TD should know where to get cheap lumber in your town and how to recognize what Class D white pine lumber isn't too lovely to use. *The Set Designer chooses style, time period, and set colors. The director gets the final say. Then the Artistic Director steps in a week or two after the decision has been made and takes a huge poo poo on the production table. *If you don't have a reliable Stage Manager, you're not going to get anything done. Period. This is just as important as having a Director and Technical Director. (I'm available  )*You can only rough block until you get some levels and a floor plan from your Set Designer. Once you have that, you'll have to reblock it in detail (which can just be on your first runthrough since your actors will probably be pretty rusty on the earliest blocking you've done) *Your Props Master, Paint Charge, and Master Carp are not doormats. Treat them with respect because they're doing a loving ton of work for you without complaint. Props Masters are some of the biggest whipping posts in theatre and your Paint Charge is not only the person with the know-how to prevent you from spending a drat fortune on paint, but the person capable of delivering the exact colors the director agrees to on the Set Designer's front elevations. *Your entire techie crew - save maybe your costumers since they have enough poo poo on their plate - should expect to double as either carpenters, electricians, or painters. Carpenters should own at least a screw gun, everything else should be provided by your TD. I've been trained in or have done just about every job there is to do on a show. If you have any questions then shoot. Wolfgang Pauli fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Dec 29, 2010 |
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Dec 29, 2010 08:27
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Named Ashamed posted:Is anyone here experienced with producing Fringe Festival Shows? 1. Do you have a Technical Director? 2. Will you have any stock to pull from? Touring sets usually build light plots out of the performance space's on-hand inventory based on an adaptable plot created by the lighting designer. *edit* Do you have a company that's working on this? What exactly do you get out of applying to Fringe? I mean, is it just some festival you bring your touring set to and perform? Estimations really aren't too hard, you just need to have an idea of what you're looking at and know your local pricing options. Wolfgang Pauli fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Dec 30, 2010 |
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Dec 30, 2010 05:24
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Well, you're definitely going to need a director. Three months is a huge amount of time to put a show together. Drag in as many professors and fellow techies as you can. As far as pricing a build goes, it only really comes down to how many flats and platforms you need and how much it costs to build one in your town. Your professors will almost certainly encourage any kind of independent work their students are trying to produce (unless they're assholes who want things done their way) Like I told Golden Bee, getting a production team (Director, SM, TD, designers, and Publicity) together would probably be step one to producing one of your own plays. Pricing everything out is going to depend on what you want to do. Keep in mind that most of the people doing this won't be producing new work, they'll be staging a pre-existing play. Something to look at as Production Manager is to count the seats, look at ticket prices, and figure out what kind of revenue you're looking at here. If you're a playwright, you should be on The Loop and start sending stuff out to everything you can.
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Dec 30, 2010 09:09
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Actually, that's one thing I have no experience with. Our space doesn't have a fly system.
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Dec 31, 2010 05:03
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We have a found space that we turned into a black box. It's a really old gymnasium that's part of a building we share with the school's Museum. Everything is in there, shop, light and paint rooms, costuming - and now that we've lost our class and office space, it's the only remaining classroom we have. We don't even have a lighting grid, we have trusses 18 feet up that we lay gas pipes across. We have a cherrypicker that looks like a siege tower to get up there. We experiment with pulleys in lieu of a fly system from time to time. Having something descend from the trusses is something that always winds up in One Acts. I had a build a puppet for a Giant in the children's show we just did. The leg was eight feet tall and a rod puppet that two people carried while another operator was on a rope pulley arm that ended up being 10 1/2 feet long. It was holding this pin that it stabbed poo poo with, so one slip and it would fly down and impale one of us in the face. We don't have too too much wing space, so any set changes will usually be something flipped around that's on casters or sliders. Every now and then we'll have some big impressive set piece that we have to haul on. For the children's show we had two masters of the universe (two Hollywoods screwed together to make an 8'x8' flat) close together and we used that cover to bring a twelve foot tower onstage (theoretically at least, between the tower and the squeaky casters on another flat we spun around, it sounded like we were constructing the thing then and there). All in all, I'm glad that I have this kind of make-do-with-what-you-have experience - or I would be if the school would stop taking poo poo away from us and unfairly censoring us. And our space is much better than the school's auditorium. It has a few acoustic dead spots (center-center stage will be silent from center-center house) and the center line for stage and house is off by like a foot and a half. We're not allowed to touch the sound board and the lighting grid can't be lowered without a key that our techie professor has (and a light call with her is not a very fun light call. I love her, but she's gone off the deep end this last semester)
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Jan 2, 2011 01:55
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Golden Bee posted:It kind of feels like cheating. So I just talked to one of my professors yesterday and got some pretty lovely news. During the Fall semester, the instrumental music majors - including the orchestra for musicals - are completely beholden to the football team. This means that we can't ever have musicals during the Fall, so I can't do Threepenny Opera. That blooows. Not only that, but the new department head wants to know the theatre program's plans a year in advance, so I have to decide on my play today. I'm thinking of Red by John Logan. It addresses alot of the artistic ideas I want to present and DPS is licensing the manuscript. Unfortunately, I've only read about it and seen some footage, I haven't read the drat thing yet.
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Jan 6, 2011 13:58
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OSheaman posted:Red was on Broadway last April and DPS is already licensing it? Crazy. Pious Pete posted:I'm more or less trying to get a feel for the "black comedy" genre and why its effective. The use having an audience experience both laughter and discomfort in the same sitting. I'm also particularly interested in the use of gruesome images on the stage, especially in comedies. I'm just running off recommendations/summaries at this point though, as I won't be reading them until the course starts in the spring, so any opinions on the current selections or recommendations would be appreciated. Wolfgang Pauli fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Jan 6, 2011 |
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Jan 6, 2011 19:56
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Does Chicago have any grad schools that are interdisciplinary? I'm looking for an MFA program, but I don't want to have to choose between directing and writing and technical work.
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Jan 7, 2011 18:06
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Sammy French left us high and dry and never got back to us, so we're not doing Chicago. Now we're just doing our student directed full-length that, god bless her, I just can't get behind. The whole thing seems like an adolescent take on an Orwellian dystopia, complete with commentary on aged modernist analytic philosophy. The two main characters are adolescents in a world of faceless, mask-wearing adults and the whole time I kept thinking this feels a whole lot like The Giver. My hopes and aspirations for this semester are going downhill fast. At least my professor's going to get back to me about Red.
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Jan 25, 2011 03:49
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Theatre by the Sea requires musical experience of their stage managers  My school sucks.
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Feb 2, 2011 06:30
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Geekboy posted:The problem is that so many monologues are so masturbatory. My eyes just glaze over and I hear Jon Lovitz yelling "AAAC-TING!" when I see/hear them. They have a lot of power when done right and are a perfect encapsulation of everything that's wrong with pretentious script writing when they're not.
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Feb 8, 2011 15:18
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Golden Bee posted:Sorry, I didn't know what you meant as an actor.
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Feb 12, 2011 10:50
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The Trojan Women is always a good standby when you've got a bunch of women and don't mind losing your job.
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Feb 14, 2011 01:25
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I've come back to the theatre thread for my periodic check-in. I graduate next Fall and by this point I won't have any more theatre classes. My last scene in my Directing class was from The Lieutenant of Inishmore. It was that scene from the Lieutenant of Inishmore. I blew a paper-mache cat the gently caress up. We had a compressed air rig that would shoot a load of blood and frozen jello gore from a cup we sunk into the model's neck. Then we put a model head on top of it with a loose skull-plate that would fall off and spill blood when the charge shot it off. Cost a hundred bucks and was loving magnificent. Even better, it's god drat reusable. I ended up winning Best Director in the class for my previous scene, though, which was Red. Never got my show for the Fall, which was going back and forth between Threepenny Opera and Red, but I'm assistant directing Candide. Really I'm going to be spending most of the summer and fall semesters writing plays and getting a grad school paper ready to send off to America's various and sundry PhD programs. I have decent chances with Northwestern (and I think my professor has my term papers floating around there...), but I'm still trying to land Columbia. OSheaman posted:Honestly? I would love to do some more physical work . . . maybe physical comedy, like Commedia or clowning. Or maybe Beckett? I dunno, just something different. Black comedy and savage comedy are tech-heavy out-of-nowhere delights. The Lieutenant of Inishmore requires an average of five gallons of blood per performance and Ubu the King, besides the several mass battles and massacres in the play, has a bear get shot and explode. *edit* Coffee And Pie posted:So, I just ended my first play recently, and I enjoyed it enormously. Unfortunately, since I'm still looking for a job, and I'm a student as well, free time and experience are not things that I have, so it's not like I can just do another play. What do you guys do to cure your post-show blues? *more poo poo to tack on* FizFashizzle posted:Walked off trying not to laugh. Last time I did SETC, when I was still in college, I received 47 callback. This time I received not a god drat one. I have completely forgotten how to do theater auditions like that. Wolfgang Pauli fucked around with this message at 13:55 on May 19, 2011 |
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May 19, 2011 13:27
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My writing is still really experimental. I'm really well versed dramaturgically so I'm playing around with a broad range of ideas and trying to incorporate that into actual stagework. My whole theatrical perspective is to cover every perspective and the full spectrum of theatre history and dramaturgy, and to use whatever will work for any given purpose. Kinda like Jeet Kune Do or the pastiche aspect of postmodern literature, and tempered with the preparedness and flexibility that I got from stage management. Alot of my playwriting I don't really mean to shop around and I don't think I have any single work that's ready for public consumption, but my essays and stuff can probably hold water. Once I get back into town in a week or two I'll dig through my student drive and see what I can post.
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May 22, 2011 21:39
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This was a theatre history test of mine, I had to trace Chekhov realism and naturalism back from Neoclassical theatre. I passed out after the first paragraph. I woke up two hours before it was due and had to finish it while fighting off that panic attack, but I think it's my most shoppable paper. I think it could stand some revising if I want to use it as a sample. For my Children's Theatre final we had to blend together the techniques we were taught to teach some randomly assigned theme to everyone else in the class. I got religious tolerance, so I used a forum theatrey drum and rhythm thing. I wrote this for it, but it was mainly a cheat-sheet to lead the rest of the class through. People enjoyed it and some got something from it, but I had some trouble reigning in people towards the end. I learned alot about applying Boal to an audience, so it worked as an experiment. I also understand why hippies like drum circles now, that poo poo is magical.
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May 26, 2011 22:30
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Golden Bee posted:Show me the stuff, because "I use everything" is kind of the default perspective. Unless you're a "True Believer" in one theory or another, most people use what seems right for the case. I'm mainly toying with the ideas of postmodern subjectivity and overlaid functions of language, and the idea of imperfect information and uncertainty and reinterpretation. I've been reading Black Swan lately, and I don't think I could have found a more perfect book to take me down this line of thought. And that, combined with Candide this Fall, will hopefully give me a stronger foundation when approaching the idea of breaks in causality and random events. The free will/determinism argument of the absurdists didn't really do it for me, either. It wasn't encompassing enough. I need to stop talking about it and start collecting more citations and writing  Time to start digging through Esslin and Taleb, and until I have a play out of this it's all non-experimental hooey.
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Jun 15, 2011 16:14
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Why the hell is that dowser over $200? DMX does insane things to price point. You can do the same drat thing with a piece of black cloth and a string.
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Jun 22, 2011 07:28
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