A Child Of Atom

I didn't have the pleasure of seeing Ragtime the first time that it was on Broadway 10 years ago. I've read the reviews though, essentially everyone agrees that it was a great show, had enormous potential, but that the production was a bit lacking, and would be too big for very many theaters off Broadway to ever produce. It is sort of a white whale of a show requiring a cast of around 40, a car, several widely varied locations, a ton of period costuming... it really is a difficult show to put on with any sort of a small budget. Thankfully the Kennedy Center produced a new large scale production that was so well received that it was brought to Broadway again, a bare decade since it originally closed, which is pretty unusual. But I agree, this show is well worth it, and more than ready to come back.

The show itself is an odd animal, and sort of weirdly presentational. No one outside of the historic characters (like Booker T Washington and Harry Houdini) has a name, and instead refer to each other as "Mother" or "Father." The most off putting being "Younger Brother." It is just an awkward mouthful, especially when the character refers to himself in third person that way. Once you get past this quirk though the show is packed with drama and story. Three families interweave through a single year in their lives, 1906, and any one of the families' stories would be more than enough to pack most shows, but the deft weaving of these threes stories is where the real power of this show lies.

There are some powerful performances here. Christiane Noll as "Mother" is by far the strongest performance in the show. Her character arc cuts to the heart of everything that was happening in this era, changing attitudes on race, and on the woman's place in society, the changing role of the mother, the new attitudes about child rearing and family... it is a lot to carry, and she does it perfectly. Every line, even the third person expository toss offs, are wrung fully dry of their meaning, and it is at turns hilarious and heart breaking.

The other outstanding performance is Quentin Earl Darrington as Coalhouse Walker. Here is another role burdened by layer after layer of story, a ragtime piano player with an illegitimate child who is struggling to be the perfect example of his race as Booker T Washington has taught him, but at the same time being crushed under institutional racism. Coalhouse has some power-packed songs that will leave you breathless, and handles two of the shows biggest props, the car and the piano, with grace.

The set is a wonder, a three story cast-iron style catwalk that with ease becomes a ship, a factory, a home, a theatre, a library... a dozen things. The set is minimal in some ways but full of Victorian styling if you know where to look. It echos the cast-iron buildings of Soho and middle Manhattan, as well as place like the Crystal Pavilion and the the original Penn Station that were so important to the aesthetics of this era. The larger props follow this idea, being little more than frameworks that suggest the prop, but keep them in the light and airy style of the set. (You can sort of make out the piano in the background of this shot.) It is an incredibly versatile way of creating the set that supports the show, but leaves most of the visual cueing to the costumes, which are also beautiful, and easily capable of supporting the show. The color coding at the top of the show (the white cast in creams and tans, the black cast in rusts and yellows, the immigrants in grays and blacks) is incredibly effective, and that sort of thought carries through the show, leaving the big "pops" of color to the entertainers (Evelyn Nesbitt and Harry Houdini) or the bands that march through on occasion. My only wish is that the set designer had trusted his concept and run with it for the whole show. Tateh's cart, the library furniture and the funeral wagon, are all far too real and solid, and step away from the way everything else is presented in a distracting way. The worst example is the street light that is dragged in for Coalhouse's dream in Act 2. It doesn't turn on (that may have been an error, this is still in previews) doesn't match the style of the set, and adds very little to the sequence. Cut it and trust the set to do its job, it is succeeding wildly on most other occasions. My other tiny quibble with the set is the central catwalk, that raises and lowers at several points in the show. They seriously need to check the rigging on that thing. There is a point in the second act where about 8 people are standing on it and with each new person that stepped on it dropped several inches. It took me right out of the show because I was afraid for the actors! I have no idea if anyone besides me would ever notice such a thing though.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fact that this production also boasts a 28 piece orchestra. Most Broadway productions these days make do with 15 pieces, if that, and I really never knew what an experience I was missing. The full rich sound that this orchestra produces is far superior, and will make you long to hear other shows produced this way.

In all, a nearly 5 star show. I am very happy to have seen it and would recommend it to anyone who is coming through the city.

Are typewriters suddenly some hot vintage status symbol? I need two typewriters as props for a show I am designing, they don't even have to work, just make some clicking noises, and everything that I have been able to track down in the past two weeks is outrageously expensive. One guy even said in his ad that the typewriter was broken, and didn't work, and that the repair part needed had to be special ordered from Germany... and he still wouldn't budge off his $90 pricetag. What the hell?

At the risk of turning into a photo blog, you wanna see what I've been doing? First a few shots of Show Boat so that you can see the set in one configuration.


(Can you spot the components taken from the Broadway show?)

Now, the same set, after 36 hours of change over, drastically altered and moved 100 years into the future, (and to the East Village) for Rent. If I can toot my own horn for a second here, I think it's one of the prettiest sets I've ever done. The lighting designer and I accomplished some pretty great looking stuff, don't you think?

Well, that was... interesting.

Coraline, recently a stop motion animation movie, but originally a book by Neil Gaiman has now also been adapted into a musical by Stephin Merritt of the band Magnetic Fields. The original book, as with most things Gaiman, is a quirky little piece about growing up and discovering who you really are, and monsters. The musical is made even quirkier by the fact that it is, for the most part, orchestrated on an entirely unorthodox collection of objects, ballons, styrofoam coolers, chopsticks, and toy pianos among them. The vast majority of the show is played on toy piano, and when a real piano is utilized it is in unconventional ways like plucking the strings, or brushing them with forms and steel brushes. The ensemble cast plays dozens of characters each, ranging from rats and mice to the human inhabitants of Coraline's world.

The story is epic, a young girl exploring two different worlds and meeting dozens of denizens of both, and the challenge is to move seamlessly between the locations and times. The set consists primarily of various deconstructed pianos scattered about or built into assemblages, and several doors. Doors play a big part in the story metaphorically, though the doors onstage are used only rarely. So the set itself doesn't really do much to add to the locale of the piece, most of that is accomplished by lighting shifts and the very clunky method of description. Nearly every scene is begun by Coraline announcing: "I am outside now." or "It's night now." Not exactly the most ideal way to carry a show.

Coraline herself is played by a much older woman which takes some mental acrobatics, at least for the first few minutes of the show. Some of the rest of the cast shine: Francis Jue for instance, especially when he is playing Miss Forcible the kindly spinster actress who lives next door. He and January LaVoy do a marvelous job as the actresses, and their scenes are some of the warmest and funniest in the show.

The show unfortunately never really reaches a destination. It lacks much in the way of suspense, which you need in a tale about a little girl fighting a demon, and all the songs seem interchangeable and sort of like outlines rather than actual songs. The rhymes comes off as forced and clunky, and vocals never really live up to the drama of the music being plunked out around the stage.

A good night of theatre, and I am happy to have seen it, but just not ready for the stage yet I'm afraid.

This is a fire hydrant.

Well... actually it is a fiberglass cast of a fire hydrant, and a really well done one at that.

I want a fire hydrant (among other NYC centric items) for my RENT set. Around noon today I decided that I should probably start shopping for it since I would need to order it soon. I started to shopping around, only to discover that the available options were either ridiculously expensive, or unattractive, or too small.

On a lark, I checked Craigslist. Posted yesterday, less than 10 blocks from my location... a movie replica fiberglass fire hydrant: $20.

I swear this thing is perfect. Someone actually made a cast off of a real hydrant, I'd stake my life on it. It is detailed down to chipped paint, and partially unthreaded bolts. No one who was carving this would have made those details.

THIS is what I love about NYC. I checked around Craigslist, there are no other prop hydrants available. There are a few real ones, (Atlanta seems to have a bumper crop of those for some reason) but this was the only prop version I found. This is nowhere else in the world where I could have accomplished this as easily.

You won't find a more devoted Dolly fan than me, and that's the hard truth. So I really went into this show wanting to like it. Allison Janney was of course another plus, as I love her as well, so my good will for this production was pretty high, which frankly was probably what allowed me to have such a good time with it.

The movie into musical phenomenon of the past few years has not exactly thrilled me. Most of the ones I've seen have left me pretty cold, and sadly this one didn't really fare much better. Movies just have a different pacing structure, and unless it is something where you can totally ditch the performances of the original actors, and bring something different to the table, then you are stuck with the comparisons. Of the three leads in this show I think Allison Janney went the furthest towards making Violet her own. She was able to overcome Lily Tomlin's portrayal, and made it fresh. Stephenie Block in Jane Fonda's role probably had the least to overcome, at least for me. But poor Megan Hilty was left with the real conundrum... to play Dora Lee, or to play Dolly Parton playing Dora Lee. Sadly they directed her towards the latter and I think that was to her doom. She lacks the personality to bring it off, and I can't help but wonder if the show would have been better off if they could have divorced Dora from Dolly and allowed an actress to create a new spin on the role. In the end all that is really required is for her to be a bit of a sex-bomb. There is nothing really Dolly specific in the role.

Dolly herself did an admirable job with the show. She wrote 16 new songs, and dusted off "9 to 5" and "Backwoods Barbie," extending them both and adding several new verses and reprise to "9 to 5." While the songs were solid, it was really apparent that she has never written for this genre before. The songs were almost entirely written as asides, and never integrated into the show as a way to progress the story the way they do in the best musicals. But still, fun music, and certainly it showed her trademark charm.

The set was... a bit overwhelming. Scott Pask turns in another admirable performance, but something just seemed... off. There certainly was a LOT of set. At times it seemed to be a show about set changes. There awlays seemed to be something in motion, some wall coming or going, or a line of desks shifting by. The best thing I saw was the movement between the outer office, where the secerataries sit to Mr. Hart's office, the scenery sort of inverted and folded in on itself to create the new space. A cool transition, at least the first time I saw it. The fourth... The rest of the show though just seemed clunky. The giant LED screen at the back was never really used to its full potential, and in fact was more often a distraction. Sadly the most clever thing on stage scenery wise was the act curtain, made of telephone hand sets and curled telephone cord.

In all... not a perfect show, perhaps not even a good show, but a FUN show. I had a good time, and in the end that's enough.

Thanks to the vagaries of tickets being passed down through friends I got the opportunity tonight to see the current Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under The Elms."

Going into this show I knew nothing about it, other than it had a stellar cast, and had transferred from the the Goodman in Chicago. I checked a synopsis of the play... a pastoral drama, set in 1900's New England about three sons fighting to inherit their mean spirited and manipulative father's farm. It conjures certain images, right?

As the curtain rose I was greeted with something I NEVER expected. The show began with a burst of white light and the sound of an explosion as played on a bass. The set revealed behind the curtain was an enormous pile of grey stone with a dead pig hanging from its rear feet stage left. Large boulders were suspended from the fly by gigantic loops of rope and two men in filthy rags were moving stones around on stage. Is this a post-apocalyptic retelling of the story? Was I in the wrong theatre? I wasn't sure. A few minutes into the show as the three brothers had been introduced and the nugget of the conflict between them had started to be revealed I was faced with something even odder.

The basic thrust is this: Dad is an ass. The youngest son is only a half-brother to the other two, and the two older brothers know that they have no chance of inheriting the farm, so they are leaving. The younger son blames dad for working his mom to death and for stealing the land from her, so he assumes the land should rightfully be his when Dad kicks it. Dad has other ideas as he soon drags home a new bride who is under the assumption that all this will be HERS when her elderly husband shuffles off. So the over arcing theme of the show, the disposition of this farm, comes to be represented very literally by a two story farm house that is lowered in and spends the rest of the show suspended and dangling over the heads of the cast. Their greatest desire, just out of their reach, but ever present and threatening to crush them. Get it?

The weird boulders also continually hang there... but I never quite figured out what they were supposed to represent.

We are told repeatedly by the characters, both in dialogue and in wistful scenes where they stare off into the fourth wall, how "purdy" the land that they are fighting over is. All we can see as the audience is the grey of the rock, the house, the rear wall, the floor, the furniture... the never ending dull dreary grey. It really left me wondering why the heck anybody would be fighting over it in the first place. The youngest son even bribes his older brothers to leave, giving them enough money to sail to California and join the gold rush. Enough money in fact that he probably could have just bought his own land elsewhere and washed his hands of the entire problem. I THINK that his desire for the land was supposed to be truly about his desire to see his dead mother happy, but again, if the land were her spirit shouldn't it have been marginally comforting?

The show is rarely performed, and I can see why. It is written in a thick Maine (I guess?) dialect and is often hard to understand. None of the characters are particularly likable, and none of them seem like the type you want to root for. The script is often as bleak as the setting we were given. Granted O'Neill writes some dark, disturbed characters, but I can't help but wonder if we had seen some beautiful elms on stage, or a touch of any color at all in fact, would it have served as a better counter-point to the dreary script, rather than constantly underlining the script visually. I'm also not sure if it was just a function of the dating of the script, but there was never really a plot twist that I didn't see coming. Maybe in the intervening years too many people have ripped off these ideas, but every solution the characters had was at once obvious, and utterly wrong. Even their final decision, leaving the father alone and shattered, the sole possessor of the land he had tempted them with, seemed forced, and only to be made because the script demanded that they leave stage at that point.

I've seen in other reviews that a good deal of the dialogue was cut to keep the show at it's rather brisk 100 minutes (no intermission) which would explain why everything seemed very clipped and precise, with none of the expounding and expanding that O'Neill usually gives us. The situation never really seemed real, the stacatto delivery of every line in the show left me me with a feeling that I was watching a very good table read, but something that should flesh out more during rehearsal.

In all I would say that I would have found this an excellent production if it had been a bunch of graduate students. I think the director wanted a grand sweeping epic along the lines of Shakespeare (he also directed last year's Lear, with some of the same cast and creative team) but what he ended up with a post-apocalyptic Lifetime movie. At least the set was fun to look at, and intriguing to watch, even if the metaphor was a bit ham-fisted.

The set is complete! Final dress went off without a hitch, the costumes look lovely with my scenery, everyone is happy with how it turned out... now we just relax and wait for the kids to show up tomorrow morning. Here's a little of what they'll see:

The human characters are masked actors, to give them a level of reality different from the animals. Everyone in the show except Rikki plays at least two characters and some as many as four. The actors don't really leave stage when they aren't in character, but perch to the side and become observers.

Rikki exploring her new home after being adopted by the humans.

One of the dance sequences, the ladies on the floor are fledgling birds learning to fly, and thus becoming endangered by the various snakes in the show.

One of many fight sequences, the final one in fact: Rikki vs. Nagana. The fights are a mix of
dance, ballet, and kung fu moves. The snakes use tantos to represent their fangs.

All in all I feel really good about this design. The process went smoothly, there were no major hangups, I only had to do one really long night (last night) and most everything came out the way I had originally envisioned. (Compare the photos the original sketch.) The only major difference is the rugs, but they were cut early on by the fight choreographer who was afraid of the actors tripping. I had hoped to have a rug in the area behind the arch on the left anyway, but I could never find one cheap enough (re:free.) I came in $20 over budget (3%.) I may in fact end up being under budget if the production manager follows my advice and raises a fuss about the paint. I had ordered 3 gallons of the tan, and after finishing the first can was shocked to see that the second can was a completely different color. The third can was different than either of those. The green that I used for the floor was the same story. 2 gallons, 2 different colors even though they were mixed by the same person on the same day. We shouldn't have to pay for that. (Not full price at least!)

Plus... it looks great.

I'm about 90% at this point... well, actually MY portion is about 98%, I just have one prop to quickly paint and I'm done unless the director has notes. The staff has one or two minor things left to do, completing the curtains, hanging some masking backstage... but not much really. This show has gone incredibly smooth.

Now if you'll excuse me it is 4:15 am, and I still have to be at my regular job tomorrow as well...

Final dress photos tomorrow!!

Things really started moving in a dynamic visual way on the set today. Primary build was completed while I was at work, so I came in to a mostly done set. After rehearsals ended it was my job to start painting and get everything looking like something other than a big block of wood. The company manager and the production manager stayed behind and helped me base everything, and then they left me to my own devices to begin the "scenic" painting. Hard to see the blue painting that I did since it is very close to the same color that is left on the walls from the previous show, but that was my big push for tonight. I also completed all of the curtains and pillows while was rehearsal was in progress, and did some work on some of the prop pieces. Tomorrow night will be the floor, and a start on the Ganesh mural that is inside the nook there, as well as hopefully beginning to put up the greenery.

Not much visual movement on the set today. There's a new all on the left of this photo, and the rear masking on that central unit went into place. There was some movement off stage, things that will be put in place tomorrow.

Tonight was the actors' first day on stage. Because they use the stage as a rehearsal space this show has been rehearsing on the set for the previous show, which was radically different. In a show like this, that is mostly fight choreography and stylized dance this adjustment period is critical. The actors get to see the real challenges they are facing, and start to iron out whether they are going to be able to do what they thought they were going to be able to do. I don't know how many times I've gotten to this stage only to hear an actor say something like "Wow, this wall is taller than I thought." Or, "I thought I was going to be able to step through this area, but there's a bench here!"

My contribution tonight was mostly sitting in the dressing room and sewing curtains and pillows. I have 50 yards of crushed gold and red silk to get shaped into curtains!

Well, this is the state of things on day two. Starting to take form. There wasn't a lot for me to do today, the children's theatre luckily has a great staff that carries on the building during the day while I am at my office job.

My big accomplishment for me today was finding the fabric for the curtain surround that I planned. I had hoped that Materials For The Arts (a local organization that provides free materials to non-profit orgs) would have the cloth I wanted, but they failed me this time. So on the way to the theatre I hit my favorite Chinatown fabric store and managed to haggle them down to $5 a yard on some beautiful crushed silk that is going to look GREAT on the set. That stuff lights like a dream. Earlier today I haggled the fine folks at Pier 1 down on a floor model wicker vase that wanted. It was marked $60, but the neck was broken so I took it away for $20. A little hot glue and no one will notice from stage. Now I just have to find two more...

Normally I do my set sketches by hand but I recently discovered SkethUp from Google, which is the only "drafting" program I have ever felt was intuitive enough for me to use. I took courses in AutoCAD of course, and I've tried Vector Works, but they are all written for applications that are far far beyond simple theatre sets and their interfaces are... horrid. After decades of using Adobe programs I just want them to function like Adobe, and they don't. I tried SketchUp on a whim and have fallen totally in love with it. It works the way my mind does. I'll admit that it has some limitations, and some of the functions are a bit annoying, but the deeper I get into it the more I am finding, and the better I am able to make it function. My first real task for myself was to draft a complete 3-D model of the Children's Theatre, and about the time I finished that I was offered the set designf or Rikki Tikki Tavi, so I "sketched" the set into my theatre model. I moved that over into Photoshop and did some work on it, and the result is this sketch. The first set for the Childrens Theatre that I've rendered in this way. I'm really happy with it.

Not the best picture in the world... (I only had a small camera, and I was in the back of the house) but I thought you might like a glimpse of what I've been up to this week, since it has thrown my world into such turmoil. I designed the costumes for this show, If You Give A Pig A Party, based on the Numeroff book of the same name. Some of the costumes, like the Girl and the Pig (the title characters) were basically as they appeared in the books, but the rest of the animals are "naked" in the books so I had to create identities for them. Dog, Cat, Moose and Snake. In the end, in my head at least, this cast was "The Breakfast Club." Moose was the nerd, Cat the prissy girl, Dog the Jock, and Mouse the "special" kid. I guess that makes Snake the stoner/slacker which I guess fits since he never really speaks and spends most of the show being carried around by other characters...

Meet Snake. Sometimes costuming a children's show means building the characters from scratch...

I hate them. You hate them. (Or you should.) I understand that they have been partially responsible for the destruction of America... but boy do I miss Wal-Mart sometimes.

Today's quest was approximately 10 to 15 pairs of identical shoes at somewhere south of $10 a pair. (I'm designing a shoe set in a shoestore.) In most of the rest of the world that would be as simple as walking into Wal-Mart and walking out again. In New York City that requires a great deal of hiking between stores, mostly in Harlem and Washington Heights, and digging around in discount stores that exist nowhere else in the world, like El Mundo and Conway. And in the end coming up empty. There is something to be said about the ubiquitous ease of Wal-Mart, not to mention the cleanliness, I really was afraid of seeing a rat or two in a few of these places.

The quest continues though... I also need a "Brannock Device" (TOTALLY just learned what the name for that thing was...) and one of those old fashioned credit card machines where you slide the thing to imprint the slip of paper... (which I have NO IDEA what the official name of might be.)

A peek at the first of three sets that I'm working on at the moment. You'll see more of it later, and one of the others tomorrow. This one is for Peter and the Wolf, which presented me with a problem... how does one build a forest on stage? I'm pretty proud of my answer.

How do I as a set designer walk a fine line on a set where bad painting might be appropriate to the location, and yet not make it look like bad scenic painting? If the setting that I am emulating would naturally be the site of some bad faux finishes, or bad decorative paint treatments, and I mimic that, will it just look like bad scenery? That's my question for today. Thoughts?