confessions of a serial theater lackey

BUS STOP Photo Album

2009-09-14T16:04:00.003-04:00

I took over 60 photos during the final dress rehearsal on Wednesday, September 10. A total of 54 images were selected and posted to Facebook. Click the image below to access the Bus Stop photo album (account/login not required to view photos):

William Inge's BUS STOP is Still Relevant at Montgomery Theater

2009-09-14T10:59:00.003-04:00

Naila Francis of the Burlington County Times writes that "Inge’s ‘Bus Stop’ still speaks to our times." The writeup, which appears on PhillyBurbs.com, makes no mention of my sound design in the show, but it does use one of my photos. Click for the full story:

Inge’s ‘Bus Stop’ still speaks to our times

Montgomery Theater's production of "Bus Stop" opened on Friday, September 11, and continues through Saturday, October 3. For ticket information, visit the theater's website.

Robots Take the Stage!

2009-08-12T16:56:00.003-04:00

I'm a little behind on this news, but plasticpals.com clued me in regarding a few instances of robots on stage. No, this is not about robotic actors -- and we all know a few of those. This is about actual robots, taking the stage and interacting with humans.

Check out the full article: Robots Break A Leg On Stage.

Wakamaru, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ household robot, in a
20 minute play at Osaka University (November 2008)

Long Time, No Posts

2009-08-12T16:54:00.002-04:00

Looks like I took a nearly three month break from posting here. My apologies to anyone who stopped by looking for new content or links, and a promise to do better. Starting now.

Sustainable Design: Styro Light

2009-05-19T08:33:00.002-04:00

This is one of the coolest bits of recycling in the theater I have ever seen. Check out Jim On Light for Styro Light - Apple’s Packaging Put to A Second Use.

Lighting Fixture Made from Styrofoam Packaging Corners (Photo: Jim On Light)

What is Lighting Design in the 21st Century?

2009-05-13T13:53:00.003-04:00

Rob Sayer has a new post over at On Stage Lighting: Lighting Designer for the 21st Century.

In this insightful piece, Rob lays out the differences between traditional (theater) lighting design -- you know, the kind you were trained to do -- and everything else (as represented by weekend rock festivals, industry expos, and award ceremonies such as the “UK Sausage Growers Quarterly Awards 2009”). It's not just the scenarios that are different; this bold new area of lighting, ahem, design requires a completely different mindset.

Web Savvy Theater: The diy web hub Interview with Nick Keenan

2009-05-06T13:30:00.004-04:00

To paraphrase diy's words: Nick is someone who is really working on something other than the web (i.e., theater) but finds himself learning more and more about web work in order to get things done.

For more on how he balances that, and what he has learned, read the full interview here.

Nick is right on the mark when he indicates how critical it is to maintain a web presence as an alternate way of convincing audiences to come see our work.

Farewell Captain Chaos

2009-05-05T14:37:00.000-04:00

Dom DeLuise is gone at age 75
http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSTRE5444X920090505

Article: Theaters' worst acts take place in the seats

2009-04-30T16:40:00.001-04:00

John Moore, Denver Post theater critic, writes about people who have "lost that synapse that once might have reminded them, 'Psst: You're in public! . . . Put on some pants!'"

Read the sadly humorous gripe yourself: Theaters' worst acts take place in the seats

Five-Armed Turntable

2009-04-30T14:52:00.003-04:00

This is a prepared turntable, designed by Yuri Suzuki (2008), that is used to actively compose and play music. The LP, though round, plays music in a linear fashion -- it starts at one point and plays through to another. With five individually controlled arms, you have the possibility for looping and accompaniment within the same set of music. Very interesting! Analog FTW!

Hat tip to Everyday Listening (via twitter).

The Five Hardest Things to Do in Acting

2009-04-20T11:01:00.001-04:00

The "5 hardest things to do in acting" are much more difficult on stage than film, where you get multiple takes and put the best one in the can. Unfortunately, this post does not offer much in the way of suggestions for overcoming the difficulties. But the clips are great fun!

http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/237852/top_5_hardest_things_to_do_in_acting.html

Montgomery Theater on Facebook

2009-04-16T11:23:00.003-04:00

Montgomery Theater is using Facebook. Come by and become fan!

"Spinning" Preview!

2009-04-16T11:10:00.002-04:00

There are still a few seats left for the "Spinning into Butter" preview tonight: http://htxt.it/E0R3

Here is a teaser pic from the recent tech rehearsal:

Spinning Tunes

2009-04-15T13:55:00.004-04:00

Here is the list of songs that made the final cut and are used in Montgomery Theater's production of "Spinning into Butter."

Start Act I
"Meard" - Brandon Musser

End Act I Scene 1
"Emeht Eivom" - Brandon Musser

End Act I Scene 2
"A Morning with the Roses" - Richard Dworsky

End Act I Scene 3
"Tween Kel" - Brandon Musser (cued after the opening chord)

End Act I Scene 4
"Reflection" - George Winston

End Act I Scene 5
"The Dark Room" - Eddie Jobson

End Act I
"Rain" - George Winston (cued up at 3:04 into the song)

Open Act II
"Emeht Eivom" - Brandon Musser

End Act II Scene 1
"Fresh Air" - David Lyndon Huff (cued after the brief intro)

End Act II Scene 2
"A Door into the Dark" - Victoire

End Act II Scene 3
"Capella" - JT Bruce

End Act II Scene 4
"La Mufa" - Astor Piazzola

End Act II Scene 5
"Oblivion" - Astor Piazzola

End Act II Scene 6
"Rain" - George Winston (cued from the beginning of the song)

End Show/Curtain Call
"Bing Bong" - Brandon Musser

In an upcoming post, I will outline what I did for the three clock tower FX that were required for this show.

"Spinning into Butter" - Tech Run (Photos)

2009-04-12T12:31:00.002-04:00

I uploaded a few cell phone images from last night's tech run.

Rare Bird Show Announces Shows for April 10 and 11

2009-04-06T11:49:00.001-04:00

Latest show news from Rare Bird Show:

Rare Bird Show has shows coming up this weekend (Friday & Saturday night at 8) with a really great sketch group called the Action Section. The shows are at the Shubin (a block south of South Street and 4th) and there's only so many seats, so if you really want to see the show, I'd recommend buying tickets online (same price as at the door; just 10 bucks).
Click here for more information.

And the 10 o'clock show is Kevin Allison from MTV's The State. He's also teaching at Philly Improv Theater; check out www.phillyimprovtheater.com for more information.

YouTube & MySpace & Facebook

www.rarebirdshow.com | Rare Bird Show | Philadelphia Longform Comedy Improv

Can You Script 100 Pages in 30 Days?

2009-04-01T15:31:00.003-04:00

Script Frenzy is an international writing event. If you are up to the challenge, try writing 100 pages of scripted material in the month of April. There is no fee to participate. And ... there are no valuable prizes awarded, no "best" script singled out.

This is one of those competitions in which everyone who achieves the goal (not just participates, but completes the 100 pages) is considered victorious. All those who reach this lofty goal will receive "a handsome Script Frenzy Winner's Certificate" (most likely suitable for framing) and a "web icon proclaiming this fact."

So, what are you waiting for? Get scripting!

Info and rules: http://www.scriptfrenzy.org/eng/whatisscriptfrenzy

Farewell to Ron Silver

2009-03-16T10:23:00.004-04:00

Activist, scholar, actor. He ran the political spectrum, but he was always honest about where he stood. And the man knew how to get things done. Fare thee well, sir, fare thee well.

Actor Ron Silver dies after two-year battle with esophageal cancer
BY Jane H. Furse
DAILY NEWS WRITER

Updated Monday, March 16th 2009, 8:27 AM

Actor Ron Silver has died after a two-year fight with esophageal cancer.

Actor and political activist Ron Silver died Sunday after a two-year battle with esophageal cancer, according to a spokesman for the Creative Coalition, the public policy organization he co-founded.

Robin Bronk, the coalition's executive director, said Silver, 62, "died peacefully in his sleep with his family around him early Sunday morning. He had been fighting esophageal cancer for two years and the family is making arrangements for a private service." [Read More @ NY Daily News]

Open Call for PIPPEN @ Town and Country Players

2009-03-12T12:55:00.002-04:00

I received the following casting call from my dear friend, Stephanie. If this interests you, come on out. If you think this will be of interest to someone you know, pass along the word. I hear a killer production team is in the works, and they are looking an equally kick-ass cast.

Open Call for Pippin (posted 3/3/09)

Where: Town and Country Players
What: Pippen!
When: March 20 and 21 (see below)
Performances: June 12, 13, 19, 20, 21 (matinee), 26 and 27

Auditions: Friday, March 20 from 7:00pm to 10:00pm and Saturday, March 21 from 3:00pm to 8:00pm at the Central Bucks Community Senior Center (700 Shady Retreat Road, Doylestown, PA).

All roles are open! To audition:
E-mail the director, John Zimmerman, at Fractal514@aol.com for an audition slot.
Prepare 16 bars of an upbeat Broadway song and arrive prepared to dance.
Costuming and choreography will be sexy, so if you plan to audition you should be comfortable with your body.
Fans of Pippin will be happy to know that this production is taking great pains to stay true to the original feel and intensity of the Fosse production, but is still using the new ending.

Town & Country Players is a Non-Paying theater.

Improv Workshop

2009-03-10T16:02:00.004-04:00

More news from the Rare Bird Show:
----------------------------------------------

Matt of the Rare Bird Show is conducting a workshop for improvisers. Go check out the Get Real! - Improv Workshop on Saturday, March 28th

www.rarebirdshow.com | Rare Bird Show | Philadelphia Longform Comedy Improv

Rare Bird Show: Upcoming Gigs

2009-03-10T16:00:00.005-04:00

Rare Bird Show has a few shows coming up...
---------------------------------------------------------

Rare Bird Show at the Urban Saloon
2120 Fairmount Avenue, Philly
with Fletcher from Philly Improv Theater
Thursday, March 12th at 9:30 p.m.
Tickets are $10 at the door.

Rare Bird Show at the Shubin with Philly Improv Theater

at the Shubin Theatre, 407 Bainbridge Street, Philly
Friday, April 10th & Saturday, April 11th at 8 p.m.
with sketch group the Action Section

www.rarebirdshow.com | Rare Bird Show | Philadelphia Longform Comedy Improv

OVER THE TAVERN Song List

2009-02-24T17:48:00.003-05:00

As I've mentioned previously, the production of "Over the Tavern" at Montgomery Theater provided for some challenges in sound design. For this post, I want to focus on the list of songs that made the final cut and are used in the show.

Open the Show
"Once in Royal David's City" - Cantate Boys' Choir

Votive/Prayer Scenes
(Start and End: Act I Scene 2, Act I Scene 4, and Act II Scene 2)
"Allelulia" - Salt Lake Children's Choir

Radio Set #1 (Act I Scene 6)
"Pennsylvania Polka" - Polish Radio Polka Band
"Polish Heart Polka" - Ray Henry & His Orchestra
"Lichtensteiner Polka" - Polish Radio Polka Band

Radio Set #2 (Act I Scene 6)
"Empty Street" - Thad Jones, Kenny Burrell, and Frank Wess
"Clarinet Polka" - Polish Radio Polka Band

End Act I Scene 7
"Django" - Vince Guaraldi_Vince Guaraldi Trio

End Act I
"The Very Thought Of You" - Jan Garber

Open Act II
"Count One" - Thad Jones, Kenny Burrell, and Frank Wess

End Act II Scene 4
"Moldau Polka" - Polish Radio Polka Band

End Show/Curtain Call
"Medley (Beer Barrel Polka_There Is A Tavern In The Town Polka)" - Polish Radio Polka Band

There are also a few voiceovers and some TV audio. I'll talk about them in my next post.

TAVERN Review

2009-02-18T15:49:00.006-05:00

Montgomery Theater's production of Over the Tavern received good ink from the Philadelphia Inquirer's resident theater critic, Howard Shapiro:

Posted on Wed, Feb. 18, 2009

It's charming to the core

'Over the Tavern' is lively fun, enacted by a clever cast.

By Howard Shapiro
Inquirer Theater Critic

Some people call playwright Tom Dudzick "the Catholic Neil Simon," and at Montgomery Theater in Souderton, you can see instantly that the moniker fits.
His high-spirited Over the Tavern has a Simon sensibility: The laughs come easily, the characters flirt with caricature but never cross that line, and the script contains not a whiff of irony. Over the Tavern - especially in this fluid production staged by the company's artistic director, Tom Quinn, and with a pitch-perfect cast - is throughly charming.
The play is the first of a trilogy about the Pazinski family of Buffalo. Dudzick has had great success in regional theaters around the nation with such non-trilogy plays as Greetings! and Hail Mary!, and while Over the Tavern lacks an exclamation point, the Pazinskis do plenty of exclaiming. The play is set in 1959, before dysfunctional was a vogue word.
The family lives in cramped quarters over the Buffalo tavern owned and operated by the dad (Tom Tansey). He and his '50s-hausfrau wife (Leigh Murray) have four kids, who get most of the best lines and are the heartbeat of the play. At Montgomery Theater, they're also the most impressive aspect of a production whose success depends on four sharp young actors.
High-schoolers Eddie and Annie (Owen Pelesh and Rachel Diamond), their retarded sibling, Georgie (Stephen Kent), and super-swift 12-year-old Rudy (Dane McMichael) clearly are bound, if not for hell, at least for purgatory (where flames are lower, one of them explains) for foul-mouthing, sex-obsessing, and all the other typical teenage activities that render them imperfect in God's eyes.
But those are the eyes of a Catholic-school God, says Rudy, who has no time for catechism, wonders to Jesus why "all you do is give me rules - angry rules," thinks confirmation in the church is meaningless, and wants to shop around for a more congenial religion. In 1959, this is more than apostasy - for a 12-year-old, it's unheard of. And so is telling a teaching nun (the first-rate Cynthia Raff) that God put him on Earth to have fun.
Everyone shines, particularly the impish McMichael as Rudy. He's a natural actor who runs with the part as if the play were cross-country. The script requires him to be both impudent and a genuine intellectual at the same time. McMichael answers the challenge with a seamless performance that would be impressive even for an adult - in an equally seamless production that milks Over the Tavern for all the good fun it's got.

Over the Tavern

Presented by Montgomery Theater, 124 Main St., Souderton, through March 7. Tickets: $25-$37. Information: 215-723-9984 or www.montgomerytheater.org.

Contact staff writer Howard Shapiro at 215-854-5727 or hshapiro@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/howardshapiro.

A Couple of Quick Updates

2009-02-08T22:22:00.013-05:00

The new season is under way, and I have been terribly negligent in making posts here. So, please accept my apologies. With this one post, I will try to remedy the situation and bring everyone up to date.

Award of Excellence

I already mentioned this on my main blog, but it makes sense to post it here, too. In 2008, I focused on upgrading and expanding music and sound effect control for Main Stage productions at Montgomery Theater. For my efforts in this and other projects, I was honored with the 2008 Award of Excellence. My wife schemed with the theater's staff to ensure that my parents and a few close friends were in the audience for the surprise presentation which took place immediately after the final performance of "The Last Night of Ballyhoo" (That would be, I think, the last night of "The Last Night of Ballyhoo"). And, believe me, I was completely surprised. I just never saw it coming; never expected such an award.

Yours truly flanked by the 2007 winner (Heidi) on my right, and the Artistic Director (Tom) on my left

Over the Tavern

I'm currently in the midst of tech for "Over the Tavern" and I love the script. This wonderful show, set in the late 50s, focuses on 12-year-old Rudy. He's a rebel and budding comedian who starts to question everything about the Catholic church even as he struggles to survive his dysfunctional family. After deciding to skip confirmation in favor of investigating the "over thirteen hundred religions in the world," all (um) Hell breaks loose.

The sound has been a bit of a challenge. At least, acquiring some of the sounds has been challenging. I needed:

polka music (fast and slow)
radio tuning/changing station sounds
radio announcer speaking in Polish
loud western gunfight noises
TV channel changing sounds
cartoons (played on the TV)
audio from the Jack Paar Show

First, I'll cover the radio stuff. The polka music was not a difficult acquisition. I actually found two great albums on emusic: "More Polish Polkas" by the Polish Radio Polka Band, and "Great Polkas With Ray Henry" by Ray Henry & His Orchestra. Most of the radio sound FX I found included snippets of modern music, so they were of no use. The day before our tech run, I was able to find two snippets with static and such that seemed to work fairly well. The Polish DJ, however, was another thing entirely. Oh, I have a Polish voiceover, but I hope no one listens too closely to the content.

The television FX proved to be an interesting set of challenges. First, I needed cartoons. Lots of them. Fortunately, I was able to record the audio from classic cartoons that have been compiled at archive.org. This is another situation for which WireTap Pro has been a perfect application. Archive.org was less helpful with the other TV audio I needed: Jack Paar. Oh, there is plenty of Jack Paar content on the web, but most of it was not time appropriate for this show. I needed something from 1959 or a little earlier. What I found was Jack interviewing Bobby Kennedy, Jack interviewing Richard Nixon, and Jack introducing a clip of the Beatles ... all of which were taped after 1960. I finally did find two clips that were earlier and settled on one of them: a Polaroid commercial with Jack Paar and Jerry Lewis conducted live on Jack's show. I'll use a later post to describe how I assembled all these clips for use in the show.

Thanks to an anonymous donor, we have a new laptop for controlling sound playback. It's a Windows Vista machine, so I'll have to keep an eye on it for the problems that have been publicized. Also, it's chock full of bloat ware that just isn't necessary, so I constantly find myself having to disable yet another "gadget". But the best news about the machine is twofold: (1) I was able to find drivers for the Firewire 410 audio controller on the web (the included CD did not have Vista drivers), and (2) We have not seen any of the memory dump issues that the older laptop experienced. Knock on wood.

Well, I started this post during the Tech Sunday, and we are now finished with the first weekend of shows. So I think I'd better post this short missive before it becomes too far out of date.

Khan is Gone

2009-01-14T17:02:00.001-05:00

[Also posted at my main blog, Prophet or Madman]

Today we lose another acting legend. Ricardo Montalban died this morning at his home. He was 88.

I remember Mr. Montalban's work with fondness. I loved his portrayal of the civilized Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island and the outlaw warrior Khan from the Star Trek series (and the film, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan). I even watched some Kim Possible episodes simply because he was voicing the villain.

I hope someone was there with him in his final moments, possibly letting out an ear-splitting, "Khaaaaaaaaaan!" just to let them know, over on the other side, that an actor with the heart of a warrior was on his way.

From Fox News:

Montalban's death was announced at a meeting of the city council by president Eric Garcetti, who represents the district where the actor lived. Garcetti did not give a cause of death.

"The Ricardo Montalban Theatre in my Council District — where the next generations of performers participate in plays, musicals, and concerts — stands as a fitting tribute to this consummate performer," Garcetti said later in a written statement.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479941,00.html