Musicals Everywhere

News that Shrek is becoming a musical left me bemoaning the sad fact that there is so little original thought that goes into musical theater these days... and then I found this;

Financial crisis sinks AMTSJ

A former employer of mine is no more. As of Wednesday last week the entire company closed down. For the full (official) story check this link; AMTSJ closed
and/Or This Link for the SF Chronicle's article...
or Here for Dallas' statement on their "indefinate postponement" of the show that essentially broke the camel's back. Rather fittingly you will notice that the woman issuing the statement's last name is "Hatchett"

Advice from 1850

Today I was reading through the Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book from 1850.  I thought I would share a tid bit of the advice from it...

"VARIOUS USEFUL RECIEPTS, &c. OF OUR OWN GATHERING;

To remove stains from Silks, Linins and Wollen Stuffs-- Mix a wineglassful of rectified spirits of turpentine with half a teaspoonful of essential oil of lemons and keep it in a well-stopped bottle. Apply a little upon the stain with a bit of woolen or silk.  The colors of the fabric will sustain no injury from this application.

To remove freckles-- freckles may be removed, we are told, but do not vouch for it by the frequent application of spirits diluted, or alkaline solutions the latter of just sufficient strength to prick the tongue.

To cleanse the hair-- It is recommended to use a little soda in the water instead of soap.  Rosemary steeped in water cleanses the hair nicely; or an egg well beaten and mixed in warm water has the same effect.

A Piece of Good Advice-- Never seem wiser or more learned than the people you are with.  Wear your learning like your watch, in a private pocket, and do not pull it out and strike out merely to show you have one."

A Trauma of Redcoats

The British are coming! The British are coming! And boy do they look tacky!

For the past three weeks I've been on the hunt for British Redcoat costumes. Apparently they are not a readily found item... most of what I've found has looked like this;

and this;

which would be ok for Halloween (maybe) but we're really trying to make it look like this;

I've had several restless nights dreaming about redcoats. Either not being able to find them (a realistic variety of dream), being carried away by a tacky polyester clad British army (a slightly rediculous variety) and being buried in them (um... an obvious viariety)... until finally I found a store on ebay that sells these;


Normally these take a 3 week turn around but after several emails and finally a "I trust you just call me" phone conversation with a very nice and well educated vendor I've managed to get us four Revolutionary War costumes that will be beautiful and fit our actors. Hallelujah! Pass the ammunitions! Here's my $1300 and I am doing a Happy Happy dance around the living room.

Curtian Call/Costume Parade

Well, the theater posted this online and I think it's a pretty good costume parade...

Comedy of Errors photos

Right now I'm so tired and yet awake... not awake enough to make sense, but awake enough to post a few photos... I did bring the film camera this time. Bought a new battery for it and let's hope that's enough. If nothing else, the producer took some good shots to share with me and these at least give you the idea of what the show looks like. I'm actually pretty happy with it.

Comedy of Errors Research

I thought I would show off some of the inspiration for my next show, The Comedy of Errors.  

I am drawing a lot of inspiration from the Tokyo counter culture scene (the Harijuku style).  Bright loud colors, odd proportions... fun.

I hope to figure out how to put some crazy dreads on stage, and crinolines...
The Courtesan is going to be very Rockabilly/Bettie Paige... sexy!

That's it for now... updates to come (most likey on Postcards)
Ta for now!

Troilus and Cressida Research

For the Curious I decided to post some of the research I did for Troilus and Cressida.

Here you see the Trojan army; based on Iraqi/Middle Eastern military.  In the end I changed the Trojans into a blue uniform that would have been truly useless in the desert, but prooved useful to tell soldiers apart on stage. What carried over was the cut of the uniform and the way they are so well tucked together. Priam (The King) had one scene that wound up being cut...

The greeks were inspired by the US Army, and a little by Apocalypse Now and Mad Max

These were images for Thersites; the narrator/ magpie/ camp follower... part Greek, part Trojan, mostly just looking to survive.
The Greek Generals;
Cassandra (the woman who foresaw the destruction of her family and city) was put in a straight jacket... and Cressida (a pretty war trophy) was intended to be modern day Mid-Eastern beauty.
For production photos click here.

Evita Fittings

This week began the epic journey that is Evita.  There is a cast of 34 including teenagers and children.  The average cast member has about 7 to 10 costumes each.  That's only the amount of costumes, the changes are more than that because they repeat a few of those.  We now kiss our free time adios... and get hunkered into the routine of frantically setting up alterations between fittings that last about two hours each.  Today we spent two hours with our Evita and we will have at least another two fittings with her... all I can say is thank goodness she is a delight.  She mentioned that there were a few videos of her on youTube that she can't bring herself to watch... however I decided to look her up and found the video at the bottom... the one good thing about doing a stressful fitting week is that the cast is fun and being with a bunch of theatricals isn't so bad most of the time.

Thank You Google!

I Googled my name and found that I got a mention for my Octopus costumes in a theater review;



It's only one line, but hey my costumes were "a visual treat"

Awesome!

Clothing word of the Day

Since I am doing Sweeney Todd right now I was thrilled to learn This word;

Brought to you via Dictionary.com;

tatterdemalion \tat-uhr-dih-MAYL-yuhn; -MAY-lee-uhn\, noun:
1. A person dressed in tattered or ragged clothing; a ragamuffin.

adjective:
1. Tattered; ragged.

Last time peasant blouses surfaced, in the 1960s and '70s, they were part of an epidemic of Indian bedspread dresses, homemade blue-jean skirts, Army surplus jackets, Greek bookbag purses and love beads, the whole eclectic tatterdemalion mix meant to express egalitarian sentiments and countercultural solidarity with underdogs everywhere.
-- Patricia McLaughlin, "The peasant look", Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, April 25, 1999

Some shop!

I must take a moment to pat myself on the back... my shop is getting to be so organized! This week I finished measuring and tagging all of the blazers...

and the suits...

I separated and labeled the sweaters, the pants, the knit tops...

I made sure the shoes were all on the correct shelves (A Sisyphean task at best)...

Why is all of this super anal work important you ask? Mostly because when you're pulling for a show time is not on your side. If a designer needs to dig through 50 pairs of black pants to see if she can find one pair that will fit an actor, it is actually more time efficient to go to the store and buy a pair that say "38x32" on the tag... then the next designer has 51 pairs of black pants to ignore because none of them are labeled. Pretty soon you have essentially a stock that is a big laundry heap where nothing is useful because nothing can be found. A disorganized stock is about as useful as no stock at all. Thus; I'm pretty pleased with my efforts.

Shakespearian Insult Time!

Why art thou then exasperate, thou idle immaterial skien of sleave-silk, thou green scarcenet flap for a sore eye, thou tassel of a prodigal's purse thou? Ah how the poor world is pestered with such waterflies, diminutives of nature!
--Thersites, Troilis and Cressida

Does half of your brain hurt?

Check this out; http://www.i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=25642

Muddy shoes

Today I had the fun of painting clean pretty clothes into looking like they've been through a week long trip in the catskills with rain, mud, a porqupine fight and the rescue of a bleeding dog... here's my "studio" mid process...

To ruin shoes it requires the following steps;
1. Field research

2. cover the shoes in a mixture of Gesso, and potting mix
3. paint over dry Gesso a layer of Raw Umber acrylic paint

4. Next layer is a Burnt Umber (leaving a little Raw Umber peaking through)

5. a slight smatterning of Burnt Sienna...

Voila! Shoes that feel like new but look Disgusting!

Mold making for Evil Dead

Zombies!

Right now my housemate is working on Evil Dead The Musical, so I've been hyper-aware of all things zombie. Yesterday he spent the whole day making life-casts of the entire cast (he promises a youTube video, totally different than the one below). Attending the session were; the prop master, the set Designer/tech director , a prosthetic's designer, the prosthetic's designer's friend, the prosthetic designer's friend's wife, the Contra Costa Times reporter, the SF Chronicle reporter, the actors, various actor's girl friends and boyfreinds, and the set designer's dog. Zombies are fascinating. Why is that?

Waiting around... (an update)

At times the life of a theatrical is like a long anxious spring break with no money... yep it's called unemployment.  This past week I had cleared for a job that I thought would start right away on.  I attended the first rehearsal and was ready for the designer to tell me "ok lets start fittings on Saturday".  It's a short turn around, most designers are anxious to start right away.  Not so. The designer told me "I want to start fittings next Thursday" leaving me a week and a half that I could have been working off my debts.  

I am unemployed.

I am broke.

I am bored.

I had such a frenzy preparing for this week that everything is clean.  Everything is ready.  I even made myself a summer shirt... 

It's hard to be too upset about an unplanned "vacation" but without any money to do anything in addition to the fact that I had rejected work makes it rather lame.  

On Thursday I got a call to help out for emergency stitching on Friday and Saturday... Hallelujah! 

In a town...

Ok we didn't get the movie voice over guy to do our trailer... but my stage play has a trailer...
wacky!

check it out HERE!

Water water everywhere...

Tech cancelled tonight due to strep throat... sickness is a show stopper whenever there is kissing involved.  Thankfully the evening off allows me to get artsy things done that I hadn't expected to finish.  No time to blog at length... my long dinner is about over.  Hopefully everything will be back on track tomorrow.Above our kick-ass P.A. walks the deck while the producers read the lines and the Stage Manager runs cues with the board ops... can't waste the whole night.

Tech Week

(tek•week) n. Jargon 1. The week in which a theatrical production works with all technical elements and performers in the performance space.  2. a 40 to 80 hour work week where everybody ignores "labor laws" ; I haven't been able to sleep more than a few hours a day but I'm in Tech Week so it is expected.  3. The week in which friends and family of theatrical workers must accept the near to total absence of said theatrical ; I haven't seen my sister for a while, either she was abducted by aliens or she is in Tech Week.

--abbrv. Tech

--archaic. Hell week

Me and my wooden friend; together again.

While studying Costume design in school I was flummoxed by how many designers are terrible at rendering (that's designer speak for drawing and painting your ideas in a semi-technical manner).   Now I understand.  Honestly it is something that isn't necessary all the time.  Last night I sat down with my watercolors and my little wooden model and painted the first full color rendering I've done all year. Often directors are intimidated by completed drawings, as though the ideas were in stone. Often it just takes too long to complete a set of drawings for a show. Sometimes clippings from catalogues and research books are plenty of information. Usually the only reason to actually sit down with your pen and ink is because you are fortunate enough to have a shop building your show. Mostly this is not the case and it is just lil' ol' you (and maybe an assistant) doing the show by rubbing two pennies together hoping they will make a nickel. This rendering was done to help my collaborators visualize what I've been telling them I'm planning. Sometimes it's hard to have somebody show you three pictures and tell you "we're using this jacket, this hat and these pants, only this will be tailored in and this will be painted like this..." in this case it was easier to sit down and draw... like a real artist! I wish I had more drawing and less shopping in my work(sigh). Forgive my reluctance to post my work online. I am happy with the drawing, but it is my professional work and I don't need to give it to the world for free.

Costume Fittings

In Costuming a play we go through a process of "fittings" where we try everything on actors and make adjustments as needed. Getting there goes like this;
As I approach fittings I become a tightly wound ball of antici...pation. I get anxious about every choice I've made and actually seeing it on the actors. I spend hours putting every sequence of choices in order, rearranging them, getting rid of some things before bringing them into the fitting. I lay out scenes on the table to see what draws attention or if I've chosen things that are all too similar... I think this process of pre-fitting selection is more intense on modern shows where there's not really the option of making drawings in advance.
What I really hope for in a good fitting are the following;
1. the actor looks 'good' ('good' meaning; the way that their character should look)
2. the actor is happy and sees how the clothes will support the action&character
3. the director likes it
4. everything is close to fitting (nothing is worse than having a whole fitting where you've shopped everything too small, too short or whatever there is to make the actor feel like a physical freak)
As I get more adept at sizing people up these fittings do go much more smoothly than they did when I first started out. However experience is not a panacea for perfect fittings and every show is different. Eras, brands, characters all change how clothes do or should fit on a body. Once you get a garment on a person it changes completely, thus as I approach fittings I become hypercritical of every garment I encounter. I judge everything about it including how it feels, looks, how it will look under stage light, stitching quality, where the darts are, how the colors will look on the performer, pleats, buttons, lining, what historical eras or people it reminds me of... yea there's a lot of thought going into the decision between "blue jeans with a dark rinse vs. blue pinstripe dress pants". As the fittings get closer, getting myself dressed in the morning becomes more of an ordeal than it should be.
Once I've been through first fittings I'll be able to breathe a little. I'll at least have a better idea of how effective my choices have been, how my actors wear their clothes, any ideas the director and I have missed... A wealth of information awaits me on the other side of fittings, but for now I must rearrange the costume rack again and make another trip to the mall as I face the unknown before me.

the dress complete

"Head wound; dark blood or light blood?"

This is what I text to my father (the former EMT) and my friend Kevin (the former ER psych worker)... really I revel in this. I love coming in to work and discussing blood and guts and "exactly what does your eye look like when it is being gouged out?". This week I've had the fun of destroying a perfectly good wedding dress. When I bought it, the woman at the counter looked at the dress and up at me with a wistful longing and asked me, "are you getting married?" I answered with a simple "no" and her heart sank a little... I think she would have cried if she had seen what I was going to do to it... here is phase one;
1. take a perfectly good wedding dress, cut up the hem...

2. drag it through some mud, dye the train, and dump some brown paint on it.

3. repeat but create a nice ombre by adding black & drag through some more mud...



Phase two will involve blood... ah I love my job sometimes.

ok I'm back... with a rant about fur

I have always thought that fur is gross. When I was a little kid I remember my mother inherited some fox stoles, that looked a lot like our family dog by the way, and I screamed and made her get rid of them. Fur is just a barely processed carcass and I find it so morbid to want to wear it around. For normal people a distaste for fur is probably not a big deal. Basically you just don’t buy it and you don’t have to deal with it. You could be an activist and make a point about not wearing it or designing with it (as Stella McCartney has done so tastefully). You could be a big self-important ass hole and throw paint at other people’s furs, but that’s the kind of forceful preachiness that is akin to door to door proselytizing. Either way you would not have to actually touch the dead thing. In my world however I HAVE to deal with old rotting nasty furs. In the costume world we have to portray every possible type of person in every possible era. It is impossible to avoid the fact that in many eras and many places fur is not the faux pas that it is here, thus I am forced to store fur in my stock. I have to touch the nice ones as well although I still think that they’re ’icky’. Despite the fact that fake furs these days look lovely and real and store very easily, at work I have five boxes full of stoles and collars and bits of furs... I just slapped the label "dead things" on them and put them up on a tall shelf hoping that if a designer wants to use them that they will be the one sorting through them. Unfortunately, my avoidance of the dead things does not stop them from coming in. People bring donations and think that they are being so generous by giving me new boxes of rotting dead things that they couldn’t sore either. Old ladies sigh as they hand them over to me wishing that they weren’t so "politically incorrect these days". I smile and leave the dead thing in the box until they go away and I can pull out my gloves so as to avoid actually touching it. Right now I have a full plastic bin in my shop waiting to be inventoried and examined for usefulness. It’s too disgusting. It’s like reaching into a bin full of writhing snakes... I lack the stomach for it right now.

RIP?

...nevermind

Beading

Somewhere in New Jersey there is a woman sitting alone at an easel hand beading a gown for Bob Mackie. Craftsmanship is often a devalued commodity in our ready-to-wear culture but it still exists. Bessie Nelson still hand beads for big name shows and performers because there are no machines to do it and the outsourced labor is insufficient to withstand a pounding from a Broadway schedule. The New York Times says that Bessie charges about $5000 to $8000 per outfit which seems to me a truly reasonable fee for a high profile outfit that will withstand a pounding and probably take anywere from two weeks (a rush order) to two months to bead by hand, one tiny bead at a time. Check out the full New York Times article HERE.

Load-In

The "Load-in" is where all elements of a stage production are pulled into the actual stage space. It's usually a long two or three day process involving a lot of overtime and skipping around labor-law loopholes. My housemate is a technical director (he's in charge of building the scenery) and recently made a time elapse video of his Cabaret load-in. So here is a minute of video representing about three days of work.

Reality Check

"oh you work in the theater, that must be so Fun!"
I look at the woman's face all aglow with dreams of a career in the arts, nights spent in the theater and a life of fulfilling conversations about art. I smile and say as compassionately as possible,
"Most of the time it is".

That is as true as I can be with most non-artists. Painters, illustrators, animators, and other such people making a living in the arts can understand. Most parents of artists have a tenuous grasp to a firm hold on the life of an artist or artisan. Spouses of artists can mostly understand... it's not that a career in the arts is not "fun" but it is also a maddening drive, it is a lifestyle, it is a job. I couldn't trade my sewing machine for a cubicle but after ten hours of sitting in front of the humming beast hemming soft goods there is no counting the other careers I could have chosen that would not involve eye infections from fabric dust.

In this blog I hope to share what it is truly like to work in the arts. It can be great, it can be torture, it is often crazy and exciting and at other times is just dirty and gross. Hopefully I'll be able to coax a few of my peers to contribute as well... we will create a collection of stories that will comfort other artists with camaraderie and educate anybody who has dreamed of a career in the arts.

February is going to be a bumpy month for me. I'll be scrambling for work in a very slow and short month. I'll also be working on getting all of my tax information together which I assure you will take a good amount of time. This year I am waiting on no less than 8 different w-2 and 1099 forms, I'm counting on making a post about that fun.

Until the next...

Blog pending...

It seems that blogs with a specific focus are more interesting. There have been articles, news, clips, and events that are more related to my work than to my "how was your day?" blog... so I'm starting a new theater/show buisness related blog... soon. Today I am mostly just getting it set up. So if you happened to surf into this blog, check back in a week or so, I should have more interesting posts up by then.