UW Whitewater Theatre/Dance Department

With the drawings for “Deathtrap” done, I’ve begun working up the rendering for the second UW Whitewater Summeround show, “Muskie Love.”

This is the black box space at Wisconsin Lutheran College, where the Optimists have been rehearsing “The Winter’s Tale.” That’s Claire, one of the stage managers, at the table on the right. It’s a small, tall space.

While watching rehearsal last night (which was the second full run through) I started putting together the plot — shades of La Musica Lirica, though at least this time around I know ahead of time how many units and how many dimmers I have to play with. We’ll have 24 1.2k dimmers (4 Leprecon packs with 6 dimmers apiece), but since power is limited, nothing can really play at full. The place we’re borrowing units from had all the radial Altman 6x’s you could hope for, but they were all lamped at 750 watts. They were also filthy, so an afternoon last week was spent cleaning mud out of lens trains.

One of the other challenges of the show will be where to put units. There’s no grid, though there is some 2×2 square steels structure that supports the plastic canopies. They’ve cantilevered two pipes out over the front of the structure to create locations for some steep front light (and I hope the curve of the canopies won’t get in the way of getting light upstage) and I built two floor mount horses that I will place out in the tiers of seating for downstage front light. Everything on the ground will have to get struck each night, and reset before each performance. . .

A reminder of the what the performance venue looks like.

French doors!