UW Whitewater Theatre/Dance Department

I’m taking a break from painting scenery to forge ahead with paint elevations so I will know what to paint on upcoming scenery. Here’s a shot of the stage as it was at the start of shop yesterday, with the under-walls for the upstage platforming in place. That’s director Jim Butchart’s fainting couch center, which we’ll be using for Judge Turpin’s parlor.

In the shop, Quinn works on the framing for one of the roofline flats:

While Lilliana lays out the details of the next one:

Down in the costume shop, work is also continuing apace. Here shop supervisor Tracey Lyons shows Shelby how to thread the serger:

Meanwhile, Bridget works on one of the dresses:

And I return to the drafting table for the rest of the afternoon:

Some shop progress pics: Lilliana lays something out while Dennis also lays something out.

Steve sealed the floor this morning in preparation of putting up the upstage platforming.

And a close-up of the floor. Just because.

First, the new ticket booth is up and running in the atrium, but they discovered that people can look right through the display case at all the information displayed on the ticketing monitors. Until a permanent solution can be applied, our chair, Marshall Anderson (and one of our costume designers), set up a snazzy display with costumes from last Spring’s “The Furies” (which he designed).

Yesterday, our TD and I got to talking about when I was going to get to paint the floor and we decided that yes, it would be a good idea to do this before walls go up. I don’t have classes on Thursdays this semester, so I hit the theatre in the morning. . .

. . . and painted all day.

Tomorrow, it gets sealed, and all those walls leaning upstage can start getting put into place.

Since I was busy painting, I didn’t have a chance to get photos of students working in the shop, but here’s one of Allison painting the cladding for the upright posts.

Yesterday, the shop started cranking out pieces for “Sweeney Todd.” They’re mostly understructure for the tonsorial parlor and it’s much, much easier to paint them before they get installed. I went in yesterday afternoon to get those pieces based:

The problem, of course, is if you’re already painting the scenery it cuts down on time to prepare the paint elevations. At least I got some of the pictorial work figured out beforehand:

Meanwhile, construction continues at a rather furious pace. Here Joe and Bruce work on one of the platforms for the downstage galleries:

And a group of student finish up one of the escape stair units:

While Lilliana and Quinn prime another stair unit:

And I work out the sketching on the flats:

The KCACTF Festival is over, and we’re back at school, though classes don’t begin until next Tuesday. Time to revise syllabi for the Spring, get plans together, work on the book (the full draft is due Feb 1st), and get rolling on “Sweeney Todd.” Some in progress paint elevations on the drafting table:

Steve, our TD, started the shop up this week in order to get a jump on things and tells me he’ll have a major wall ready for me to start painting today. . . huzzah? Oh, did I mention I need to get some drawings for “Midsummer’s Night” going and there’s a stack of Audit and Review reports I need to read?

This past week Tracey Lyons and I (with occasional appearances by Jim Butchart, since he lives in Milwaukee) spent five days at the KCACTF Region 3 Annual Festival, this time hosted by UW-Milwaukee. We took about ten Irene Ryan nominees and their partners, three stage managers, a costume design, and a sound design.

Here is most of the group, shortly after the stage management presentations:

And here are our three stage managers, Brianna, Emily, and Allison:

Here’s the unrealized costume design presented by Katie Krueger:

While none our students moved forward in the competitions, much was learned and they had the chance to present their work to complete strangers, as well as check out the work done by their peers at a number of other institutions. We’re pretty darned proud of the work our students presented and hope they take the things they learned and push on even further in their work during the coming year.

We always encourage (well, force) our students to be as active as possible at the festival. Even if they don’t move forward in their respective competitions, we expect them to attend seminars and get involved with things like Design Storm and the play readings. Our costume designer joined the critical writing program. We had four students cast in the staged readings of new plays.

Joe (in the middle) gets ready for a one-act:

Abby (second from the left) waits while the full-length is introduced. Quite frankly, I though this full length student-written play was the most satisfying piece of theatre I saw this festival.

For some reason, I can never get our students to do the Tech Olympics, even though they’ve all learned how to do it all in Intro to Tech, and most of them continue to do shop work. Sigh. Finally, here’s Tracey hiding behind her coffee as we wait to see the design presentations.

Oh, on a totally different note, I was interviewed by Gionofer Fields for Milwaukee Public Radio’s Lake Effect program on scenic design and our upcoming “Sweeney Todd.” The interview can be found here!

http://wuwm.com/post/fleet-street-comes-alive-through-thoughtful-set-direction

Presentations of Intro to Design’s final lighting design project happened this morning, and now the corridor is lined with projects:

Which means finishing up the grading, entering the grades, then doing some more work on “Sweeney Todd”. . .

. . . which I suspect will indeed kill us all since we’ve only got about two and a half weeks to build it when we return in January. We’ve also started meetings on “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.” Meanwhile, the next book chunk deadline is Jan 1st, and we hope to have four or five more chapters to send in. On the other hand, we’ve printed out the first nine chapters and will now go through them with a fine-toothed editor’s comb.

The day before Thanksgiving was the day the Intro to Theatre class’s costume design products were due. We spent the class period looking at them, and yesterday I dug in and started evaluating them. This is one of my favorite Intro projects, as the students do something they never before thought they were capable of doing.

There was also the push to get the groundplan of “Sweeney Todd” into the hands of all concerned:

Then, the fastest way to get more info to our technical director is to launch into the 3D modeling:

Now, heading full speed into cranking of “Sweeney Todd” drawings. This afternoon, working out small groundplans for all the wagons and other bits before launching into more detailed drawings:

Strangely enough, a friend of the music department had a harmonium for sale just when we needed it most:

And this morning, Tracey’s camera broke during her make-up class. I ran down to snap photos of students’ prosthetic work. Here are some of them working on their projects:

Just heading down to talk to the director and TD. . .