Old Fashioned Drops

 A friend of mine, Joseph Cummings, recently designed Into the Breeches! for Mainstage Irving / Las Colinas.  

He used several beautiful, old-fashioned painted drops created by Dallas's former Wolf Studio.  This was an important theatrical design and scene shop - founded by Peter Wolf - that once created all the scenery for Dallas Summer Musicals (now Broadway Dallas).  Many local designers and painters worked there, including the noted designer Bob Lavallee and the late Wade Giampa.  (Who was an enormous help to me as I was finding my feet as a theater designer.  So kind and so much missed...)

THIS is the kind of thing that studio routinely produced!

 

Drops by Wolf Studio, reused for Into the Breeches! Mainstage Irving/Las Colinas, designer Joseph Cummings

Joseph has started researching the history of Wolf Studio - as I hear more about it I'll pass on more pictures.  UPDATE:  Read Joseph's blog HERE for a history of Peter Wolf's studio and these particular drops.

That downstage teaser, the swoopy proscenium design, was created in the 1970s for a touring regional / Broadway production of Sound of Music.

Addendum:  When I designed Into the Breeches! a few years earlier at Stage West, I too felt the need for painted drops... so their shop's talented scenic painter painted a few small "banners" AKA "legs":

Lincoln's Birthday

 This quote from Lincoln's 1862 address to Congress was pointed out to me today:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Happy Moments

 

I got to design and build an Ent-ish tree!

For Pocket Sandwich Theatre's Herbbits, Wizards & Borks, Oh My!

Hope and Gratitude

In this depressing time - and it's not just the gray cold weather - I'm trying to find and share hopeful, thoughtful things.  

From today's email, this thought from national treasure Dolly Parton:

"I make a point to appreciate all the little things in my life, because I learned early that if you don't, you get disappointed a lot. If you do, you might be pleasantly surprised quite often.

I go out and smell the air after a good, hard rain. I re-read passages from my favorite books. I hold the little treasures that somebody special gave me. By keeping my eyes open for unexpected joys, I find the world gives back more than we sometimes think."

          Source: Author James Clear's newsletter and originally from Dream More (paraphrased)

What "little things" am I grateful for today?

Well, the sun is shining.  My heat is working great.  My tropical plants, pining inside by the window during our cold snap, can go play outside again tomorrow.  And in the news... well, hum right on past most of the news... but one January 6th insurrectionist has refused her pardon because she now realizes she was wrong.

There are rays of hope. 

I'm grateful.

Catching up with This New Year

 Well.

It's been a year here.  Lots of theater work last Spring, family sickness after that...  A useful, difficult, unexpected year.  And this new year?  It looks to be different but the same: difficult, we can expect surprises, and certainly can expect it to be at times very difficult.

Here are a few brighter spots:

1)  Spring will come.  Even in a year where it Snows in New Orleans! it will thaw into Spring.

2)  There is plenty of work to be done.  And here we all are, sleeves rolled up, able (if not quite ready) to pitch in to help.  

3)  Art still matters, perhaps more than ever.  Go ye forth and make some!

I'm rereading Alain de Botton's The Architecture of Happiness.  (Highly recommend!  Both for the Architecture and the Happiness.)  I'm going to excerpt a bit here:

"In his memoirs, the German theologian Paul Tillich explained that art had always left him cold as a pampered and trouble-free young man... Then the First World War broke out, he was called up and, in a period of leave from his battalion (three quarters of whose members would be killed in the course of the conflict), he found himself in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin during a rain storm.  There, in a small upper gallery, he came across Sandro Botticelli's Madonna and Child with Eight Singing Angels and, on meeting the wise, fragile, compassionate gaze of the Virgin, surprised himself by beginning to sob uncontrollably."

Courtesy of Wikipedia

Even in my little corner of the theater world - a long way indeed from Botticelli - I have met a few people who told me that a play has touched them and, in one instance, it was the alarm to leave a bad relationship.  

Echo Theatre's production of Lauren Gunderson's Natural Shocks 

Wonderful that the threatening furnace (that my subconscious understood)

was the warning a viewer in danger needed to see 

So.  Art.  Of practical use too sometimes.

Also, here is a little vid I found heartening today, from Austen Kleon (whose book Keep Going remains helpful) about the importance of planting your garden:

Plant Your Garden

Today

 

 

Big News in Aenoriia! (Where?)

I'm excited!  

That huge - and ever growing - fantasy world in Minecraft that I've been helping build for years now is finally open for download!  

View of the city of Illias with Silverwood in the foreground

Available on AstrophagyMC's Patreon:  https://www.patreon.com/astrophagymc

AstrophagyMC in Illias

VOTE!

 Just that.

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