I Needed the Laugh

Awards can get a little... crazy.  

I just found out this year's nominations for The Column Awards.  

Perhaps you remember a couple of earlier posts of mine on the intricacies of scenic design and plagiarism versus legitimate reuse etc.  HERE and HERE. The short version is that a tree - and the rest of its set - for A Midsummer's Night's Dream somehow ended up, to its designer's surprise, on stage again as a set for Camelot.

A Midsummer's Night's Dream, Trinity Shakespeare Festival - 

set design DEFINITELY by Bob Lavallee

Camelot, Lyric Stage - photographer unknown 

set design still by Bob Lavallee... or, and... well, it's complicated

So... now BOTH sets have been nominated for awards!  The Shakespeare play's set as "Best Original Scenic Design of a Play - Equity" and its Camelot zombie-after-life as "Best Original Scenic Design of a Musical - non-Equity."  This is credited to both it's actual designer and to its imaginary nom-de-repaint-it-we-won't-say-plagiarism designer, Cornelius Parker.  

That rascal.

Ha!

As a side note, I am appropriately honored to discover that two shows of my own are also so honored:  Kind Lady, for Mainstage Irving-Las Colinas and The Winter's Tale, for Trinity Shakespeare Festival.  

But I'll happily lose - twice! - to that gorgeous tree.

PS I'd be very happy to credit the photographer of that Camelot photo if anyone knows?

News Break

Just found out I won a Critics' Forum Award for the set of The Explorers Club at Stage West and WaterTower Theater.  Pretty cool!  (Critics Forums are hard to get hold of.)

Many thanks - I'm thrilled.  I'm also grateful for the HUGE amount of help from everyone at Stage West who beautifully built, painted, upholstered, created faux books, helped set dress, loaned us taxidermy animal heads (from a WaterTower backer, thank you!), and generally made the set possible.  Twice.

The Explorers Club - Stage West and WaterTower Theater

Note the bar top of cheapo "granite" plastic laminate and foam pool noodles covered with vinyl,

and the painted mahogany.  Behind it is a Plexiglas and Modge-Podge-ed "stained glass" window 

which I decorated, now decorating my studio.

General woodsy library with many stuffed animal heads.  Those books, 

believe it or not, are mostly faked by Stage West's prop designer.

Note the globe used as the topper of the stair's newel post.  There was a funny 

slapstick moment when a character leaned on it.

More libraryishness...  You can see an antelope head.  Photos courtesy of Stage West

My original sketch.  We never found a taxidermy bear, but we were 

kindly loaned a suit of armor instead!  The bar's support lions were another kind loan.

Please Forgive a Little Back-Patting

The Column Awards (Dallas - Fort Worth area theater awards) were held a couple of nights ago and one show I was associated with cleaned the house!

Uptown Players' production of Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike, in its category of Equity Play, won merely:

Best Play; Best Director (B.J. Cleveland); Best Actor (Bob Hess); Best Actress (Wendy Welch); Best Featured Actress (Julia Golder); Best Scenic Design (as Miss Piggy would say, "Moi!"); Best Lighting Design (Jason Foster), and Best Sound Design (B.J. Cleveland).  Sadly even this role-call leaves out a few great people... I guess we had to leave a few awards for somebody else.  Did we?

Woohoo!

All kidding aside, congratulations to the whole Vanya, Sonya, Masha, and Spike team.  It was a terrific show.  And congratulations to all the other winners and nominees and patient un-ballyhooed-this-year worthies who do such good work all around the DFW area.

Uptown Players' Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike - photo via Uptown

Among those who deserved wins, nominations - heck coronations! -  for this set are set dresser Kevin Brown and TD Dennis Canright and his carpenters, painters, and volunteers.

Your Own Awards

Here in the Dallas Fort Worth area one actor noticed that his friends in the civic theaters and smaller professional theaters were never winning any awards no matter how brilliant their work - because all the awards were going to actors and designers working in bigger, better-funded theaters.

So he started his own awards.

The Column Awards have become a staple of the DFW theater season... even outliving the more "established" awards from the now defunct Dallas Theatre League.  I've always admired the spirit of just up and creating your own award.

But I'm even more impressed with director Philip Lord of The Lego Movie who, not able to compete against the bigger, more blockbuster, more "prestigious,"more non-toy! films for an Oscar, has literally created his own award... from Legos!  His tweet HERE:

LEGO (TM) Oscar  (TM) by Philip Lord

for The Lego Movie

Love it!

Pen Award-Winner!

Wonderful!

Se Llama Cristina, a play by Octavio Solis which Kitchen Dog Theater produced last year (and I got to set design) has just won the prestigious Pen Literary Award for Drama!

Se Llama Cristina by Octavio Solis

This photo by Matt Mrozek shows actors Vanessa DeSilvio, Israel Lopez and the shadow of Jeremy Schwartz.  

Also my set... "mine" meaning many, many people's actually.  Christie Vela directed.

Congrats!

The DFW Critics' Forum recently ate their annual fried chicken lunch and handed out kudos to local theater companies.  So a general Congratulations! to the theater artists mentioned.  Well done!

Particular shout-outs of happiness from this blog for the recognition of so many Kitchen Dog shows (the home team, right?) and for praise of both Wingspan Theatre Company and Funhouse Theatre and Film's Daffodil Girls.  These are two examples (ones I personally know best) of small companies with small budgets that are nevertheless rich in ambition and talent and that do terrific work...

Here's to all the Little Theater Engines that Can and Do!

Believed public domain image.

Earlier post on Funhouse Theatre and Film HERE.  Daffodil Girls?  A clever adaptation of David Mamet's Glen Garry Glen Ross... morphed into the cookie sales of the Daffodil Girls.  A wonderful show written by Jeff Swearingen.

The Pritzker Prize and Fairness

The Pritzker Prize is presently THE big award in the field of Architecture.

Sure there's the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects.  But that, as the label says, is purely American (well, U.S.A.), while the Pritzker is world-wide.  Founded in 1979, this award is notably more inclusive in the nationality/religion/skin-color departments and has even, in 2004, started awarding awards to women.  Zaha Hadid was the first female to win, followed by Kazuyo Sejima (who shared that year's prize with Ryue Nishizawa).

The AIA, I'm sorry to say, has never awarded a single gold medal to a single woman.  Ever.  Not in 106 years of existence.

So obviously there have been no women in the practice of architecture in the U.S.

No?  Well, obviously no women who were any good.  Okay, well not until just lately, far too recently to have won medals.   Though...  Julia Morgan?  Early 1900s.  Designed 700 buildings  in California, including Hearst Castle.  Or, jumping to today's crop of wrong-gender American architects, how about Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang? Won a MacArthur "genius" grant.  (Earlier post HERE.)  Or how about that eminent and widely influential architect and theorist Denise Scott Brown?  No gold necklace?

But misogyny is tomorrow's topic.  Today's controversy is another injustice:

In 1991 architect Robert Venturi won the Pritzker Prize.  His architectural partner (of 22 years then, 44 now)  was Denise Scott Brown.  She was co-author with Venturi and Steven Izenour of the seminal book Learning from Las Vegas which put them all on the architectural map.  "Denise Scott Brown is my inspiring and equal partner,"  Venturi writes in the public petition asking the Pritzker Committee to acknowledge her contribution to the work Venturi alone is credited with.

Photo of Denise Scott Brown and Las Vegas  from the petition page HERE.

Architecture is a collaborative design field.  Just as theater or film is.  It's obviously unfair to single out one member of a partnership and ignore the other.  Co-authors are self-acknowledged equals.  But even when creative contributions are less comparable, credit is due where credit is due.  In film a director gets prominent billing, but gaffers get credits.  Theater programs credit a wide range of contribution and ought - and sometimes do - credit the carpenters.

Scott Brown herself asks, "Let's salute the notion of joint creativity."

Please consider signing the petition asking the Pritzker Prize committee to remedy their omission of two decades ago, giving credit now where it's due.  Read the petition HERE.

I am grateful to Metropolis magazine for bringing this to my attention.  Read the article "Architecture's Lean In Moment" by Alexandra Lange HERE.  (BTW, Metropolis is one of the few architecture rags worth reading.)

ADDENDUM:  The Pritzker last year stiffed another female collaborator, when they failed to recognize Lu Wenyu when honoring her husband Wang Shu.  (He signed the petition.)  Two other partnerships have been recognized however.  At best it's... inconsistent.  Architectural Record article HERE.

Vicarious Tony Thrill

Gotta say, it was very satisfying to see the terrific scenery for Matilda win the Tony, after meeting (just days before) its designer, Rob Howell.

As soon as I get more than a minute - today's filled with meetings and set dressing - I'll report in on Mr. Howell's talk at the Broadway Masterclass.  For now, I'll only say that he was one of the best speakers.  Engaging and relaxed and obviously at the top of our profession, in the conversation of the Q and A he gave us insight into the process of designing.

So I was  rootin' for him and Matilda!  A really good show... with (officially now) Superior Scenery.

The Tony Award - from the official website HERE

Matilda pulled in several other awards: Featured Actor, Lighting, Book, and The Matildas (a special award to these four talented girls), plus nominations for the absolutely wonderful Headmistress and Miss Honey.  There's strong competition on Broadway - can't win everything.  Awards are funny things: the old consolation that "just being nominated is the real award" is actually true and a lot of very good work never even gets nominated... yet it's still kinda fun to take home that little statue.

Glad Rob Howell gets to.

(I can only imagine trying to explain the award-gizmo to the airport TSA screeners.)

Embarrassing Post

I promise this won't happen often... but I have to link to a funny cat video.  Really.

LOLcats are everywhere!

But here's the deal: this little black & white flicker of film about Henri is a clever satire of cats, humans, the-tragedy-of-life-as-we-all-know-it, and (not least funny) French Cinema of the most pretentious, um, serious and artsy sort, complete with subtitles.

(I'm told the narrator's accent is so thick that actual French speakers understand better with the sound off.  But do cats have the right shaped palette to speak French properly?  Their English is certainly sub-par.)

This little gem has everything I most respect in, um, Art: it's made for love and learning (you see the filmaking improve between the original Henri and this Paw de Deux); it's made with modest means - using the limitations even as part of the story (especially at the end!); and it has a point of view.

Anyway, here's Henri:  YouTube LINK.

Salon calls this "Officially the best cat video ever."   Henri Paw de Deux just won an apparently prestigious LOLcat-film award.  (They have those?  Sure.  There's an award for everything.)

Nice News

I just found out that my set design for Boeing, Boeing at Circle Theatre won a Column Award!  Pretty cool.

Boeing, Boeing at Circle Theatre, set design by Clare Floyd DeVries

(Click on the pic to see it better.)  It's always very heartening to learn that people like your work.  

This show was a bit tricky to design, mainly because Circle's stage is quite small and the script called for seven (7) doors - the design challenge was to make it NOT look like a wall of doors!  And then to make it look French and '60s. The time period mainly through the Pop Art and details, French through architectural detail and views o' Paris.

Earlier posts on Boeing, Boeing: Shopping, Approaching Opening, Incomparable Theater, and Critics.