End of the Rainbow

At Uptown Players.

A show well worth seeing.  A good story - with  Judy Garland near the end of her career - a great cast and production.

Extraordinary leading lady!  Janelle Lutz.  Just... wow.

Opening was Friday night, so I've caught my breath again after the last mad rush that always happens.  I'm pretty happy with the set - a suite at the London Ritz in 1969.   With maybe a little secret tucked away.  Thanks big-time to TD / wiz carpenter Dennis Canright, set dresser Kevin Brown, prop designer Jane Quetin (who found great furniture), lighting designer Jason Foster (who made it look so good), and director Cheryl Denson (who, besides being fun to work with, talked me off a small ledge re: miss-matched fabric wall covering).

Special thanks to Ella Forester, fashion blogger of Els Chamber who kindly allowed us to use one of her photographs as the view outside Judy's window.  I'll attach a better photo with Judy at the window looking at that view when I get my hands on it, meanwhile...

End of the Rainbow at Uptown Players, photo (I think) by Dennis Canright

Here you can see the hotel room set, window closed, under theatrical lighting.  Just a hint of the view...

End of the Rainbow under construction - 

photos by Clare Floyd DeVries

The view as BIG copies.  Added bonus: a view of

building Judy's fantastic vintage Louis Vuitton style trunk

And here the view is at earlier stages.

Top above, newly installed view outside the window.  (And wasn't that a nasty tight triangular cubbyhole to work in filled with ladder, lighting equipment, speakers, and cables!  Imagine unrolling 3' wide x 10' high photos on crinkly paper, then - on a ladder with a stapler - trying to line up the architectural railings etc.  Arrrgh!)   

Above, the lower photo, see the view as four separate rolls of giant photocopies, getting trimmed and ready to hang.  

Because the original photo had very muted color, I was able to economize by getting black & white copies and then tinting them a little by hand, rather than paying much more for color copies.  The difference between under $40 and over $200.

That fantastic piano?  Another kind and very lucky loan.  If you notice the floor pattern... that was me, a week earlier, with a brush-onna-stick.

Come see End of the Rainbow.

ADDENDUM:

Here's a photo of that window view as used in the show.

Uptown Player's production of End of the Rainbow -

Mike Morgan Photography

And here's that surprise...

Uptown Player's production of End of the Rainbow -

Mike Morgan Photography

Calling All Stage Carpenters!

Uptown Players is looking for carps.

Contact Dennis Canright.  (Or me, and I'll pass you on.)

Bonus, you'd get to build my design for End of the Rainbow.  Woohoo!

In the Press

A few interesting items from newspapers:

On a personal note, I am chuffed to discover that Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike at Uptown Players is a hit.  According to the Fort Worth Star Telegram:

 "It’s the best production of a play that Uptown Players has ever done, and it doesn’t hurt that the script is one that, like the great writer from which it takes its inspiration, is destined for classic status."  

Wohoo!  Read the rest of the review HERE.  I really do admire this script and cast.  Earlier post on the show HERE.

Les Demoiselles de Avignon, Pablo Picasso - public domain at Wikipedia

On a non-personal but still theatrical note...

There's an interesting op-ed in the New York Times written by actor James Franco about the recent plagiarism scandal around another actor's, Shia LeBeouf's, creative? endeavours...  It's an thoughtful and maybe even a plausible take on behavior that, in anyone not a famous actor, would be considered mere cheating and brattiness.  Read it HERE.  

I think Franco may have a point (I've seen a few actors let much less fame that LaBeouf's go straight to their egos), but it seems... inconsistent... for anyone to act out because they're treated "special" while counting on that "special"ness to shield them from the consequences.

More and more I come to think that we have to separate the work from the man (or woman).  

Picasso was a kinda nasty person who painted well.  Charles Dickens was more flawed than his own Scrooge. More recently, Woody Allen... sigh.  I deeply love many of Allen's movies, but I have no idea where the truth lies in the ugly 20 year old accusations against him that have resurfaced.   I can only be glad that I need never decide whether to let him babysit my kid and can, instead, just rewatch Manhattan.  Whatever Allen is or did I choose not to devalue his work, just as I'll always love the story of Scrooge's redemption and Picasso's blue guitarist.  

I think it's often true that the artist puts the best part of themselves into their work (leaving the worst for us to cope with in daily life), while The Work seems to go on to develop a  life independent of its creator.  

In which case... maybe LaBeouf's biggest sin isn't so much plagiarizing others as that, by casting doubt, by NOT putting his best self out there, he betrays his own body of work, past and future.

Comments?

The Importance of Drawing

In architecture -  but also to any type of design or designer.

Here's the master Michael Graves writing in the New York Times: "Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing."  I absolutely agree - drawing and the designer's hand are part of the machinery of thought, vital parts of study, memory, and creation.

I am also strangely encouraged to discover that I share my love of the humble rolls of yellow tracing paper known to architects of my generation as "yellow trace" or, most affectionately, "trash paper."

(Because, while designing, we trash soooo much of it.)

A sketch for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels at Uptown Players, copyrighted, of course

As Michael Graves's sketches are copyrighted, here's the most Gravesian of my own, a sketch for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on - of course! - yellow trace.


An earlier post on architectural sketching HERE.

Giving Day

Today is North Texas Giving Day - your best  chance to support the performing arts in DFW, while streeeetching your dollar.

All gifts of $25 or more given TODAY will be "matched" by extra funds!  (Just like mine were.)

For the price of two movie tickets, we theater folk would be very very grateful.  

And your support will go a long way!  At Kitchen Dog...

$25 pays for copies of the script for the cast, designers, and crew

$50 buys two lightbulbs for stage lights (see why theater's expensive?)

$150 pays for one costume for one actor

$1000 pays all expenses for one staged reading of a new play

$5000 buys building supplies for all shows in a season (we pinch pennies!).

Just click on the theater name to reach the Giving Day page, where Spending Your Cash For a Good Cause is made very simple and pleasant, even down-right enjoyable.  It's that glow of nobility, that's what it is.

KITCHEN DOG THEATER  

And here are some other theaters doing good work, that I also work with:

WATERTOWER THEATER  

CIRCLE THEATRE  

UPTOWN PLAYERS

Thank you.  There IS no theater without you.

First Peek at The Divine Sister

Here's the first photo I've seen of my newly-completed-paint-barely-dry set for The Divine Sister at Uptown Players.

Photo courtesy of Uptown Players

Notice my St. Francis church window?  With his traditional giraffe of course...  

Dressing a Boar

Well, Set dressing with a Boar's head.

A fake one.

My set for Uptown Player's The Divine Sister consists of two sets, really, splitting the revolve at the Kalita Humphreys theater.  The big half represents St. Veronica's convent school; the small half is the living room of a mansion.  It seems that the late husband of this rich widow was a naturalist and traveler, so naturally we looked for "naturalist" sorta stuff to use as set dressing for the it-could-otherwise-be-generic rich lady's salon.  I borrowed African masks, framed copies of Audubon's bird paintings, and even framed my own home-made (paper) butterfly collection, then...

One of the interns has a connection to SMU's theater department.  Several of us remembered the handsome faux animal heads that hang in SMU's shop and... well, there was this gorgeous Boar's Head.  And we could borrow it!

It's about the size of a small car - a Smart Car, maybe.

A HUGE black Boars's head!

A Boar's Head - public domain image from Wikipedia Commons

Cool.

Years ago I watched SMU's wizard of a prop designer build this surprisingly light-weight fake taxidermy specimen hair by hair.  Incredible!  I've always admired it.  Was thrilled at this chance to use it.  So now, over my large faux marble fireplace in this elegant, rather dainty, lady's sitting room there hangs this monstrously over-sized pig head.

This creates a few decorative problems.  For one thing, although the fireplace mantel is tall and the set wall is tall and the fireplace-breast even taller, the director needed the piggy hung very very low so the dainty-sized actress can touch it.

This looks kinda like...
                                 the boar's head is so heavy it...
                                                                      slid down the wall.

But I fixed that.  Some.  I added a temple-front "cap" to the wall (to make it look shorter) and then added a faux stone heraldic shield between that cap and the Head to help fill the upper part of the wall (a shield left over from Shakespeare's Richard III, most recently reused over the fireplace for Boeing, Boeing).  Then I dressed the mantel top with over-sized candlesticks and photo frames.

Now it looks rather as if the Boar is pushing his Head through the wall to look at snaps of the late husband.  (I found great man-with-mustache-in-pith-helmet photos!)

Funny.

Then I dragged in the biggest, blackest classical urn I could find to hold the decorative palm tree off in the set's corner... so The Boar's Head isn't the only big, black thing on set.

ADDENDUM: a link to an earlier post on using art as set dressing HERE.