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":

Big Tony

Last night The Dallas Theater Center was given a rare Regional Tony Award for their work.   

Well deserved!  

In a radio interview Dallas Theater Center's artistic director, Kevin Moriarty, credited this win "to every carpenter and..." going on to explain that it is the result of decades of good work under several ADs and by many many artists and box office clerks and so on...  

I agree.  This is, in part, a win for the whole theatrical ecosystem of DFW.  

Important as the DTC is and Tony-Award-winningly TM excellent! as it's work obviously is, it just can't do such high quality work without a whole supportive world of contributors.  Contributors of both ticket money and artistic talent.  A Tony!  Wow, what a great validation.

Congratulations!

Speaking of Thanks Due, I'd like to nod now to several theater colleagues who aren't around to share this community thrill:  

Kristina Baker, who died seven years ago now.  A wonderful performer and singer who I remember best as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd.  I remember this show well because it was my first set design for a musical.  (Who knew musicals were different?  Or so hard?)  Kristina was wonderfully patient and good humored about those crazy-tall kinda-welded-together rickety metal stairs I made her climb.  While singing!  This show put WaterTower Theater on the map.  (And me too.)  Kristina helped raise the bar for local actors, while being unfailingly kind and helpful to us all.  Helping create the kind of theater ecosystem we have here.

Wade Giampa, who died in 2009.  A terrific scenic designer.  Lovely scenic painter.  His work raised the production values at Lyric Stage - famous for their musicals - and wherever he worked.  I remember a conversation with him onstage at a civic theater where, as we talked, he nonchalantly painted with a brush on a long bamboo pole... creating, effortlessly!, a birch forest.  A good and wise friend to me as I was learning about theater, generous with his experience.  Kindly sharing hard-earned wisdom with the newbies is - as Wade's example models - one of the best parts of our theater community.

Rene' Moreno, who died this year.  A wonderful director and much sought after, he was famous for the intellectual seriousness of his work and his gift with actors.  But also a lovely actor.  I had the privilege of designing several sets for him and the unique chance to design a set at Kitchen Dog Theater that featured him in Richard III... in a wheelchair.  A design challenge - all ramps - except for one set of stairs where, at the early off-to-the-party-ditch-Richard scene, his Richard was left behind, unable to climb after the others.  From the bottom of those stairs the look on Rene's face...

Or his voice speaking Shakespeare's:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

These were all exceptional people... and yet part and parcel of a work-a-day theatrical community that continues on, doing good work...

So great congratulations to the DTC on their Tony!  And a moment to give thanks to - and for - colleagues like these who create a community in which such a cool thing is possible.

What Goes Around... Goes Around Again

I'm working toward finishing a set for Uptown Players' upcoming End of the Rainbow... the 1969 suite at the London Ritz where Judy Garland stayed.  You know the kind of place: gilded furniture, crystal, flowers, fancy carpet, and gold-colored brocade on the walls.

Brocade that a good friend of mine, the late Wade Giampa, chose years ago for draperies in another fancy hotel suite in the play The Plaza Suite.

Set finishing for Uptown Players' End of the Rainbow

re-using Wade's brocade

Techs this weekend, opens next Friday!

Renderings

In my files I just happened across this image of a gouache rendering by the late Wade Giampa of his set design for Edward Albee's The Play About the Baby.

Gorgeous.

Wingspan Theatre Company's production of The Play About the Baby.