lighting – The Actorvist

Hello Gentle Reader!

Well, Sunday marked my final performance for a while, but it was anything but uneventful. 😂 I get to the theatre that afternoon with the mindset that we are going to have a start time of 2pm and I would be back home and in my pajamas relaxing the rest of the night away before chaos week at my survival job. First, I think I have to note that the temperatures were easily in the 100 degree range and possibly hotter. Once you start broiling though, you can’t really tell if it has gotten hotter.

5 minutes to curtain and my casemates get into their places for a reveal that happens shortly after we begin. The “Places” call is made and I head over to spot where I catch a pair of pants that are thrown to me offstage. The curtain speech is made and the main curtain is pulled open and I listen… waiting for my cue to enter.

Up to this point, you could hear this group of people is ready to laugh. They had some good vocalizations while the first actor is giving his exposition speech. I hear my cue “they’d eat the linoleum off the floor if it had a vinaigrette on it”

With that, I am on stage. I get to say, “Maybe his plane is late.” Then slowly, the lights flickered out. Or maybe it felt slow. 2 minutes into the play, the power dies! My cast mate and I stood patiently waiting for a minute or so, in the hopes that it would be a quick little blink of the lights.

And there we stood for what felt like 10 minutes, but was more like a minute in reality. I finally turn to the audience and said, “so how are you doing today?” We had a laugh, but I wanted to keep people in a cheery mood, so I kept talking…

I recall saying “believe it or not, this isn’t the first time I have been in this predicament.” I told them a short story about when I was in White Christmas there was one performance that the lights went out due to winds from an upcoming rainy night that was expected. While we had 2 flood lights at the back of the theatre, they weren’t powerful enough to light the stage safely enough to complete the show. Instead, we offered conversation and the cast gathered on the stage and we sang some carols with the audience. It was really quite a lovely moment to be a part of.

Very kindly, many of the people offered to use their phone lights to keep the stage lit, but I said, you don’t want to drain your battery! Especially if we are in a true power outage.

One of the people asked me to recount the time that I was in Lend Me A Tenor (which was the whole reason why I wanted to be in this show) and how it is to take on the role of Max again. I know I had written about my experience and as I am sure you know, Dear Reader, I am terrible at marketing myself. Instead of saying that I had a whole blog post about it and they could read it on TheActorvist.com, my face hole said “I can’t fully remember the details. But I have a reason why…” then spouted (like some sort of snob) that I was in several shows that year that rolled into each other that it was hard to recall all the details. Only after someone from our stage crew gave us the hook did I think about trying to recount the blog post itself.

UGH!!! I could kick myself. LOL

I feel very lucky that even though it was only a small majority of the audience would come back for the postponed start time, they were a lively bunch. What a way to end a super fun run! The cast and staff were absolutely wonderful and the rehearsal period was short as was the run. It couldn’t have been more perfect. Even with all of our oopsies. 😂 Or would a plural of oopsies be oopsieses?

What out of the ordinary thing has happened to you in a theatre? Did I tell you about the time that someone was breathing oddly and unresponsive during a show? Wait this isn’t about my stories 😳 I want to know more about YOU!

Thank you again, Kind Reader for your time and until next time… Stay safe and alert and take care of yourself and those you care about.

❤️

Hello Gentle Reader!

It has been a bit, hasn’t it?

I hope you are well and healthy and had a lovely weekend.

Sadly, I found out about two people passing away. Each dear to me in their own way and neither in the same relation circle so it’s like which ever way I turn to face, I have to look at sadness. 😒

On Sunday, I found out that my cousin, Scott, but we always called him Scotty, had passed after he’d been hospitalized and a friend from the theatre, Mike, had passed on Saturday.

If there was one great regret that I have about stepping away from family functions and such it would be because of missing my cousin Scotty. He was fearless. A little reckless, but always willing to try dares, and especially gross food mixing stuff. I remember my aunt always yelling at him for doing something but one of the main things was reaching over and honking the horn while she drove under an overpass near their home. He did it every time, so I don’t know why it always surprised her, but it did.

One of my most favorite memories was when my dad took us and my little brother to see 101 Dalmatians in the small movie theater in the neighborhood. I remember there weren’t many people in the auditorium but we were up near the front. Then the scene came on where Cruella DeVil is driving furiously to catch the large truck the dogs were in and she has to miss the bridge and drive down an embankment and into a pile of snow. As she is driving the embankment, she is bouncing all around in her car and Scotty lets out his crazy laugh that has a sort of Pee Wee Herman quality to it. It sounds to old to be a child’s laugh if that makes any sense. Think Ricky Ricardo having a belly laugh. Any how, he lets out this big “HA HA” that is so loud it makes us laugh. Then, after Cruella has got back on the road, there is a point where her hair is all crazy and there is a close up on her red eyes and they have that spiral going on in them.

For some reason, that just makes him laugh more. This in turn makes us laugh and all the way through the rest of the scene up to the crash, we are laughing so hard because of his goofy laugh.

I am gonna miss that crazy kid, but so thankful that he showed me what being fearless looked like.

Mike was a different kind of cat. He was an excellent lighting designer. His credits are in the hundreds, easily. Maybe even more but I know he worked on many of the same projects that I did. I do believe that the first show I had met him on was Gypsy. I didn’t really get a chance to know him until I was in Smokey Joe’s Cafe.

We would talk about his love of dance, the shows that he saw in New York, the show he was going to see on his next trip and sometimes about when he had done shows. I used to think that he was a grumpy man, but I came to realize that he just had a very serious face unless he was smiling or laughing.

I had never seen this happen ever, but once, I think it was during the opening weekend or maybe after the Friday night show of a production of Jesus Christ Superstar, somehow, all of the lighting cues were deleted. All of them. There was nothing and Mike came in and overnight recreated the entire show. When the cast came in for our call, we had no idea until the stage manager had mentioned it. Insane!

I think my favorite thing that I will remember with Mike was working on the lighting for my directorial projects. As a cast member to meet and interact with the lighting designer is fun and cool but as a director your interactions are much more intense. I always would give him so much sass about having to use a fog element in his designs and once he explained it to me, I couldn’t unsee how much it helped.

On Jesus Christ Superstar, not the aforementioned, at the start of the 39 lashes, the lights were much less red and you could see the faces of the upstage cast. As the lashes continued, so did the deepening of the red and we thought pulling the light from the incredible upstage cast would make a kind of hellish looking landscape as they would show as silhouettes and could bring more to the contrast in their position as encouraging the punishment versus when they had supported him. I wish I had a picture from the actual production. This is from tech week.

On Smokey Joe’s Cafe, above is probably my most favorite shot I have of the entire process. Not that I didn’t absolutely adore the cast, but sitting side by side and trying to find the most perfect hue of various lights in the different areas was the most unexpectedly fun part of directing. The back record neon isn’t on and this little moment before we added any color felt like making magic.

Thanks for piquing my curiosity in lighting design and teaching me other ways of thinking about how storytelling can be fascinating and wondrous. Thanks for sharing your stories and ideas.

So pull up a chair and until our paths cross again, my friend, I shall always remember you at your “desk”