End of the Year

I'm nearing the end of my last year of college and I'm going to have to start looking for some full time employment in the industry. I'm not going to get my hopes up and believe that i'm going to get a solid paying job right away backstage in one of Brighton theaters. I'm still going to try for those jobs, but I'm expecting a job connected slightly to the industry, maybe working in a box office or as an usher. I may be able to work my way up from there, or even just work in a shop and keep working in theaters in the evening as much as I can. 

  The West End/Broadway musical 'Avenue Q' is coming to the Theater Royal in Brighton next month, and I'm desperate to go. The musical uses hand puppets on stage mixed in with actors. I've watched some clips of the musical on YouTube and it's incredible how they can interact so well. I've also heard that the set is very simple but well done and effective. I'd love to work with puppets, when I started getting into drama when I was young I joined a couple puppet workshops and drama clubs which involved using puppets. I've always been amazed that through body language you can make a puppet feel any emotion. I feel that Brighton needs a Punch and Judy stand in the Pavilion Gardens somewhere, old children's entertainment used to be so simple. 

I think people should play with Puppets more, especially with children. Enough of silly video games for the under 10s!

Our House Stuff

I've been doing lots of little things for Our House over the past couple weeks.

We've been rigging (putting on the stage) an Irish Pub, and a Caribbean Island themed Las Vegas Hotel Bedroom as well as the rest of the main set, which creates all the other scenes.
The entire set is monochrome, and only certain parts of the set are picked out in bright red, I've been painting all day in gloss white, making sure everything on stage is either black, white or grey.
I designed and painted one of the backgrounds for a scene yesterday, It was the cocktail bar.
Opening night is in 5 days, and we're so close to having the set completely done so we can let the cast in on Sunday (3 days away!) and I can't wait.
I have more painting to do tomorrow and to finish the Vegas bedroom (putting pineapples above the heart shaped bed)
I believe it's going to end up as a pretty good show!

Set Building

Finally, I am actually starting to feel like the Stage Manager for Our House.

The inspiration for the houses!

We have begun to build the main parts of our set, and I had to give jobs to each of our team/crew, to make sure we finish it as quickly as we possibly can. I started out by beginning each job by myself, then after the individual got he hand of what I was doing I would let them carry on. his worked particularly well as we were painting 9 almost identical 2 meter by one meter 2D terraced houses for a backdrop on the entire musical.

We only have four weeks left till the show and we have LOADS to do. I'm going to work on finishing the terraced houses (probably by myself) all Friday, then start on designing all of the other scene's backdrops. Including a cocktail bar, an alter, a penthouse..


I hope it all looks great! I can't wait to post some pictures of the finished article!

STARS!

Yesterday I worked on Stars in Their Eyes at Blatchingtonmill!

It was the first time ever that I have worked on a sound desk during an actual show, and nothing major went wrong at all, I didn't need any help with any of the show run, although I needed a lot of guidance setting up during the production week, however I am sure that next time I will be able to set most of the sound on stage up.
This is me!
I realised yesterday that I am never going to be in control of the lighting at the Windmill Theatre ever again, my last time was Billy! This year I'm working on LX at Teenspirit which is at the Concorde 2, which is a well know venue in Brighton and I'm very excited about working on it, but I'll still miss the lighting programme at Blatch.

The Titanic

Finally, another show to work on...
Over the past couple of days I have had the privilege to work on 'The Titanic' which was being put on by Southwick Opera :http://www.southwickopera.co.uk/

Titanic was a 1997 Broadway hit . Inspired by the discovery of the wreckage of the RMS Titanic in 1985 Maury Yeston composed the music and wrote the lyrics based on the book by Peter Stone. It won five Tony awards, including Best Musical.

Titanic is set on the famous ocean liner which sank on its maiden voyage on April 14 1912 and interweaves the lives of the different types of people that were on board at the time and all about to share the same fate.

Although the theatre was fully functioning and seated about 120 people, it was one of the smallest I had ever worked on, the wings were very small and made it extremely hard to move the pieces of set about. These included a large staircase with a locked gate at the top, a truck with a large tilted area with railings, made to represent the boat as it slowly tilted and sunk. I joined the crew a couple of days late due to work, so they had planned most of the big scene changes already. Therefore my main job was to help out when I could and then follow the script, making sure I always knew when an important scene change was coming up, and that the rest of the crew knew how long we had. I had to always know where in the script we were throughout the show, so whenever the Stage Manager asked where we were I could point to where exactly. 
My most favourite part about this show that I had never seen or heard of before was the score, I would happily pay to watch it just for that.
Moving on to Blatchingtonmills production of Our House that is coming up in February, we are Building building building! We are also in search of the bodies of 3 cars, although we only want the front half on two of them. This is the biggest show Blatch has ever done, and myself and my crew seem determined to make sure that it will go down in memory for the school. Lets just hope all goes to plan.
I can't wait to blog about more hopeful set pieces!

Mark Ups and Models

We started full on work on Our House today in Stage Management.
We decided how we were going to perform all the snappy scene changes that happen constantly throughout the show. The stage will have steel decking placed higgledy piggledy across the stage, at different heights too, getting lower as they come towards the audience, most of these will have a hard board cover, that, when propped up will provide different backdrops for the different environments in the show, with the enormous help of sound and lighting, of course. As a constant backdrop we will have a four foot high flat, painted to look like terraced houses along the back of the stage, giving us room to be able to project above them.
We moved on to making a rough, 1:50 scale model of this idea to show our director, and luckily he was very happy with it. Once we have finished the model completely I will upload a post about it alone with a picture!
All in all this had taken us the good part of 3 hours, after this I went with a fellow crew member and we had to mark out the rehearsal room in the correct scale as the stage will be, will all the decking marked out and the different heights. This took another 3 hours. After only about 2 corrections throughout. It was my first ever mark up, it was a lot easier than I realised.
Next week we begin painting and cutting these flats. This is the earliest Blatchingtonmill has ever stared for a February show!

Interviewing and production meetings!

Responsibilities!

On Tuesday, I, along with two other Blatch6 students were asked to interview candidates for the new job offer at Blatchington Mill. Tom, our main technician, left Blatch so we are in need of someone to replace him (a very hard job indeed!)

Nothing much has gone on recently when it comes to Stage Management. There have been a couple production meetings in school with the directors for Blatchington Mill's production of Stars in Your Eyes, and the more eventful production meeting of Our House, where we learnt, that when it came to the staging, that the Director has no image of what he wants it to look like, what so ever. 

I can't decide whether that's a good thing or not.