“Godspell” – Show 3 of 6

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Updated: September 6, 2019

This semester at NVCC, we are doing three theatre shows, when we normally only do one. One of these shows, the musical, was initially dreamed up to be more of a revue, overseen by the music department. It has since changed shows and treatments, substantially.

But this is exciting for me. We have ended up with a “gutter punk” version of “Godspell.” The set design was left as just a couple of arches upstage, and a platform with steps in the middle. Just two false prosceniums with clouds painted on them, left over from some show maaaaaany years ago that are to be flown, then cut up and trashed at strike. This saves on work for the shop, since they have to build a big set for “Rumors” as well as the bits they built for “Complete Works of Shakespeare-Abridged” and the detailed painting that went with it.

Having just come off of “Having Our Say” at Long Wharf, I decided that this was too good of an opportunity to pass up and grow my projection mapping skills, while reveling in a punk treatment that I could really enjoy (aside of designing the audio). So, I took point on this, realizing that we’d be pushing the limits of the gear and resources we possess, for this show that was supposed to be a low-key production but clearly was now anything but. I need to deliver and support what the actors have been busting themselves to put on.

So, first up was audio. This show is being put on in our main stage auditorium space, and I remembered all of the work that went into “Hairspray” a year ago. That laid the plan for what I did and did not want to do this time around. I’ve also decided to try and fix some overall sound issues we have in this space, as I am able with what we have. I learned some documentation procedures over the past couple of shows I did at Yale, and I’m looking forward to what the extra legwork will pay back in detail and organization.

Quiet time to tune the new system was last week, which saw me blasting the new Soul Asylum album. 🙂 All of the house music will be a journey through the history of punk rock and themes of change, self identity and realizing potential. I’ll have to publish the song list at some point. It goes pretty deep, and I’m sure some stereotypical older theatre-going folks may not care for it. But I’ve never gone quite this far in assembling playlists for house music before, and I think I’ve established strong moods and foreshadowing as the show shifts.

Now for the set…I’ve been working around the clock to get this thing done. I’ve got everything mapped, and we’re running both front and rear projections. The shop painted the set a light concrete faux finish for me, and we’re projecting onto that and a white scrim. It’s up to me to set the locations, and Jon, my boss and the lighting designer, shot a lot of photography that will be used as textures and scenes. Because of deadlines moving and other things slowing the initial design phase down (and my own running around between shows), I’m designing a lot of the show on the fly. Qlab to the rescue! Instead of rendering a lot of composite videos, I’m really pushing our Mac Pro to do a lot of the work for me on the fly, with text effects and animations. The photo below shows the set covered in many instances of Qlab’s Titling cues, which of course are all animated. In other scenes, flowers bloom out of the brick work, using motion captures I found that I changed into transparent backgrounds.

We open tomorrow night, and it looks like we have 1100 cues in Qlab, spread across two computers that are slaved together.

Luckily, I can photoshop like the wind, so I can create spaces for the actors to work in!  All those years in art departments is really paying off this week. One of the locations is a stereotypical punk rock club, where the back wall is photoshopped with around one hundred stickers of punk rock bands and related brands. In the space of a few weeks, we went from a production that was orphaned to a major production.

-brian

Six shows to design in six weeks!

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Updated: November 20, 2017

The rest of this season is going to get very interesting. I have three schools that I will be working with, that, between them, have six shows all opening in a six week window of time! This is a new challenge, but with some planning and workflow choices, I can do it. Some are bigger and some are smaller, which helps them fit together. In order, they will be:

#1 – “Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged” (sound programming, since we don’t have a board op, and slaving all cues to lighting)

#2 – “Music Man” (lighting design & some projection)

#3 – “Godspell” (sound design and video/scenic design)

#4 – “Into the Woods” (lighting and sound design, maybe some video)

#5 – “Rumors” (sound design)

#6 – Dance Program’s final performance (video design)

I’d better stop updating my blog and start working on paperwork!

-brian

“Having Our Say” at Long Wharf Theatre

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Updated: November 20, 2017

As anyone who has worked with me in the past couple of years knows, I am a fanatic about Qlab. That program has really changed what is possible, especially on the shows where I am allowed to run rampant, creatively – I can output, or control, all of the elements I come up with for live performance. 

So when I got the call from Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven to work on their upcoming revival of “Having Our Say” because they needed a Qlab guy, I was beside myself. I was told what they were looking to do, and asked if Qlab would handle it.  I said “Yes” emphatically.  It would most certainly do all of that. I was also looking forward to working on this show because I worked at Long Wharf back in college – a long time ago – and hadn’t been back, since I went off to do corporate and tours and stuff. I was glad I did this – this is one cool space, with nice people and it’s cleverly worked out, like a boat builder designed the shop. Love it. I’ve been here a lot, making this and that work and building things like baffle boxes for the projectors.

(Is it a doll house or a baffle box? You decide…)

 Over the course of the tech process, the entire design changed. Like, a lot. The show was opening in New Haven, and then moving on to Hartford Stage. So change was inevitable. However, part of this meant going places I hadn’t taken Qlab before (and using advanced features I didn’t know were available). In the end, we delivered a great looking show and the audiences responded. There were glitches throughout the tech process, some big and some smaller, and in the end we had to watch for those – but the little nagging things that remained were things that 99% of the audience would never notice. Just those of us working on the show, day in and day out, knew they were there. Qlab’s technical support was on the line with me throughout the tech process, and in the end we ended up maxing out our Mac Pro’s GPU.
The story is a biography about two women, both over 100. They are sisters, who grew up in the segregated South. Going through their family photos and stories, they have seen a lot, and it is a much more engaging show than you might initially think.
To help tell their stories and make the photos come alive for the audience, we projected images onto the walls of the set. Eventually, those images became videos, to provide effects and transitions. Moreover, we slaved video and audio playback computers together and then triggered them from the light board, so that the audio engineer could just focus on mixing the show. I also built a network to connect the projectors to, so that we would have LAN access to their power, focus, color correction, and shutter controls. All of this was controlled during the show, as needed, via Qlab with Applescript, MIDI and OSC. No need for IR remote controls or getting up on ladders once they were hung.
My wife will be involved with the show when it heads up to Hartford Stage. Yay!

 As a side note, this show really focused on realism. Not only did the set dressings get very extensive, but since the characters are making dinner during the play and the entire script breaks the fourth wall, they spent a lot of time developing ways to fill the theatre with cooking smells!  Combined with the amazing props department at LWT, it was very impressive. My technical intern at Fairfield U, Logan, now works at LWT, and it was her job to cook.  🙂

 I call this one “Two Men Discussing Roast Chicken”

-brian

First time mixing at Yale – (“Music Man” #1)

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Updated: November 20, 2017

I’m back at Yale this week, mixing an alumni performance of “Music Man” (I will be doing this same show with 8th graders later this Spring…might be a little different…) This is exciting, as I’ve not mixed FoH here before.


It was supposed to be a staged reading of the play, with just some mics at music stands. But of course, being Yale, it became so much more than that. There are foley sound effects coming from a couple of places, and a 30 piece orchestra that the sound designer has thoughtfully close-miked and used Y-combiners, so there are almost double the number of mics on stage. It’s been…interesting.


Anyway, I was told by the Stage Manager that this was the clearest mixed show that she’s heard in a long time. So that’s good!


Because this is Yale, I had a lot of cool toys at my disposal. I’ve worked with Galileo units in my drive rack before, but never had to configure them (the problem of being a tour mixing guy – while everything is already done for you as requested, there are some things you can end up not ever having to do yourself). Having now programmed a Galileo (via the much easier LAN interface) I love them and want to buy like five of them…if I had the $7500 sitting around for each one!  Anyway, with thirteen audio zones, soundcheck is more than just “does it work?” So I built a cascading set of cues to automate my sound checks, which is a great thing computers are good at – duplicating repetitive tasks. The scripts (Applescript & OSC) turn on and off different channels in the Galileo, use text to voice features in OSX to announce what zone was being tested, and then play a wav file of white noise that I had cued up. So I can hit go, and listen to “Zone One, Orchestra Left” followed by white noise, and it continues through the rest of the positions. (Actually, for speed, I don’t have the labels detailed – if there is a problem, like when I first set it up and had an error, I just go back and check that missing zone number manually.) This helps remove the chance that I’ll miss something, while double-checking the computer’s work by running sequentially.


Bonus: they’re feeding us dinner this week in the dining halls. Combined with the snow, it’s like we’re at Hogwarts.


Bigger Bonus: my friend Alex (lighting op) pointed out that the role of Mayor Shin, who had a very familiar voice, was being played by Mark Linn Baker, who played Larry on Perfect Strangers in the ’80s!

-brian

Downton Abbey gig

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Updated: November 20, 2017

Last night was a random one-off in Providence, RI. It was a white-tie affair – dinner for big PBS donors, followed by a sneak preview of the first hour of the final season of Downton Abbey.

I don’t have a copy of the show, so please don’t ask. 🙂 But this was quite a fabulous location, with great food, at the Roger Williams casino. I was the video lead and had a great seat.

I am a major gear head, so it was quite ironic that I wished I could have replaced the rather large pile of gear that went into a single screen and two PA speakers for a single computer to projector connection. Realizing that PBS might not have wanted to provide a video file for the screening to cut down on piracy options, I wrote some scripts in Qlab (of course) during my dinner break to use the DVD player application and control the full screen options, etc, and run that all in a cue list. You know, should I ever run into this kind of situation again… Would have been so much simpler and less poking at things that don’t work the first time.

-brian

Two Shakespeares for the Price of One

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Updated: November 20, 2017

Now that “Psycho Beach Party” is done and I am over my hours, I am back to NVCC, where I will be sound designing two Shakespeare shows that are in rep over the course of a couple of weeks.  I’m excited to see some of my students starting to pick up Qlab over the course of these shows.

The two shows we will be presenting are “Much Ado About Nothing” (set as a Mad Men-era piece) and a more classical edition of “Romeo & Juliet,” which opens tonight.

I was surprised that R&J actually stole my interest in the process of sound design, and let me solve some common workflow issues in sound design and the limitations of our space and gear. There were a lot of little flourishes I was able to make to help reinforce the sense of place for each scene. I enjoy trying to make things as real as I can and have the opportunity to do so. Sometimes that is literal – like my use of bird and bug sounds that are indigenous to the Italian countryside (or figuring out how the heck a peat fire differed from a wooden log fire for “Dancing at Lughnasa” last year). Sometimes that means giving the audience expected cues with how they perceive a sound to be – the famous example being a gunshot in the movies or tv sounds nothing like one in real life.

For this show, the latter situation is in the grave at the end of the show. I wanted to give that feeling of being deep in the earth, trapped away from everything, locked in position as the world slowly spins on its axis. So I went with some sounds that are not unlike what you would hear on the Starship Enterprise – sort of an ominous engine hum. The trick is not to make it draw your attention, and most of the audience may not even notice it is there. Psycho acoustics are fun.

But the real fun belongs to my birds. I found some samples of parakeets that are native to the area of the play, both male and female. So during one of the scenes, there is a whole subplot involving a courting pair of parakeets that call to each other, move around the room, and then fly off to stage right.

My solutions: because these two shows are in our black box theatre, the sound system in there isn’t quite as good – we have zero outboard gear available. Luckily, since all of the sound is playback, I took this as an opportunity to learn about effects and audio processing in Qlab. That was how I tuned the room, something I saw Pilobulous do a couple of years ago when I did audio for their tour when it came to the Quick  Center. I also finally figured out how to do multiple sound outputs that could be controlled independently through the same hardware – one for, say, soundscapes and another for cues, which run at different volume ranges. I designed a production of “Merry Wives” over the summer and wished I had thought of that sooner in the design & tech process.

-brian

Psycho Beach Party (UNH)

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Updated: November 20, 2017

This is my second semester at UNH, and we are about to open “Psycho Beach Party” – the first of our two shows for the semester (looks like I’m running out of hours this semester to get involved on the second show). One of the proposed design ideas was to have actual sand on stage…anyone who has been in the position to have to execute and build a show that takes place on a beach knows the conversations I’ve been having over this semester.  🙂 This was also a rare opportunity to have to build a building with a roof on stage, which is usually the bane of lighting designers (but they seem to be making it work on this show).

It’s my birthday and I’m covered in sawdust…

The real enjoyment I am getting out of this show is working with the student sound designer, Terrence, who’s a sweet kid with lots of ideas and chops. We’ve had a lot of discussions on soundscaping and, of course, designing in Qlab. The audio gear is a little limited there, and locked down, but along with the rest of the student sound team (Kyle and Sam) we’ve been able to pull out some great effects and tricks. There were a lot of spreadsheets to help keep things consistent from show to show. It’s looking good!

Last season, when I worked on “School for Wives” here, I had to build a shop before we could build a show. This time around, in the interest of further organizing things, we took inventory of the whole space, and, among other things, color coded all the cables and lighting instrument barrels. We were in a bit of a holding pattern early in the season, getting things approved, so what do I do when I’m faced with free time? That’s right, I clean!

-brian

Orange is the New Black

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Updated: November 20, 2017

Greetings from Boston! I will be here for a couple of days working on an event that is a luncheon benefiting a women’s shelter called Rosie’s Place. I’m on Team Video, the governor and first lady will be here, and the keynote speaker will be Piper Kerman, the author of the book “Orange is the New Black” – you might have heard, but they’re making a TV show about this…

Being “Indecent” (at Yale!)

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Updated: November 20, 2017

A few weeks ago I got a call from Yale, asking me if I could come in and be the A2 for a show they had opening.  Just wrangle the wireless mics, but they didn’t know exactly how many they’d have. Things were still up in the air. Could be 3, could be 18.

Well…

This has turned into quite a production for me. This was supposed to be a little side gig for me, outside of my time at UNH, during the time when NVCC would be quiet and the season wouldn’t have really started yet. Instead, my little side gig is paying me overtime for the time I’m there!  I’m hitting 90+ hour weeks – luckily the two schools are so close and I only have to go up to NVCC once or twice before November.

The play is called “Indecent,” and is the story of the production of “God of Vengeance” by Sholem Asch in 1907. This is the world premier, and after this month’s run it will be moving to La Jolla Playhouse in California, and then on to the Vineyard Theatre in NYC! In all these years, it’s my first play that will be headed to Off Broadway. The cast is amazing – in talent and in spirit, and I’m extremely lucky to be here with them. I have to spend a lot of time in close quarters with all of them, and am the only tech with a workstation actually IN the dressing room. There is a true ensemble here, and it’s wonderful to feel that they have included me in their ranks.

The show is quite demanding. It is being treated as a period piece, and so all of the tech has to be hidden. I’ve been customizing mics for every actor and musical instrument, to be as hidden as possible (12 in all).

As if that weren’t enough, there is a ton of video and automated moving set pieces and rigging through the show. The music is outstanding, and is musically directed by Aaron Halva and Lisa Gutkin (she’s got a Grammy from her work with the Klezmatics, among other titles)…really, everyone’s resume is impressive. Every single one. This has been quite a talent pool. I haven’t stopped being emotionally touched every performance.

Of course, the thing that everyone will be talking about will be the thing that demands my extra attention – every night it will RAIN 500 GALLONS at the end of the show. Yup. It’s impressive (and means doubling up on moisture protection for those actors’ microphones)! The crew here has been very supportive of my role here, and getting me what I need.

But man, I need sleep…

The workflow I’ve developed for this show, aside from having an extremely organized workspace, is my laptop with a separate login on it for this show. My time is limited, running from theatre to theatre, so I do all of my prep at the end of the night, so I when I walk in I only have to pull out my laptop, plug it into the cables I’ve installed, and load up a user profile that automatically brings up notes from the prior show that have been emailed to me, and my digital script which is legible in the dark, containing all of my notes and cues. When my days are this long, working smarter is the only option!

-brian

Wedding Photos are in!

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Updated: November 20, 2017

A few years ago, I met a girl who was TD for the show I was hired to mix FoH. Her name was Mary, and we got married in July!

Thank you to Jeanette, RJ, Alex, and all of our other theatre, film, and music friends who helped pull off an amazing night, with all of the rest of our friends and family.

-brian