Hairspray, x2

This season is just not letting up. I’m getting married this summer, and we are paying for the wedding ourselves. Which means we’re not doing the typical $36,000+ American wedding (we are kind of not into that anyway) and we are trying to pay for it in cash. So I’m…working. A lot.

I am designing/building two totally separate productions of the show “Hairspray”. (If things pan for one of my director friends, I’ll be doing the show a third time, next Spring.) The first show was luckily just an 8th grade production, because I was the technical director and built the set, sound engineer and designer, AND the lighting designer. It almost killed me, but hey, you do what you have to, right? The kids got into building the set, as did their parents. Combined with building “School for Wives” at UNH, I’ve never been covered in so much sawdust!

Teaching junior high kids to paint faux finishes (jail)

Found materials and ripping off another production…I just had to show them how to do it. 🙂

That was the Jr. version of the show, of course. On to the full version, which went into tech two weeks later! This is my first big show in the main stage space at NVCC, so there was a bit of a learning curve in designing the sound system and mixing the live orchestra, to figure out how the normal configuration worked or didn’t for our needs, and growing it from there. Luckily, a bunch of my sound cues were already designed, hahaha!

This version, of course, has the big can of hairspray that explodes at the end of the show. I just bounced down the final version of the sounds for that, and am now firmly in the belief that I need to integrate the sound of depth charges into my designs much more often. I think I found the right frequency that shook the space just right. 🙂