The Pirates of Penzance on Treasure Island

It was a busy season at the ACTSA Summer camps this year. We had our usual camp classes and small shows but this year we took on The Pirates of Penzance as our musical which is no easy task for children under the age of 14. Our Tour took us out and about with an adaptation of Treasure Island with music added by our wonderful director, Laura Minadeo. Needless to say, we had a bit of a pirate theme. When everything was finished, we had done Pirates, Treasure Island, Macbeth, When the Mountain Meets the Moon, Rats, and a few junior classes as well.

For Pirates, we really needed a universal style set because it was going to serve as set for every other camp production. Normally that's not a big deal but we also had a rock musical called Rats, written composed and directed by David Tessier. Luckily it fit his needs as well. Stage right was just a 4x8 tower with stairs which was supposed to be cave like. Given my lack of time and help I decided to create a rock face with some 2x4 scraps and a drop cloth stapled onto it all and then painted. Certainly not perfect but I think it looked alright.

Stage left was a bunch of 4x4 platforms and scrap pieces from the shop combined to make ruins. I didn't spend much time on this at all since I still had some foam bricks and half walls sitting around. Throw a couple of painted flags into the mix and a silhouette of the Queen of England and I was just about done.






We also had just replaced all the cyc gel, which made for some awesome color, though after doing the math, to replace all 3 colors for all the fixtures cost $140. ouch. But oh boy was it worth it

Our Tour had to pack into a short school bus and we decided on keeping the layout the same as our last tour since the support pieces were all there already. I swapped out for a new backdrop, which I'm pretty happy with, but as always wish I had a bit more time for, framed by palm trees. The disaster piece that I hated and didn't have time to do anything about was the side tall landing boat flat, it was just done quick and ugly and I was less than pleased with how it turned out.

Balancing the stage out we had a magic treasure chest which I built from the ground up, far larger than I had intended. I got going and about half way up I realized how huge it was going to be, but it was all made from scrap material and I didn't have enough to start over so I went on with it. The chest turned out pretty well though and I was definitely happy with the end results. The chest stayed on stage the whole show and contained all the props that were needed. It clearly held no treasure, but that's where the magic came from.The lid had a built in shelf that was was held in place by two handles so when it was time for the big reveal, they closed the lid, pulled the pins, and when it opened had a pile of treasure sitting on top which was worth all the hassle if only for the crowd reactions when it happened.

Here's how the chest worked. This was my test run

Projection speeds things up greatly. I took my rough sketch, 

made a transparency and went to work. 

Drop in progress

 Almost finished

 Pirates tower, in process

 Before painting SL, some of it was usable without any work

A dowel rod, piece of linen and some paint and I've got a flag.

Of Julio Mata, Charlie Brown, and Summer camps

A recap!

 This past weekend we had our wonderful college friend, Julio Mata come up from Florida to stay with us. Ok in reality he came to see Norah Jones and profess his love for her and the staying with us was a side effect. If you don't know who Julio Mata is I'm surprised because everybody does. It seems like whenever he is around people from everywhere are yelling HI JULIO! I expected it to happen in Providence. The nice thing is I got to slum around town for a day and we discovered things I hadn't seen despite having lived here for a year. One example is the Providence Athenaeum. It happens to be a library. It also happens to be awesome. Example:

 

 It's pretty neat. It has push button light switches in all the stacks and it has a basement level that has a rare book vault that is pressure sealed and apparently anybody can go in it. Julio and I just looked through the door. There was more exploring and gallivanting and then on the 4th of july he flew home.

The past week or so I've been balancing prep for the ACT summer camps, the ACT Rapunzel Tour and Heather's YMCA production of Charlie Brown.

This is what we settled on between each of these 4 flats there will be 2X4 boxes creating open panels between them so that actors can literally step out of or into the comic. This was the end result of a marathon day of painting. After this picture everything got outlined in black to give it that pen inked comic quality. Today I built the doghouse for snoopy. Time consuming but surprisingly easy if you just build a giant rehearsal cube and slap triangle roof sections on the side to imply a roof that comes to a point. It still needs more work but it will be easy to bounce back and forth between my camp work and it because I can work on it while things dry. switch back while the doghouse dries. Let the next piece dry, and so on and so forth. A great, if not tiring, use of my time.


Last but not least today was the first day of my first ACT summer camp. We've got 2 classes going right now and I've got finishing touches on the set to do this week, rehearsal cubes to paint and the Rapunzel tour to build. Saturday was a nightmarish day almost 13 hours long of me trying to play tetris with my platform stock until I had an arrangement I liked. After that I blasted through the painting by just using my air sprayer which saved me a bunch of time and a lot of back hurt. Not a terrific picture but after that many hours working by myself to finish it, that was the best it was going to get. Once its touched up and the ground row for behind is it done I'll snap some better pictures. Sometime before the end of next week I'll have also made a cityscape sort of ground row, sort of hard backdrop type set up for upper stage left and right to give it a little more depth and balance the height in the center. Also as a final note, I've been listening to the soundtrack for the American Idiot musical and I really like it. A couple of great new songs and I love the sound of extra orchestration and a female voice to compliment the Billie Joe Armstrong style voice.

Time to breathe yet? Not quite. As they say, No sleep till Brooklyn.