Christmas Carol & Ming Cho Lee

I am master electrician for a production of Christmas Carol this season. It falls just between a few of my other shows, so I have had to take it on in an extremely organized manner - the days I have allotted to it are all I can give them, with very little room for extra time. Luckily the LD is also the Production Manager, so he's got a handle on what else is happening in the space and knows what he needs.  Spreadsheets and Vectorworks files are the order of the day, as is the coffee machine that sits outside the hall.

This show had it's original 12+ year run at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ, and the set was designed by Yale's legendary Ming Cho Lee - his last, as it turns out, before he retired. It is now being put on by New Arts, an organization that came about in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, here in CT.

The bedroom wagon, in particular, is loaded with all kinds of practicals and clever bits to make the ghostly apparitions more believable. Lighting is a thing I do, but normally doesn't excite me as much as other departments. But I LOVE practicals and making all of the little bits work in this show! Lot of work to crawl around in small spaces with a headlamp and wire things together. The result is beautiful.

I work on a LOT of shows, and often don't get to see them. This is one show I am going to be sad about missing. At least Mary and a friend of ours can take my tickets, and tell me about it afterwards.

-brian

I learned more about what kinds of heights I don't mind and what kinds I hate.

Come to the Cabaret

After last Spring's insanity, we escaped to backpack in Europe for a bunch of the Summer. This Fall found me working on, among other things, NVCC's production of Cabaret. I won't get into how timely this show was with the political climate here in the US, but it was definitely the grounds for a lot of conversations.

In any event, I was the Sound Designer, and worked with our tech director on the video end of things. After "Godspell" in April, he designed the set to include projection, so I engineered the video production and designed the motion parts while he made up the stills. For the train scenes, I ended up using stock footage, but I really wanted to coordinate a video shoot with some friends we made over the summer while we were backpacking in Europe, who were from Czech Republic and could give us genuine Central/Eastern European footage. But, alas, the timing and the budget wouldn't allow for it.

I did manage to use a bunch of period musical recordings for house music, that I'd been saving for a while. Cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/ is an amazing project - the sounds might have been a bit older than the period, but they were from the geographical area and might have reasonably been listened to at this time - certainly the songs would have been, if not re-recorded. In any event, the noise and warping inherent in the digital transfers of these old Central European songs was a great mood-setter. Any extra, non-period noise in the recordings added to what the audience would expect from period music - much like how a gunshot on TV doesn't sound like real life but adds to the drama and expectations.

On the orchestra side, we finally figured out how to improve the sound in our space - the classic battle of the orchestra being too loud and installed systems with only left and right speaker matrixes being underpowered. By far the best sounding show we have done in the space. Very proud of my students and how they have become self-empowered to build the systems I've been specing out.

This week, I'm master electrician for a run of Christmas Carol, with the set designed by Ming Cho Lee. That's pretty exciting. Then I'm designing video and lighting for some Christmas performances because, you know, December....

Luckily I've been keeping copious notes on that latter show from previous years, with drafting and spreadsheets, so I can turn it around faster in the limited time I have. And, because of Qlab, I can sync lights and video with the same Go button, and use the lighting board for manual/dynamic flash and trash. They have an old ETC Express board there, which I don't mind at all - I can make it work with moving lights with some planning, and it is the perfect compliment to MIDI triggers. So the fact that they stopped updating it in, like, 1996, is not a hurdle at all! It is actually my favorite board to work on.

-brian