A Fitting Like No Other

Today we had a puppet fitting for Falstaff. Ron Campbell came in, tried him on, and we spent about an hour and a half working out some kinks – or at least identifying them. He couldn’t see enough through the beard, he didn’t have enough flexibility in his arms, and his neck was a little stiff – so now we (and by we, I mean Chris Brown) have a few days to fix those things before starting rehearsal. Such a luxury to have the puppets before rehearsal starts.

Though I must say, I was slightly giddy to finally see “the big man” walking around the space. Silly, silly stuff.

Who is Willie B. Shakes?

So, I think I am in denial about rehearsal starting – not because I’m nervous about rehearsal, no, I can’t wait, but because of all the admin work that has to be done before I can start rehearsal – oof.

I always have this experience on the first day of rehearsal, where about 2 hours into it, I remember that this is why I decided to go into theater. Since, I’m in the office much more than I’m in rehearsal, it always escapes me and always comes back. It’s a battle to remember that the shows aren’t getting in the way of our fundraising, planning, admin work, it’s the other way around.

When we did Othello, and I was blogging, after a post about a tough rehearsals there was a message from “Willie B. Shakes” saying “Is it your casts fault? This is hard stuffeth man”. I figured it to be random postings, but during the closing night party, it was revealed that the person posting was Willie B. Shakes was in fact Catherine Castellanos. And now as one of the Wives, she’ll be blogging also. Ah, what goes around comes around. To every season, turn, turn, turn. Something like that.

THE PUPPETS ARE HERE!

So, the puppets arrived today – in large boxes with “PUPPET” marked on the outside of each of them. I have been worrying all week about what would happen if they were destroyed, and lo and behold, not a single one of them was scratched. And they look beautiful!

The rig to make Master Ford blow smoke out of his ears arrived with them, so I called and told Anthony Fusco that he would in fact be having smoke come out of his ears. He laughed out loud and exclaimed “I think I just learned everything I need to about what my preparation needs to be”. True.

So, on other ends we are trying to get the show under budget. Set wise, this has meant making cuts. As soon as we have pictures of the set model I’ll throw them up, but we started out with the idea that part of the set would transform into a Dr. Caligari-esque dark dungeon – but as it goes, we just couldn’t figure out how to make it affordable, so as of this morning, it’s out – such is the way of the budgeting, So long Dr. Caligari-esque dungeon, we hardly knew you.

I meet on Friday with our costume designer to find out what we need to do to get our costumes under budget. And then….

Two weeks from tomorrow we begin.

Sweet Thunder Pics

Last night at our sweet thunder workshop at the Guerrero House, one
of the quieter girls, Celeste, approached us about possibly using
some of her art work as an inspiration for the project - either in the
zine or displayed at the reading.

As you'll see she's a rather amazing artist.

Sean

boxed in

The puppets are all packed up for shipping. Now they sit in boxes marked "fragile" and "do not put weight on" until Monday when they begin the long journey here.

Go west, young puppets, go west.

puppet ulcers

So, the puppets are being shipped cross country next week. We’ve had to spend the week figuring out how much we can insure them for. Basically, if they get destroyed, what would it cost to replace them…ugh, what a horrible thought. How could we replace 3 months of work in 3 weeks? Double Ugh. And since we don’t have very much money for shipping, we can’t go fedex, or UPS, we need to go with a smaller place that we’ve never used before. So, I’m going to be freaking out from the moment they leave Atlanta till they arrive. Oh, my stomach.

Though I’m not nearly freaking out as much as my friend Clark, who is trying to see if he could be a “mustache man”. You take a look for yourself.