collisionwork | Penny Dreadful and Other Weekend Fun Activities for Kids

So Episode 5 of Penny Dreadful, "The Deb of Destruction," which I directed and designed, went by on Saturday and Sunday and went over quite well. I was really pleased with how it came out. We had good houses both shows, and it's a good thing we've now added the extra matinee for this monthly series - it was getting to the point of having to turn people away from the one Saturday night show, which we probably would have had to do this weekend without the extra show.

I really enjoyed doing this script, which had a bit of a Lynchian-Twin Peaks feel to it (one cast member called it Penny Dreadful: Fire Walk With Me) - good broad melodrama, scored with big loud Bernard Herrmann music from Hangover Square, White Witch Doctor, Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, and Citizen Kane (used most often for the scenes involving William Randolph Hearst, of course).

I was busy up in the booth running the show most of the time, so I didn't get to shoot many pictures of the show, but my camera was passed around on the floor (mainly in the hands of Matt Gray, I think), and a few shots came out okay.

Becky Byers was quite impressive as Abigail Pierce, the Deb of Destruction herself:

The dialogue-free, tense dinner scene (which I scored with the aria from Citizen Kane) was, as expected, the highlight of the show . . .

Unfortunately, we didn't get any shots of it from runthrus where it was done full-out to its VERY bloody conclusion.

Apart from that, I wound up with just a few behind the scenes shots, like this of Christiaan and Bryan planning something . . .

. . . this of our William Randolph Hearst and Abigail Pierce relaxing before cue-to-cue . . .

. . . and what I think is a self-portrait by Matt as Leslie Caldwell, Detective of the Supernatural . . .

Apart from that, the UTC#61 shows at Walkerspace went down, and I got to see Cat's Cradle at least, and we ended the six-episode run of the sitcom for the stage 3800 Elizabeth at The Battle Ranch.

Now, Berit and I can move onward properly to our shows for the rest of the year: The Magnificent Ambersons, Spell, Everything Must Go, and Harry in Love.

Of course, I also have a sizable role in next month's Penny Dreadful, as it turns out. {sigh}

PS As mentioned in the previous post, I've been getting complaints from some friends and family about this page taking forever to load, not loading completely, or just plain crashing the browser (usually Firefox, it appears). I think this has something to do with the amount of photos and videos I've been posting. I've started putting the videos behind LJ cuts, and if that's not enough, I'll do that more with posts containing lots of photos. Let me know in comments if there's any improvement already. Thanks.