Work Work Work

[collisionwork]

The Magnificent Ambersons is going both well and with great difficulty. The show proper - story, acting - is working well. I have to keep tweaking, but it's mostly there. The stuff around this is now the big concern, and the show really relies on these elements: sound, lights, costumes, projections, complex set movements.

The actors have been trying to stay on top of the latter of these, but we have to keep going over and over the moves - especially as we never have everyone there (last night we had 18 out of 20 actors, a record). We lost an actor this week, and I had to split his part up between four other actors. We gained our last actor (FINALLY!) last night, Josh Hartung, who stepped in quickly and got right to it, even with being thrown all of the "now you move the screen, now you move the box" directions.

We had two 6-hour rehearsals on Saturday and Sunday to try and get all the movement down. Berit had her game board next to her to keep track of the people who weren't there.

This is the setup for the start of the immense ball scene (22 pages out of a 104-page script; took us three hours on Saturday to work out):

Here, Berit is either listening to a question from an actor or is watching someone screw up the blocking and is about to jump in to fix it (at rear, Roger Nasser, Timothy McCown Reynolds, Scot Lee Williams):

Perhaps Stephen Heskett (George) has a question about the placement of the screens (built, but without fabric yet) or the seating boxes (not built when the photo was taken, built yesterday) for the vigil scene in the hallway outside Isabel's room. Walter Brandes (Jack) also is interested, while at rear, Sarah Engelke (Isabel) goes over her deathbed lines:

So Berit tells them what to do (fortified by Diet Mountain Dew, dried fruit, jelly bellies, and some kind of icy beverage):

(for years, there has been a joke - I think started by Maggie Cino - that in 80 years time Berit will be the subject of a feminist theatre scholar's Master's thesis, which will put forth the idea that B was the true brains behind much of the creative work of myself, Edward Einhorn, Daniel Kleinfeld, and Frank Cwiklik - the above photo will be Exhibit #1 in the text of Berit Johnson: The Squelched Voice)

Here's the actual director, as he looks toward the end of a rehearsal (Berit, my stylist, also mussed my hair up more to make me look even more harried):

Still to do for Ambersons:

Postcard.
Fabric in the screens.
Paint the set boxes.
Get or build props.
Get costumes.
Make the projections.
Make the sound disks (with edits, etc.).
Build light cues.
Send out email blast.

We open Sunday. Whee.

Also, as Brick TDs, B & I have to go over and get the whole space ready for techs and the Film Festival itself. And we're supposed to go down to the Kings County Clerk's Office today to get our dba for Gemini CollisionWorks taken care of.

So I have to get the hell out of here now . . .

Comments

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

hey we have the same hair now , lol !

Berit looks effing great on these photos.

Berit

[(Anonymous)]

Ahem---I must note, the proper title is: "Berit Johnson: The Silenced Voice". This was originally conceived in partial homage to her time in choir, as well as her being the true brains behind every major theater production of the late twentieth century.
-DMcK