Hello again friends!
How have you been? My super-busy-life is about to become my moderately-busy-life again, and I’m very much looking forward to this Saturday’s sleep in. Tonight is our closing night for Barber of Seville and tomorrow is strike. Our set is then off to its next destination to be used in another production of Barber next year and again the year after. The next show we have coming up is Mozart’s the Magic Flute and we have the pleasure of building it in our scenic shop!
Generally speaking, we build one of our three shows every year, and we try to rent (or buy, if we get a great deal) the other sets from the various Opera companies across North America. This gives us the opportunity to bring in beautiful sets from all over the place, as well as build our inventory and then send our shows out on the road as well.
This set is designed by Bretta Garecke, who designed the Lighting for last season’s Salome, as well as many other sets, props and lighting concepts for Edmonton Opera over the last 10 years. She’s a very talented but incredibly busy lady. She lives in London (jealous!) and travels all over the place designing sets, props, lights and more.
I’ve had the opportunity to sit in a few of the design meetings for Flute where they’ve discussed how to build it, the paint choices, the fabrics and how this will all tie together with Deanna Finmann(resident Wardrobe Designer and head of Wardrobe)’s costumes and Rob Herriot’s stage Direction. I must admit, most times in those meetings I just sit there in trying to soak up everything going on around me. They discuss linesets (where the scenery will fly in from), sightlines (what the audience sees) and how everything will track on, off, disappear, reappear and so on. Ever since I got my second start in theatre*, I spend a lot of time looking up into the grid whenever I see a show. I want to see how it works and maybe one day I’ll be able to do the same thing.
So how does it all happen? For starters, Bretta gives us sketches of her proposed design. Then she (and an assistant I believe) build a to scale model of the Jubilee stage and put the set into it. We use the model to help us figure out how everything is going to work, and to give the various departments reference of what it will look like on stage. From there my boss, Clayton, will draft the various set pieces into the stage and then he figures out how to build things so that they’re a) going to look the way they’re supposed to look b) fit onto the truck and if possible c) be light weight. He breaks them up into construction drawings for the carpenters and welders and then they get to work.
Here is Mr. Parker ensuring everything is printing correctly and on time.
Here is the start of our forest flats. Our Head Properties gal, Chantel Fortin, helped with this project by taking Bretta’s sketches, transposing them into a grid and then drawing her grid out across something like 36 sheets of plywood? It was a crazy process but it turned out great in the end.
Then those drawings come to life in our carpentry and welding shops. Our year-round carp crew members, Greg Brown (Head Scenic Carpenter) and Kathy Cooper (Asst. Head Scenic Carpenter) have been joined by Vincent Mesick and Kris Aasen (Both mine and Clayton’s former classmate!) to make this set a reality. I don’t even want to tell you how many pieces of plywood these guys have cut in the last two weeks, nor how much routering they’ve had to do, but to give you an idea, we have to clean out our dust collector every day. EVERY DAY! That’s a lotta dust!
Here we have Kris working on the sun with Kathy (not pictured).
In our welding shop we have Ivan Siemens (Head Welder) and Andre-Michel Lavoie (Asst. Head Welder){Also one of my former school chums, but this time back in high school.} building the various aluminum elements in this show. Since this is our first show doing so much metal work, we really only started outfitting ourselves to do this type of work this year and it has been a bit of a learning process for us. Ivan has been a great resource throughout everything, and I look forward to many more welding projects in the EO’s future.
Good thing we have 5000 sq feet of floor space! Too bad it still isn’t quite enough…
Those big metal pieces at the top are the portals and below is the metal frame being put onto the forest flats.
In this show, we have a forest, various portals, palm trees, flowers and more! It’s going to be one magical place to visit and I’ll be posting more photos as we go through the process. We have our Head Scenic Artist, Shanna Orgovan starting on Monday, along with her helpers, Megan Kumpula and Katie Hartfeil (Who is also our Asst. Head of Properties). They’re tasked with taking the wood and making it look like wood — classic theatre stuff, you know how it is — among many other things. I’ll see what I have permission to share and then show y’all soon :).
Well that is it for tonight! I’m off to give my mama a backstage tour of the Jube shortly, followed by a much needed night of rest before tomorrow’s strike.
Hope you enjoyed this post! 🙂
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*I say second start in theatre because my first experience was as an actor throughout junior high and high school. I got into film once I started post secondary but found my way back to theatre three years ago and have loved every minute of it.
Production Assistant Life 