Da Vinci reimagined:

Hmm, does Jim know something about playwright Trevor’s Disney past?

The San Francisco Chronicle could only come to our second preview, so we held our breath, and the review was a rave! We found out about the review the next night, our opening night. I got a text 30 seconds before the show started that the review was online and a rave. That’s a great way to go into opening night–and made our opening night party at the local pub all the more awesome. Here’s the Chronicle review. That lead to a mention by the Chron’s David Wiegand on KQED radio.

Then there’s Beyond Chron….

And For all Events, and a fabulous piece in The Examiner even before we opened. Trevor also “appeared” on Pirate Cat Radio, KPOO and KUSF. Bay Area Stage and Screen also quite enjoyed the show.

The Bay Guardian review may come out this Wednesday, and SF Weekly’s Chloe Veltman couldn’t come to the show in time to review it, but is scheduled to see it closing weekend anyway. We missed the Merc’s Karen D’Souza, but this only means that if the show moves to the East Bay or South Bay (hint hint, companies), we won’t have “used up” that review opportunity.

Today the set was finished, lights and speakers hung, and even microphones hung. (If you know Thick House, can you imagine the effect of having actors on microphone?) The actors were so happy to be in their performance space. Our first tech, mostly with sound. If I heard our stage manager’s call right, I think there are some 40 sound cues in the first five minutes of the play, and today was the only day we had our sound designer, Cliff.

In fact, nearly everyone is working on two or three shows at the same time. Director Rob Melrose is also directing his own company’s show, Bald Soprano, which he also translated and which techs and previews the same time we do. Cliff Caruthers worked on The Chosen at TheatreWorks, which just opened, is doing sound for Bald Soprano (I believe) and is spending the rest of the week teching November at ACT, which opens a few days after us. Lighting designer Stephanie Buchner worked on American Idiot, and is also lighting Bald Soprano. Set designer Michael Locher is designing the two Kolvenbach plays at Magic Theatre and also–you guessed it–Bald Soprano. Technical director Jim O’Sullivan is the assistant tech director at TheatreWorks and has had to go down to Southern California to work on Daddy Long Legs, TheatreWorks’ coproduction with the Rubicon.

So, tech was going well, the soundscape sounded great, actors were happy, everyone in great spirits. I decided it was the perfect time to make my exit for the day and work on marketing.

Now–and this is fully a compliment–I think Jim is such an excellent actor that he can look rather cadaverous, with bags under his eyes too, just by acting. I’ve seen him do it in rehearsals–it’s subtle, but there. Still, last weekend they decided to try a makeup test, using some yellows just to bring out, well, the yellow. Lighting designer Stephanie Buchner was on hand to see how it looked under the lights–and you can get a slight idea of how it came out in that photo. You can see a little bit around his eye, and he did some on his hand and arm as well.

Our concept for how the Creature looks is much in the same vein as the stage version of Elephant Man. The actor isn’t all done up in massive amounts of makeup and prosthetics to make him look “deformed,” the actor conveys that illusion by acting, even if the text includes some physical description.  So, although The Creature text describes the Creature as having long, black hair and being of impressive height (a height taller than Jim actually is), we aren’t going to put him on stilts, and as for the long, black hair, Jim already sported that look last month in As You Like It at San Jose Rep. It was quite Keith Richards.

Microphones? The designers and director Rob Melrose took the concept of a radio play as the jumping off point (after all, we did produce two podcasts of The Creature in the past several years). But don’t expect live foley and all that stuff. We’re after a presentational look. It’s kind of hard to explain: it’s not quite a radio play, it’s not Word for Word, but it’s not  full-out realism (we haven’t built a ship stuck in the ice).  But the microphones are suggestive of a radio play. Tony Kelly, who runs the Thick House (our venue) jokes that no one has rigged the place more for sound than Cliff. We’re most likely going to end up with a sound table in the house.

The microphones are amazing. Captain Walton (Garth Petal) uses them to read his letters, and they’re so engaging. Some of the hanging microphones echo, so when Victor Frankenstein (Gabriel Marin) calls out to captain Walton from his sled on the ice, it’s haunting. And of course some of the Creature’s (James Carpenter) lines are just creepy. All the microphones really add lots of layers to the text, lots of dimensions–and Cliff is such a wizard.

His original soundscapes and effects are just as haunting. It’s always difficult to bring in sound and music to rehearsal for the first time, especially this early, when it throws the actors a little bit. As with all shows, the actors just have to get used to it–it’s all part of the rehearsal process. and these guys are pros, so they’ll get it, and when it works, it really rocks.

The Creature postcard