Urinetown the Musical is full of surprises!!

I attended the opening of Urinetown last night.

WOW! 

Urinetown has to be one of the strongest musical theatre productions in the history of the UNI Department of Theatre!  The student performances, the work of the directing team, the design team and crew are all OUTSTANDING!  If you love musical theatre, if you are a supporter of the UNI Department of Theatre, you don’t want to miss this one.

The first act was awesome and well-received by the audience.  And then, because I chose to remain in my seat during intermission, I witnessed a special show.  It began after the houselights had come up and patrons had begun making their ways to the aisles and exits.  A group of about five or six run crew members emerged from backstage right, and made their way down to the grate in the floor downstage right.  They appeared to be inspecting the grate, as if to identify a problem.  As they stood on the four sides of the grate and bent down to touch it, a loud pulsing bass beat enveloped the theatre and they began to move in unison.  To my surprise, as the music progressed, I looked around and noted that more than half of the Urinetown patrons, including President Ben Allen, were participating in the same wild dance!  What was up?

There are times when I feel like I’ve transitioned to somewhere beyond the fringe of mainstream culture.   This was one of those times.  I was clueless.  What could this mass hysteria be about?  So I did what I always do when I need accurate and insightful information:  I asked a student, in this case, a group of students sitting directly behind me.  The answer came clearly and with nonchalance:  “Interlude”.  I also learned that the dance has become a sensation particularly during this season’s basketball games, and that the young man credited with creating it was a former student of mine in Creativity and Performance:  NISG Vice President Ian Goldsmith!  An old adage proven true:  you’re never too old to learn!

Kudos to all those dedicated and hardworking members of the UNI community who are making Urinetown a success!

--Leonard Curtis

Urinetown Updates from Leonard Curtis

Something hot is cooking in the Strayer-Wood Theatre!  On Thursday (technical rehearsal) the warm soup was transferred to a cold kettle.  Now, over the course of the next week, the production ensemble will be firing up to a full boil!

Since my last blog entry, Urinetown has come head to head with technical rehearsals, a process that in the Strayer-Wood Theatre is at once exciting, ponderous and exhausting.  The final touches to the working components of the set are being made by students under the direction of Technical Director Ron Koinzan, and Set Designer Mark Parrott.  Props Master Allie Smith is steadily checking things off her extensive to-do list. 

On any given morning this week, you could walk into the Strayer-Wood Theatre and see Pip Gordon, Chris Winneman, Stephanie Wessels, and Tony Lempares tackling the painstaking process of building beautiful light-cues, taking lighting notes, and addressing electrical problems.  If you go there, don’t forget to carry your Maglite!   Don’t forget to button your lip!  I forgot to do both during an intense cue-building session two days ago.  The result:  I tripped into the seating (the theater was necessarily dark for cue-building), exclaimed a few choice words, and then cowered as I realized I had violated the dark, quiet, and preciously short time that lighting designers have to build splendid cues (I’m pretty familiar with Pip’s work) and build them right in order to minimize future notes.  There I saw distinctive patterns, a subtle color palette, and insightful cue transitions.  I can hardly wait to see it!

This Saturday will be a busy one as Mark (Parrott), Alex (Westrum), Allie (Smith), Ron (Koinzan) and crew tie up the loose ends of scenery, paint and props.  On the same day, the costume studio will be having a major work call in preparation for the first dress on Sunday.

These big musicals require special exertions from the performers, especially when music and dance rehearsals are shepherded by artists as inspired and dedicated as Joel (Waggoner), Daniel (Wells), and Kelsey (Waugaman).  There were bunches of thrilling performances evident at Crew View that now have to slow down, as if they were performing in sticky honey, as lighting, sound, and scenery cues are layered into their performance work of the past six weeks.  It’s always like that, then back up to speed by opening!

This production of Urinetown exemplifies one of the most important artistic and pedagogical activities in which the UNI Department of Theatre participates:  working with, learning with, and learning from free-lance theater artists and colleagues from other academic theatre programs.  Urinetown is a collaboration between UNI’s Department of Theatre and  Marshalltown’s Iowa Valley Community College Orpheum Theatre Center.  It is also a collaboration involving a free-lance theater artist from New York City (Joel Waggoner) and a UNI colleague from the Department of Health, Physical Education and Leisure Services (Daniel Wells)  It is an excellent example of how coordinated collaborative efforts within a college theatre environment serve to build learning outcomes for all parties involved.

I haven’t yet had a chance to talk to Jay, Joel, and Daniel about the impact this production is having on the students under their mentorship, but a brief chat today with Pip Gordon and Chris Winneman (Iowa Valley Community College Orpheum Theatre Center) revealed that UNI student collaboration with “Team Lighting” has resulted in the following important student opportunities:

·         Urinetown Assistant to the Lighting Designer Stephanie Wessels has been offered a job as stage manager for the inaugural performance at the Orpheum Theatre Center this summer.  The arena production of The Music Man will be directed by Rod Caspers (Austin, Texas) with musical direction by UNI’s Dr. Rebecca Burkhardt.  With a cast of 26 local performers, it will be the first live theatre performance produced in the newly renovated Orpheum Theatre, an historic RKO Art Moderne movie house from 1949.

·         Michael Brown, lighting designer for our spring 2011 production of On the Verge, will be receiving a recommendation (very favorable) from Pip as he applies for the position of Assistant Lighting Supervisor at the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville.  Michael has been an indispensible contributor to the process of familiarizing our Orpheum Theatre Center guests with the peculiarities of the performance space and its lighting equipment.  In addition to serving as long-time student guru of the latest lighting technologies, Michael has proven himself to be a very gifted lighting designer, judging from his contributions to On the Verge.   Proof of Michael’s talent and expertise as evidenced by his portfolio and the approval from a first class lighting designer with a long history at ATL should place Michael in a strong place to compete for this important appointment.  Good luck, Michael!

·         Thomas White, ETC control console programming-guru has been an indispensible factor in assisting “Team Lighting” with the setup and programming of the light board and moving lights.  I also witnessed him pulling a couple of long stints with trouble-shooting and lighting focus.  Thomas will be following up on some leads on lighting industry work opportunities in the Las Vegas market, thanks to our Orpheum Theatre Center colleague, Pip Gordon.

Certainly, many seeds of opportunity are being sown in the rich earth of Urinetown.  Next week I hope to un-earth a few more...

Associate Professor Leonard Curtis Shares Thoughts on Monday's Urinetown Activities

Although I derive great satisfaction from designing for the department’s main stage season, I also love to experience the process from the safe and relatively objective perspective of a spectator.  This has been the case with our production of Urinetown, directed by Jay Edelnant, designed by Mark Parrott, Carol Colburn, and Pip Gordon, for I have no official role on the production team (Additional members of this stellar team are Music Director Joel Waggoner and Choreographer Daniel Wells.).  This situation has allowed me to float from studio to studio, helping with scenery construction, props, and paint, contributing assistance where needed and taking opportunities to work with our students in a more relaxing way than that of a supervising designer.  Thus, my production experience in this situation more closely resembles that of a student volunteer from Theatrical Arts and Society.  It is one where I get to help out and learn and observe the growth of a production with wonderment and admiration, without the endless decision-making required for the realization of a design in “the big house”, the Strayer-Wood Theatre.  It is very useful to step back occasionally and experience this process from a student view-point. 

Two additional pleasures attend my sideline participation in Urinetown:  working for the first time with Chris Winneman (Associate Lighting Designer), and working again with my good friend Pip Gordon (Lighting Designer).  I first met Pip at the University of Iowa during the fall semester of 1987.  We were both graduate students in Theatre Arts, she with a crusading vision of what extraordinary theatre should and can be (not much has changed there!), me a jaded and skeptical dropout from Florida State University’s MFA program.  From our work together at University Theatres, including a couple of great summers with Eric Forsythe’s Iowa Summer Repertory Theatre, then to her outstanding teaching at Grinnell College and lighting design work at Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, she has returned to Iowa to serve as the Director of the Orpheum Theater Center in Marshalltown, Iowa.  Lucky Marshalltown!  Lucky us!  As I write this, she and Chris are in the South Lobby of the Strayer-Wood Theatre writing cues for Urinetown.  I wish all of our audiences could have watched the show that took place in the Strayer-Wood Theatre on Saturday.  Beginning at 9:00am, Pip, Chris, Master Electrician Tony Lempares, and a large crew of Iowa Valley Community College students (Marshalltown) and UNI students worked persistently and diligently to focus the more than 250 fixtures that make up the Urinetown plot (This is a large hang for the SWT, facilitated in part by the participation of two college programs, the first in a hopefully long ongoing collaboration with Iowa Valley Community College.).  They finished the work on Sunday afternoon.  I watched a little bit of Pip’s initial playing with groups of fixtures producing specific color washes and patterns.  There are some exciting looks and I look forward to seeing her work come together with the work of the other designers and the directors and actors in the next two weeks.

Designer Mark Parrott, his assistant Alex Westrum, a TAS student named Jody and myself began the process of applying the final paint treatment on Friday night so that “Team Lighting” (i.e. Pip and crew) would have a homogenous paint value upon which to begin the focus on Saturday.  Today Ron engineered the moving of the piano from the floor to a platform 10 feet above the stage floor, and Props Master Allison Smith, put some finishing touches on more of the colorful props used in this production.  So far, my experiences have been limited to activities in the scenery studio and onstage, but today I checked out the costume studio and guess what?  Things are humming down there as well!

More to come later…

As Big as Texas: A Full-Length Musical about the Life and Times of Texas Governor Ann Richards

Last fall I was fortunate to receive a PDA to work on a new musical.  PDA stands for Professional Development Assignment and is a competitive granting of support for a faculty member to pursue her or his own creative or research project.  By competitive, I mean that you have to apply and a committee of professors from many disciplines look at the proposals and make selections.  My proposal, “As Big as Texas:  A Full-Length Musical about the Life and Times of Texas Governor Ann Richards,” allowed me and my writing partner, Rebecca Burkhardt from the School of Music, to spend most of the fall in Austin, Texas.  Here’s a little bit of information about Governor Richards:  Ann Richards rose to national prominence at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.  Her best-known quote from this convention is about George H.W. Bush:  “Poor, George.  He can’t help it.  He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”  This made headlines and Ann Richards was suggested as a future candidate for the first woman president of the US.  When she became governor of Texas in 1991, it seemed as if nothing could stop her, but George W. Bush managed a successful challenge to her bid for reelection in 1995.  Though no longer Texas governor, Richards continued her active political life up until her death from esophageal cancer in 2006.   A political pioneer and openly recovering alcoholic, Governor Ann Richards continues to loom large on the landscape of Texas. 

Ann Richards’s papers are in the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History on the University of Texas campus in Austin.  It is a huge collection, with 1500 boxes of public and personal papers, but that’s where we needed to begin.  Our work in the fall was the third time that we had visited Austin to do archival research.  My schedule consisted of getting to library by 9 or 10am (after coffee, of course), working until around noon, having lunch, and then returning to work until the library closed at 5pm.  There was so much information!  We discovered that there were additional materials that had not been catalogued in our previous visits, and though we had hoped to finish up the research portion early on in the fall and begin our writing, that was not possible due to the wealth of information we found about the last stage of her life when she was struggling with cancer. 

How do we keep track of all of this information?  The old-fashioned way.  I typed notes on 3 X 5 note cards, categorized them, and filed them in card file boxes.  There are five boxes, including the bibliography card box.  This seemed the only way to organize our work.  This semester, Dr. Burkhardt and I have been meticulously outlining the piece.  We began by reading through all of the cards and putting aside information that we thought we didn’t need to use, or couldn’t use for some reason.  Then, I began outlining.  My outline process was executed with 11 X 17 inch sketch paper.  We had identified topic areas, which we call buttons, and I drew a large circle in the center of the paper which represented the button.  Possible songs were identified and these were smaller circles surrounding the larger button, or when needed they had their own smaller piece of sketch paper.  Next, we read through the material related to that button, selecting information we wanted to use.  I drew a line sticking out of the button and wrote a word or phrase that would help me remember the information.  The card number was also noted.  Our buttons are related to the different roles Governor Richards assumed in her life.  I am going to write the piece out of order, picking a button and starting off with it to see where it leads.  There is so much information that I feel overwhelmed at times, but I also know that our meticulous approach will pay off and that once I begin, the work will draft itself.

It has been a challenge to devote time to this project while directing and teaching, but I have learned an extremely important lesson:  I can do it!  As I told my playwriting students today, stealing advice about the secret of successful writing from one of Dr. Burkhardt’s former professors, “affix your butt to the chair.”  And that’s what I will keep doing.