Couldn’t get the blog to work on 7/12/11 so I wrote it up in a Word Document to upload later.
Tuesday morning-
Rob Bissenger- Associate Set Designer with Spiderman. Rob has been with the show since 2005. He brought ground plans, models and renderings of Spiderman. Gave background about the show and how he became involved as a designer.
Since the theatre had not been selected at the beginning of the designer process the designers started with the concept that there would be set pieces that would jut out into the audience. His assignment from the designer was to pinpoint all of the sight lines and figure out where everyone in the theatre could see the house since the designers knew he would have the sets come into the house.
So they’re first task was to figure, based on sight lines, exactly what part of the house the entire audience (balcony too) could be seen from everyone. This was the basis for where the Chrysler building unfolded and came out into the house.
But Rob didn’t want to spend the entire time talking about Spiderman so he wanted to talk to us about the design process from beginning to end.
Pre Visualization
Concept- need to come up with a concept. Conceptualizing the idea. Used his work on View from a Bridge as an example.
Concept-what do I want it to feel like? Pre visualize on a small scale.
Start with a figure
Think about the space-how the characters move through the space. Use programs that you may already know (Auto Cad) or free design program
Like Google Sketch up.
Continue the plan and follow through with the production.
A question came up from the teachers about the preparations for Designers vrs Technicians= two different paths.
Designers need to be great storytellers. See good movies, good plays, good books. Rob felt like the college major isn’t as important as surrounding yourself with quality books, plays, stories, literature. He really stressed the fact that majoring in theatre-or art-or design isn't as important as getting a strong well rounded education.
His proudest contribution to SM was the globe lab. This was the one set piece that he was responsible for designing and came to be used in it’s original form. He is most proud of the collaboration it took to design the six moving legs since this took all of the design team and was the result of completely new theatre technology that has never been used before.
Tuesday am-second session
Patrick Goodwin-Casting Director and Julia Murney-actress-one of the last Elphaba’s on BW.
They started their workshop with an example of a poor audition. Julia walked through the door and went all the through an audition with poor choices. Patrick shared that many NY actors actually have many of the bad habits we witnessed, and that at this level most of the actors he sees are all great, but how they conduct themselves in an audition is often the key to getting the role.
Many great audition stories were told in this workshop-hard to believe that professionals conduct themselves so poorly.
I took a full page of notes. Most of them are exactly what DJ Gray teaches to my Musical Theatre students in her Audition workshop.
Patrick also discussed stunt casting and he defended it. Talked about shows like Chicago and Adams Family bringing in celebrities, often people who aren’t BW trained, who are cast in roles in order to keep ticket sales going.
Patrick explained how this stunt casting can prolong a show’s life, enabling 100+ people to be employed longer. Never thought about it that way. Still don’t like it, but I understand it better.
He also shared how certain shows-The Lion King, Phantom of the Opera-where the show is the star so it doesn’t need a star to bring in an audience like weaker scripts (Adams Family). Book of Mormon came up and Matt explained that in that case the creators are the stars-not the actors or show-so it doesn’t need a name actor to sell tickets.
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