I miss theater so here’s some of my favorite roles from the past few years
So as most tech kids do I have my fair share of odd jobs, and unfortunately I never get to put them in a bio because I don’t know them until tech week. So here they are:
A door: I was working in a ballet of Alice in Wonderland and during the scene with the eat me drink me size changing thing, we did it by having 3 different sized doors onstage, and spotlighting whichever one Alice was at. Then immediately after she was done with each we would pull it off. The only functional was the middle, medium sized door, which she went through as the mid opened, so we had to run it off immediately. My job was to push the door closed every time Alice tapped it (before we got a working latch that rendered me meaningless in that regard), and pop out and run it offstage as soon as she stepped through. Truly a breakout role I know.
A symbolic pipe: Same production of Alice in Wonderland, but later with the Caterpillar. It was a community production aimed at kids so of course we couldn’t have any *drug references* (not in our good Christian ballet, even though the entire story is basically a drug trip...) So instead I was just the “fog machine operator”. (I only had smoke inhalation problems once :)
A cluster of stars (?): This was my school’s production of Addams Family, as my first time as chief I was foolish enough to respond to my director’s request of “Do you think you all can pick up Fester and sort of dance around stage with him?” with, “Um I think we can do that, yeah.” So I got to rap myself and 4 of my crew members in battery operated twinkle lights, “Walk, but more flowy” onstage and pick up our wonderful actor playing Uncle Fester.
A hurricane: Also Addams Family. But the big finale of Act 1 (in the school edition at least) is a storm comes and prevents the Beinekes from leaving. The way we had this staged was some cool lighting stuff, and Lurch loudly closing the doors. This meant that the doors had to open at some point. That duty was assigned to me. You could catch my face on the recording for a second and everything.
A human tie-line: This one wasn’t as much of a role as it was a backstage job, but it was during a ballet production of Swan lake (that got canceled because of Covid :’(. ) It was during an act where all of our big set pieces were backstage and we had a lot of dancers coming off and onstage, and they all had big sticky-outy tutus, which just meant that all of the many dancers took up even more space. Our mid curtain took up a lot of space right by the middle legs. We couldn’t tie it up because we needed it later in the show and there was a set piece in front of where we would put it. So I hugged the mid curtain out of the way for the entire act.
