As our season wraps up, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is just getting into full swing for the summer.  

We've had so much fun this season and  I thought I'd share some of our memories as well as some of the projects that got missed in my weekly blogs.  There was SOOOO much cool stuff- how could I fit it all?

On our last day, the shop held a breakfast potluck.  It was full of delicious eatments including Joe's famous biscuits, 4 pounds of bacon, espresso, and much more!  Some of us ended up beaching ourselves on the couches in the break room.  

It was a day full of fun and goodbyes.  

Here in the OSF paint shop, we are getting started on our world premier of  "All the Way,"  commissioned from Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Robert Schenkkan.  It's going to be a really powerful and informative show, and beautifully designed as well, by Christopher Acebo, who always delivers something dynamic AND fun to paint!   

Not to mention the power of this show being placed in juxtaposition to "Party People"  being played in the New Theatre right across the street.

From the OSF website:
  
1963.An assassin’s bullet catapults Lyndon Baines Johnson into the presidency. A Shakespearean figure of towering ambition and appetite, the charismatic, conflicted Texan hurls himself into Civil Rights legislation, throwing the country into turmoil. Alternately bullying and beguiling, he enacts major social programs, faces down opponents and wins the 1964 election in a landslide. But in faraway Vietnam, a troublesome conflict looms. In the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright’s vivid dramatization of LBJ’s first year in office, means versus ends plays out on a broad stage canvas as politicians and civil rights leaders plot strategy and wage war.

Below, our Artistic Director, Bill Rauch, talks a little about "All the Way;" it's conception, basic premise, and ideas as well as the correlation with "Party People."  

LINKS:  
Some interesting links about the life and tenure of LBJ:

LBJ time line

Kind of Interesting:  Found this message board discussing our production, as well as general thoughts on LBJ.
DemocraticUnderground.com


Should LBJ be Ranked alongside Lincoln?
From Smithsonian.com

Why it's our very own Lead Scenic Artist, Mr. Pat Bonney (aka Pappy!) to talk about As You Like It,  one of our fabulous outdoor shows this season.

Oregon Magazine 1859 came backstage to take some shots of us working and to get a little sneak peek at what we do.  Here's a little taste, to the left.
This is Tim Hannon, one of our machinists in the machine shop.

Check out this link: 

1859 Oregon's Magazine

It's always cool to be featured in a magazine!  Both of our lead scenic artists were featured in pictures! How cool is that?
http://1859oregonmagazine.com/osf-behind-the-scenes#3
Photos by Ezra Marcos

And here are the final letters all rusted up and being attached to the scaffolding.  They are going to look great in the space!

This week, Gino, Thayne and I are wrapping up working on the polished cement floor for Party 
People. 

Here, Gino Franco, our Lead Scenic, adds a dark step to one of the upstage wagons.  




Below you can see a slideshow of our progress with the various glazes.  
These floors always look so big in our warehouse space!

Here is the finished cement floor.  

After we popped the seams and a few of the edges and corners, there were coats and coats of gloss floor wax .  

Looks pretty convincing for a bunch of wooden platforms, eh?  

For the past couple of weeks, we've been working on our upcoming production of "Party People."  This show is going to be so cool and I'm super excited about it.  The story of the show is that it is a performance piece performed by a children of the Black Panthers and the Young Lords and directed at the revolutionaries of that time talking about all that his parents gave up to make this revolution happen.  

From the OSF website:

"Prepare for a high-energy, infectious mix of theatre, poetry, jazz, blues, hip-hop, boleros and salsa as UNIVERSES digs into the story and legacy of an American revolution. Four decades ago, the Black Panthers and Puerto Rican Young Lords were young activists providing food and health care in their impoverished communities while in a desperate struggle to survive the systematic dismantling of their movements. Now they are 60-somethings untangling a traumatic past and an unclear future. In ensemble, OSF actors and UNIVERSES toggle between then and now in this meticulously researched, compelling work of fiction."

It's going to be moving.  It's going to be real.   It's going to be fantastic.

UNIVERSES is an incredibly interesting, fun and cool group you just have to see.  Below, they discuss a little of the background of "Party People."

For more info on UNIVERSES, check out their facebook page



                 or the UNIVERSES website at: http://www.universesonstage.com/index.html

This week, for a cute little side project, I got to paint feathers on this adorable little chicken, Henrietta.  

Carved from foam by the prop shop's Diane Green, our renowned fowl (and other things) sculptress, she sports a jaunty tilt to her head and eyelashes.

Here at the festival, we are getting ready to open our three outdoor shows and have gotten a little swamped with props!  Mostly from the show "The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa."  This week, we've been working on this guy:  a giant bust of Falstaff supposedly made of Cow Manure. 

It was carved from foam and coated in fiberglass by our prop department's own Annette Julien.  We then primed it to keep it from bubbling under the hot sun, and to keep the treatment durable for the outdoor show.  

Oh, yeah, it's also a working puppet and it sings. 

So first to make some nice manure textured goop.  More complicated than you think.  It can't be too fresh and smeary, can't be too old and crumbly, and it needs that perfect cowpatty brown.   

What's my secret poo recipe, you ask?  This recipe called for a little jaxsan, and little flex glue, chunky sawdust and tint.  For some extra "post digestive" realness, we also pushed in some curls of hay (not shown in sample at right).  

We pushed, rather than brushed, the goo on by hand.  It was quite fun actually!  As we put the goo on, we pushed in the hay.  Lynn Jeffries, the puppet designer, had a lot of fun with this project and  asked us specifically to put some hay coming out of his ears.  We later added some dry bush variations in color as well as some shadowing and highlighting.  

And here he is!  
The finished product.  Making "John Falstaff" the butt of Iowa's jokes!  

Detail shot!

And that's how I made poo into art.!

This week, we have been working on banners for our production of As You Like It.  

There were two sets of banners, one set for the "good" duke (the green winged antelope)  and a set for the "bad" duke (roaring lions!)  Bad guys always get the cooler stuff. 

Above, Gino paints the "hellmouth"  a cut drop that is actually used as an entry and exit.  

Thayne works on another of the lion banners.  

The slideshow below shows the progression of the lion banners and some finished shots of the hellmouth. 

Here is a nice finished shot of the "good" duke's banner, the flying antelope.  



The background was done with a soft spray and a large foam stamper, depicted below.