NYCPlaywrights July 27, 2019
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NYCPlaywrights
Jul 27, 2019, 5:15:02 PM7/27/19
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Greetings NYCPlaywrights
*** FREE THEATER IN NYC ***
Saturday, July 27th - 7pm
Sunday, July 28th - 7pm
AN EVENING WITH FIDEL & MY MOTHER THE RADICAL
An original one-man play written and performed by TIM PEREZ.
As part of the NYU/ Studio Tisch Graduate Acting Alumni Association (GAAA) 'BARE BONES PRODUCTIONS'…
This multi-media play examines Latino history, memory, identity and the current treatment of migrant children, parents and US citizens, juxtaposed against the Cuba revolution.
Tickets are free.
To directly reserve your tickets, go to… reserv...@gradactingalumni.org
To see Tim Perez's website:
WALKER THEATRE - 5TH FLOOR
NYU Tisch School of The arts
721 Broadway
NY 10003
*** DRAMATISTS GUILD UPDATE ~ PLAYWRIGHTS WELCOME ***
We are pleased to announce that She LA Arts in Los Angeles, CA, Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, CA, Theater Latté Da in Minneapolis, MN, Theatre East in NYC, and Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Cold Spring, NY have recently joined our Playwrights Welcome program!
Playwrights Welcome offers available tickets to professional playwrights on the day of a performance, free of charge. These are tickets that would otherwise go unsold. Developed for Dramatists Guild of America members, Playwrights Welcome is a national ticketing initiative created by Samuel French, along with Dramatists Play Service, Dramatic Publishing, Music Theatre International, Playscripts, and Rodgers and Hammerstein.
More information on the Playwrights Welcome program...
*** OPPORTUNITIES FOR PLAYWRIGHTS ***
Over Our Head Players is accepting submissions for the "2020 Snowdance® 10 Minute Comedy Festival," now through November 1. "Snowdance®" entry is open to original 10 minute or shorter comedies for the stage.
Winning entries will be performed together in one theatre presentation by the OOHP Snowdance ensemble at Sixth Street Theatre for five weeks beginning January 31, 2020. The entire Snowdance production will be presented 24 times during the run. At each performance, audience members can vote for their favorite individual comedy; the audience favorites will earn cash prizes for the playwright.
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The Richard Rodgers Awards 2020
These awards, created and endowed by Richard Rodgers in 1978 for the development of the musical theater, subsidize full productions, studio productions, and staged readings by nonprofit theaters in New York City of works by composers and writers who are not already established in this field. The winners are selected by a jury of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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The Jonathan Larson Grants are intended to honor and recognize emerging musical theatre artists. Composers, lyricists, and librettists who work in musical theatre are the focus of the grants. ATW is committed to serving artists who are creating new, fully producible works for the theatre, and advancing the art form. The grants do not honor a specific piece or project.
*** FOR MORE INFORMATION about these and other opportunities see the web site at https://www.nycplaywrights.org ***
*** FLY SYSTEM ***
A fly system, or theatrical rigging system, is a system of rope lines, blocks (pulleys), counterweights and related devices within a theater that enables a stage crew to fly (hoist) quickly, quietly and safely components such as curtains, lights, scenery, stage effects and, sometimes, people.
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Throughout his lifetime, Peter Foy applied his artistic vision and mechanical ingenuity to the challenge of safely flying performers in a variety of different and often difficult circumstances. His creation of the Inter-Related Pendulum helped define Mary Martin’s barnstorming performance as Peter Pan for the 1954 Broadway musical and ushered in a new era of spectacular, highly-controlled, natural-looking free flight.
In the years that followed, Foy introduced a series of wholly new flying systems, each created to remedy a problem or redefine a flying aesthetic. He created the Floating Pulley system in 1958 as a means of flying actors in low-height venues. His determination to preserve the magic of theatrical flight by concealing its mechanism from the audience’s view led to his introduction of the Track-On-Track system, an ingenious arrangement allowing independent control of lift and travel, in 1962.
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“Shoshana Bean was starring in Wicked on Broadway and got to the big number at the end of act one, ‘Defying Gravity.’ As most people know, Elphaba rises up during the whole last section and ‘flies.’ In actuality, she’s on a cherry picker that lifts her while an enormous dress blows around her. The cast then runs onstage and points upward while she belts out the ending. Well, one night she got to the part where she rises and sings ‘It’s me-e-e-e-e‘ and… she didn’t rise. The cherry picker didn’t work, but she had to finish the song. So, she just walked off the cherry picker and kept singing the end of the song. But what about the ensemble? They’re supposed to run out and point up at her, flying above them. They decided the only way they could point up at her is if they ran out…and laid on the floor. So, the entire end of the number was Shoshana belting how she was ‘defying gravity’ while standing 5’2” off the ground and the whole ensemble singing ‘Look at her! She’s wicked!’ while laying on the floor. And that’s live theater!”
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Deus ex machina is a Greek term meaning “God from the Machine.” In Greek tragedies, a God would appear and resolves the conflict in the story by introducing new information to a character. This was usually done with a crane or a trap door for entry onto the stage to make it seem like the God's appearance was supernatural.
This same idea was used throughout plays in the Late Middle Ages to create the illusion of flying. A crane would be installed into the theater behind a scenery piece, or offstage, to hide it. Then the actor would be wearing a harness that was then attached to some kind of pulley system that would run along the arm of the crane in order to adjust the height of the actor once the actor was off of the ground allowing the crane operator to raise and lower the flying actor. To compensate for the weight of the actor, at the bast of the crane around where the operator would be located would be a counter weight system which might be metal weights or sandbags. By using a crane not only can you move up and down, but you can also move from side to side as well, depending on the restrictions of the scenic pieces. It could also be possible to move upstage and downstage if the crane was on some kind of track in the floor.
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Some tips and tricks to help you "fly" your characters in Peter Pan the Musical.
If you intend to use wires and harnesses here are some of the top flying companies in the world: www.zfxflying.com www.flybyfoy.com www.freedom-flying.co.uk www.getvertigo.com www.bluechilliflying.com.
Here are some more straightforward suggestions all of which have come from successful past productions – we hope they help you:
• Place the characters on stage risers, flood the stage with dry ice and create the illusion of movement with a spot-lit mirror ball leaving the music to do the rest.
• Create some life-size silhouette puppets which can be held up against a London skyline.
• Get your characters to use scooters on stage in amongst lots of dry ice / fog.
• Use UV light on a totally darkened stage – only the fluorescent costumes of Peter and the children are picked up and glow as they are carried across the stage by figures dressed in black.
• A black star cloth on an empty UV-lit stage stage can create the illusion of the characters suspended in mid-air against the night sky.
• Simply blow some fog onto the stage and use rotating gobos in moving lights to create a cloud-like sky for your characters to “fly” over.
• Employ a couple of see-saws between the nursery beds (with one end of the beam controlled by crew members from behind a black cloth). Use a spotlight to light the characters just from the knees up. Even though the characters only rise a few feet the effect on the audience can be delightfully deceptive.
• Place the characters on a black staircase in black out and spotlight them with a projector behind showing moving images of the London skyline
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There's another way in which she is like Peter Pan. After spending the first half of her life as a gymnast, Ms. Rigby can truly fly with the greatest of ease. What's difficult, she says, is singing, dancing and acting while wearing the 7-pound harness that hoists her aloft.
"You're strapped into it like a corset around your waist and over your shoulders and through your legs, very tightly," she says. "I had to gain an incredible amount of endurance to pull it off."
The actual flying "is a ball," Ms. Rigby says. Designed by Foy -- a name which is to stage flight what the Wright Brothers were to airplanes -- Ms. Rigby's flying sequences receive a backstage assist from "two guys who are pulling the ropes, one who pulls me back and forth, and one who pulls me up and down."
Her most daring aerobatics come at the end of the first act. "I spin and I turn . . . I actually grab the curtain and I spin," she says. "I guess because of the gymnastics I have a pretty good awareness of how to spin, how to stop myself. There's a feeling of total abandon up there, and risk. I'm not cautious up there."
There have been a couple of mishaps, however. In Kansas City, Mo., during the sword fight with Captain Hook, "I was flying too fast and put both hands in front of me to stop myself," Ms. Rigby recalls. "My sword hit the set first and ricocheted and hit me over the eye." She finished the show with blood streaming down her face, and subsequently received 10 stitches. "I'm sure the audience thought this was the most realistic thing."
On another occasion, the wire that propels her upward got crossed with the wire of another actress. "Instead of flying out the window, she flew up in a horizontal position. She was in bed, so with covers and all she flew up in the air," Ms. Rigby says, adding that they immediately performed the scene again -- correctly the second time.
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When the world’s most famous nanny comes to the Muny — complete with umbrella, spoonsful of sugar and child-rearing techniques guaranteed to baffle Dr. Spock — she will perform her most spectacular feat: She will fly.
She will fly right over the audience.
If you have seen “Mary Poppins” before — on tour at the Fox or at other indoor theaters — you know that she’s supposed to do that.
But you may have wondered how that would be possible at a theater that has no ceiling.
You know she doesn’t actually fly, right? The actress who plays Mary Poppins — that’s Jenny Powers, this time out — must be safely attached to a wiring system that creates the illusion of flight.
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