Creating a Starcatching Color Palette for Peter

Rachel Pollock at work

"A show like Peter and the Starcatcher has an incredibly specific color palette, which means that we moved a lot of projects through the dye shop for this production," says costume craftsperson Rachel Pollock.

Rachel was painter/dyer for the individual parts of each of the many costumes worn by thirteen actors portraying over 100 characters, while her co-craftsperson, third year graduate student Erin Abbenante, made many of the hats and headdresses. Together they served as a craftwork team of two, coordinating with the main costume shop team, comprised of many more costumers (both staff and students),  working as tailors, drapers, stitchers and more. 

In addition to handling yards and yards of fabric, this included work with vintage lace trim, buttons and elastic for suspenders. Mermaid costumes for one show-stopping production number alone required over thirty dye jobs for everything from zippers to satin gloves.

The brocade vest for  pirate chief Black Stache embellished with applique dragon motif and hand painted designs. And to the right, as worn by Mitchell Jarvis playing the dastardly dandy (photo by Jon Gardiner.)

The Ensemble struts their stuff  as musical mermaids. (Photo by Curtis Brown.)

The collar for warrior chieftain Fighting Prawn, ornamented with rooster tail feathers and hand-painted cutlery. And as worn by Myles Bullock (center front) with the Ensemble. (Photo by Curtis Brown),

"When you look at the array of clothes for this show, an incredible amount of labor has gone into creating the effects the audience enjoy during the course of this fast-paced 2-hour performance. Even someone paying close attention to the biggest, showiest costumes will have little idea of the time, effort and attention to detail required," says Rachel.

Enjoy the many colors of Peter and the Starcatcher. Onstage now through December 12.

Click here or call our Box Office 919-962-7529 for tickets.

Holly Poe Durbin: Creating Costumes for Peter and the Starcatcher

Centered around pirates and magic, Peter and the Starcatcher is a fast-paced production, giving actors the joy, and responsibility, of alternating rapidly between multiple characters. While some characters need little or no physical change, others require complete transformation. "This type of play is very much like doing a musical—once the music starts there’s little room for variation. The entire design team must create a world for the play that will enhance speed and fluidity," explains costume designer Holly Poe Durbin.

Holly says her start, working on ensemble pieces for the pre-Broadway production of Angels in America and an early version of The Kentucky Cycle, taught her about story structure and dramatic intent, which helped with this production.

The design process starts before the roles are even cast. "The director (Brendon Fox), actors and costume designer collaborate to make the thousand small decisions that bring each character to life," says Holly.  She starts by sorting through which characters are fully formed and dynamic, and which are portrayed in a partial way as fleeting momentary characters.

The design team spent hours creating a storyboard for the show with Brendon.

"Together we started forming rules about the world such as equating "star stuff," a magical substance, with light. Any character encountering it will have shiny surfaces or light qualities to their costumes. Another rule we established is identifying each moment by interpreting whose point of view we are seeing through."

After discussing these things at length with the entire team, Holly was able to put pencil to paper and begin to actually design the costumes. Her design process is broken into three steps. Holly began by doing a lot of research, which included reading the Peter and the Starcatchers books and the original Peter Pan stories. She collected images that inspire her, then curated those images into mood boards for specific characters.

Research mood boards for Black Stache and pirate costume details.

Then, Holly created pencil sketches used to bounce ideas around with Brendon. In some cases the sketches changed several times, as artists changed their ideas and Holly redesigned the characters. This phase wrapped up when casting began so Holly could work with each actor's approach and add it into the mix.

The final step was when sketches went to the PlayMakers costume shop for brainstorming with the costume team. At this stage, Holly worked with the team to solve any challenges that arose.

"It takes a large pool of specialists to create a show like Peter. PlayMakers has a spectacular reputation for being able to create a top notch stage vision and I was very excited to know I was coming here to do Peter and the Starcatcher."

Come and enjoy Peter and the Starcatcher. Onstage through December 12.

For tickets, click here or call our Box Office at 919-962-7529.

Lighting Designer Xavier Pierce on Finding Inspiration

To set the mood for Peter and the Starcatcher, lighting designer Xavier Pierce found inspiration from a variety of places, from his home in New York City and the work of artist Victor Eredel, to pictures and artwork such as the images we see below.

To begin designing for a play, Xavier reads the script and filters through the words, sifting through his "own emotional database of living." He does this in an effort to make emotional connections with the words, then creates lighting that coincides with those emotions. Xavier describes this picture as "starstuff." He says, it's "an organic/spiritual compound used to reinvent nature as the beholder sees it in the mind."

The artist of the photo to the right, Victor Eredel, "is a visual artist who uses hyper lucid surrealistic backgrounds with hand developed beings in his work. The storytelling and visual superiority of his works spoke to me, embraced me and inspired me to dream about the play as small children dream," explained Xavier.

When asked about his experiences designing at PlayMakers (4000 Miles, The Mountaintop), Xavier replied, "I think of PlayMakers as home... I feel so much warmth when I step through the doors of the Paul Green Theatre. I open up the doors and see my brothers and sisters working hard doing their craft and being passionate about theatre."

"The Neverland and the Wasp" 

 Here's an example a sketch by Xavier; he uses drawings to help visualize and create the lighting for each scene.

"We dreamed as kids and now we dream as artists"

Dream with us as Peter and the Starcatcher takes the stage November 18 - December 12.

Click here or call our Box Office 919-962-7529 for tickets.

Let's Go Flying with Brendon Fox

Mysteries of Harris Burdick by Chris Van Allsburg

"Imagine a mashup of Treasure Island, Harry Potter and Monty Python, involving magic, friendship, first love, and flying cats. Something for everyone!"

- Director Brendon Fox

describing Peter and the Starcatcher 

Most children have fantasized about flying, and director Brendon Fox was no different. For him, flying meant freedom and exploration, and more importantly, escaping adults who told him what he could and couldn't do.

Director Brendon Fox

Brendon, in addition to directing at theatres across the country, including Opus and Angels in America for PlayMakers, is an Assistant Professor of Drama at Washington College in Maryland. He says that as much as he wanted to catch a production of Peter and the Starcatcher in the past, he's glad he didn't have the chance as this has allowed him to come to our production with fresh eyes.

Brendon confides that he's fallen in love with so many things about this production: "The play manages to capture a sincere sense of wonder and imagination." It incorporates music and puppets, while holding onto the imagination required to play "make believe."

Peter and the Starcatcher tells the story an orphan boy with no name and a Starcatcher-in-Training in the late 19th century, as they strive to keep magical "starstuff" out of the hands of pirates and other nefarious characters.

"The young people having adventures in Peter and the Starcatcher have the time of their lives, encountering dastardly pirates, crazy weather, animals out to eat them, and exotic natives of foreign islands. This show invites us to live vicariously through them – to see the world through their eyes, full of danger, joy, laughter, and even experience some hard lessons about growing up. "

Magic and wonder of childhood. Photo by Heather Perry

The sheer size of the production presents challenges and opportunities for the cast and crew. Brendon compares the scope of Starcatcher to that of a Shakespearean production with a large cast, many locations and interpretations unique to each situation.

"The cast has to be incredibly versatile to transform into so many characters, often in front of the audience. The design team and I have spent six months going over every moment and location in the play, and have storyboarded (like a film shoot) how we are going to evoke every location and approach events ranging from a storm onstage to a dense jungle."

This has put the creative team to the test like kids playing with found objects and using their imagination to create a pirate ship or an island. Brendon says this encourages audiences to fill in the blanks. "We're not trying to be too literal or spell things out for those watching the play." Ideally, he wants the audience to view the show through the eyes of a preteen, though the show is full of humor, heart and magic for all ages.

Ready to fly? Join us for Peter and the Starcatcher November 18 - December 12.

Click here or call our Box Office at 919-962-7529 for tickets.

Beating the Odds: How Guys and Dolls Conquered Broadway, America, and the World

by Gregory Kable

Part Two: America and the World, or My Time of Day

Frank Loesser rehearsing Marlon Brando and Edward Hopper's poignant Nighthawks (1942).
(www.mtishowspace.comwww.mtishowspace.com) (www.edwardhopper.net)

My time of day is the dark time
A couple of deals before dawn
When the street belongs to the cop

And the janitor with the mop
And the grocery clerks are all gone
When the smell of the rain-washed pavement
Comes up clean and fresh and cold
And the street lamp light fills the gutter with gold
That's my time of day.

How might we account for the incredible staying power of Guys and Dolls? Without question, its combined strengths of original plotlines, deft characters and arresting score are prime factors. But a wealth of other musicals without this show’s devoted audiences or longevity can boast of the same. Instead we can place Guys and Dolls among a handful of musicals which are quintessentially American in spirit and tone and which have become internationally beloved as unique affirmations of foundational principles. Even the briefest roster would include as diverse a collection as Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, Jerry Herman’s Hello, Dolly!, and Ragni, Rado and MacDermot’s Hair. Beyond their spectacular achievements as musical theatre, perhaps an answer lies in the social context for each of these essential classics, and Guys and Dolls can be productively approached from this direction as well.

Standing at the midpoint of the American Century, 1950 afforded a timely opportunity for assessing the nation’s trajectory. America had endured two World Wars and economic calamity, and the tide of modernism had been rising at a steady pace since the 20s with urban displacement of an agrarian society one decisive result of this transition. The life of Damon Runyon himself is one expression of the shifting dynamic.

Alfred Damon Runyan (the surname Runyon the legacy of a newspaper typo) was born, prophetically, in Manhattan, Kansas in 1880. Raised in Pueblo, Colorado, he became a newspaperman by the age of fifteen, covering sports, crime and courtroom beats as a star reporter for William Randolph Hearst’s publishing empire. Once settling in New York, Runyon brought both an outsider’s fascination with and Midwesterner’s critical eye to the epicenter of modern America. Following the Wall Street crash and the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, Runyon found a new income stream in the fiction that would secure his legacy.

The Beggar's Opera (www.music.org)

The Granddaddy of Guys and Dolls and arguably the American Musical, is the 18th century English Ballad Opera, The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay (1728), a rollicking satire on human and social corruption with a gleefully depicted underworld serving as a funhouse mirror of respectable British society.

Gay’s innovation was to reset existing English melodies to new lyrics suitable to his needs. The method surprised and delighted audiences who could come in humming the tunes, undercut the heightened romance, heroic stature, and foreign languages of the dominant grand opera, and overnight established a vogue for vernacular musical entertainments, and the kind of “light” or comic opera that the Victorian team of Gilbert and Sullivan would further immortalize.

Never one to pass on dramatically sound existing material, German playwright Bertolt Brecht returned to Gay’s masterwork in collaboration with composer Kurt Weill for their adaptation entitled The Threepenny Opera. Premiering in 1928, this updated reboot would become one of the most important and influential musicals of the century. Although Brecht and Weill’s piece would fizzle on Broadway in 1933, finding delayed success two decades later in a landmark Off-Broadway production, its appearance in the 20s suggests that the vein of exploiting urbanism, and especially its criminal class for fun and profit was there to be mined.

(www.threepennyopera.org) The Threepenny Opera (www.last.fm)

The pointedness of Gay’s outrageousness and Brecht’s politics may be absent in Frank Loesser, but those predecessors would certainly recognize a kinship with their own experiments and the shrewdness of making such subject matter deeply pleasurable. “The proof of the pudding,” Brecht was fond of repeating, “is in the eating,” and Loesser’s audiences, like those of Gay and Brecht/Weill before him, clearly couldn’t get enough. As much as George M. Cohan, George and Ira Gershwin, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had earlier in the century, Loesser’s Guys and Dolls would put its indelible stamp on our collective consciousness of what New York City is all about.

Guys and Dolls (www.playbill.com)

Thus, if Loesser and Abe Burrows engaged in the ongoing project of reshaping American mythology (the credited Jo Swerling withdrew from the project at an early stage but was contractually protected to be listed co-author), they built not only on the trifecta of Gay, Brecht, and Runyon, but upon another prominent figure of the interwar and postwar years.

Walter Winchell was ubiquitous in newspapers, radio and television from the 30s to the 50s helping popularize the same kind of punchy style and striking use of American idioms which characterized Runyon’s pieces, as well as (for better or worse) fueling the fixation on American celebrity, a focus which has ballooned to today’s gargantuan proportions. Like Runyon, Winchell retailored New York as the glorious, glamorous, gaudy heart of national culture, providing colorful ballast to the dreariness, predictability, and sacrificial ethos endemic to the Depression and the nation’s slow recovery.

Newsman and personality Walter Winchell offered relief from America's starker realties.
(www.britannica.com) (www.vintage-ads.livejournal.com)

Given both men’s high-profiles and their special delights, the Runyon-Winchell Manhattan became enshrined as the truth of the times. Their New York City was the bold, brash image the metropolis craved for itself, and consequently internalized as authentic memory. And from the opening sequence entitled “Runyonland”, Loesser and his collaborators recognize how full and loving a portrait of modern America was contained within this potent mix of outsized ambitions, sympathy and cynicism, and a promise of wish-fulfillment.

(www.spoonercentral.com) High times and bad times in period New York (www.britannica.com)

It is this heady air that is so blissfully captured in Guys and Dolls, preserving in equal measure the sentiment and snap of the American life. If transplanting pastoral romance to big city environs wasn’t exactly new, it still felt sincere enough to ring true given the historical moment of Guys and Dolls, coming just before the explosion of the suburbs transformed the national psyche once more.

(www.blog.insidetheapple.net)                                                              (www.mysticstamp.com)

Guys and Dolls embodies both the hustle and wistful tenderness of the city, a union speaking to the intersection of an abiding faith in American innocence with our parallel drive for greater experience. Sky Masterson’s hymn to the city dweller’s senses of place and self introducing this essay is a disarmingly intimate turn so characteristic of Loesser’s whole. From start to finish his New York City is personified with as much devotion as any character—two of its defining features, the skyline and subway, literal signifiers of those brass rings of aspiration and mobility, the reach and the freedom that built and continue to inspire America. The zip and rush of the contemporary world offset the habit of trading in nostalgia, but Guys and Dolls still finds ample time for quietly reflective moments as in a painting by Edward Hopper. In this fusion, the piece’s emotional power is unforced, organic and satisfyingly earned.

(www.mercantilemill.com)                                                                             (www.redditgifts.com)

Glitz, gangsters and gamblers rubbing shoulders in Hollywood takes on New York.
(www.moviepostershop.com) (www.gettyimages.com) (www.antiquegamblingchips.com)

What, then, are some of Loesser’s life lessons musicalized in Guys and Dolls? Submitted for your approval is a Lucky 7 of extrapolations:

• If the national character is equal parts passion, optimism and irony, Musical Comedy is one of its most perfect and telling expressions.
• Virtue and vice are inextricably bound in a host of our enduring works, likewise sentiment and satire.
• Similarly, all extremes of morality or sin threaten us with a diminished life. This is nowhere more pronounced than in the turnabouts following the show’s Havana interlude.
• Our history is not one of constant upheaval. A peaceful progress can even be traced between our pastoral past and urban present.
• American success and happiness are just as predicated on luck as on pluck. The Puritan work ethic isn’t everything. Timing and “chemistry” as Sky maintains, are also verities. In that respect, both Plymouth Rock and Las Vegas are key memorials.
• Always take your best shot and err on the side of trust. If not, you might let a sizable windfall or precious chance at love pass you by.
• On the flip side of that last injunction, if a wager seems too good to be true, decline it and happily avoid “an earful of cider”.

Vitality and Variety: Salvationists and Showgirls sharing Guys and Dolls' spotlight.
(www.pinterest.com/thesalarmyctri) (www.takemeback.to)

In these and other respects, Guys and Dolls endures as a musical monument to Whitman-esque ideals, showcasing our nation’s time of day in a one-in-a-million town in which one can’t help but hear and respond to America singing. In any sweepstakes of urban Americana it’s truly better than even money that Guys and Dolls finds a place in the winner’s circle.

(www.newyork-wallpapers.com)                                                  (www.allposters.com)

Guys & Dolls - onstage through July 25th.

Click here or call 919-962-7529 for tickets or more information.

Beating the Odds: How Guys and Dolls Conquered Broadway, America, and the World

by Gregory Kable

Part One: Broadway, or Luck Be a Lady

“All life is six-to-five against.”

As one of Damon Runyon’s signature aphorisms reinforces, it was never a sure thing. When producers Cy Feuer and Ernest Martin landed on Runyon’s fiction as the basis for a follow-up to their sole Broadway musical to date, 1939’s Where’s Charley?, based on the Victorian cross-dressing farce Charley’s Aunt, they immediately turned to the composer of that previous hit, Frank Loesser, who readily took to the gamble.

Doubtless, Runyon’s peculiar appeal, Prohibition-era tales steeped in such specificity, irony, and a droll objectivity accounting for their humor on the page, made them even more unusual a source for musical treatment than the Brandon Thomas chestnut. But adding to the uncertainty of the venture, Broadway exited the 1940s less invested in romance and fancy than a sober, searching realism. The towering dramas of post-WW2 America, Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, blazed the path for such 50s classics as Come Back, Little Sheba, Tea and Sympathy and The Crucible. Reinforced by the sobriety of films like Gentleman’s Agreement, On the Waterfront, and the landmark movie adaptation of Streetcar. American art ushered in an era of grit and frankness whose collective glare confirmed the truth of Williams’ surrogate self in The Glass Menagerie, whose protagonist rhapsodizes, “nowadays the world is lit by lightning!”

Neon Wonderland: New York’s Times Square in the Age of Runyon.

(www.mindsimedia.info)

Despite its position as a national institution in postwar popular culture, even the musical was not immune. Long considered a delightful diversion, the genre’s historical highlights were as significant for their relative rarity as for their trumping of standing conventions. Suddenly the musical had upped its game, as the 40s trended toward greater integration among the elements of a show (its story, songs, and staging) which retreated from traditions of freewheeling creativity toward a more contained verisimilitude. By the late 40s an unapologetic fantasy like Finian’s Rainbow, intersecting love stories, political satire and leprechauns, would stand as the exception that proves the rule—under the influence of the teaming of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the musical was increasingly honoring logic and probability. 1943’s Oklahoma!, followed by Carousel and South Pacific were heralded as the genre’s welcome and long-delayed maturation.

But not everyone was buying. The musical still suffered a lack of full critical acceptance. In his groundbreaking 1946 study The Playwright as Thinker, the formidable scholar Eric Bentley dismissed the genre wholesale as crude folk art succeeding on stage through the thinnest distractions of song, dance, and spectacle, in Bentley’s words, “embellishments on a scarecrow”, which summarizes his patronizing stance. But even Bentley would change his tune a decade later, including Guys and Dolls among a quintet of representative American Dramas in an anthology of works due respect and esteem, lionizing the piece both “the best of all musical comedies” and “an organic product of American life.” Like the Salvationists forming one half of the landscape of Guys and Dolls, Bentley became a convert.

Still, the accolades were in its future. In development, Guys and Dolls remained a wild card in a more regulated gaming environment, and its producers were doing what they could to even the board. Loesser proved an invaluable asset, writing prospective songs at the breakneck speed of a thoroughbred, while the thorny issue of a useable storyline seemed a bigger obstacle than initially thought. That pull of Rodgers and Hammerstein was strong, and the earliest concept for Guys and Dolls was a straightforward love story between two sharply opposed personalities (the most recent model being that hard-won romance between French planter Emile De Becque and Midwestern nurse Nellie Forbush in the Pulitzer Prize-winning South Pacific).

American Originals: Damon Runyon (1884-1946) & Frank Loesser (1910-1969)

(www.digitaldeliftp.com) (www.greatentertainersarchive.blogspot.com)

It took a dozen attempts to solve the problems with the book, before veteran comic Abe Burrows proved the perfect foil to that enervating tone of misguided sincerity. Burrows was an effortless match for the Runyon style, most notably in his beloved radio show Duffy’s Tavern which, like Runyon’s fiction, was long on locale, idiosyncrasy, and vividly vernacular characters and speech. It was Burrows who skewed the story toward comedy which paradoxically strengthened the romance. As with the complementary relationship between these structural features, Loesser and Burrows seemed as potently synchronous. For all of its sense of cohesion, Burrows was primarily fitting s story around Loesser’s completed tunes and lyrics, the antithetical approach to the unifying principle of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show. That the seams aren’t visible and the narrative and numbers dovetail so easily in and out of one another is a testament to the daring, artistry and imaginative breadth of both composer and bookwriter. The additions of the legendary George S. Kaufman as director and the robust Michael Kidd as choreographer only further sweetened both the pot and its prospects. Guys and Dolls opened in November 1950 and ran for an impressive 1,200 performances. Lady Luck had clearly descended and been charmed into turning all of those risks to rewards.

Rolling the Dice: The Colorful Denizens of Runyonland Sing and Dance on Broadway.

                  (www.oldscrolls.com) (www.bluegobo.com)

Those “six-to-five” odds from Runyon’s opening epigraph had been outpaced and the show paid huge dividends. Guys and Dolls became an instant classic, and Loesser the hottest property in town. A resurgence in Runyon’s work was one happy consequence (he had died in 1946), and Feuer and Martin’s reputations were secured. They would again team with Loesser and Burrows for the perennially popular How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1961. And in a turn of events worthy of a Broadway musical, this final collaboration would itself garner the Pulitzer Prize, capping the careers of its creators and further cementing the status of the genre. As only the fourth musical to win the coveted award to that point, it also again argued for the equality of musical comedy with that more serious minded form of the musical play. Just as in Guys and Dolls, it was payoffs and happy endings all around. Perhaps the impetus lay in that initial challenge of probable defeat calculated in Runyon’s “six-to-five” odds. As Runyon himself continued, that imbalance is “just enough to keep you interested.” Audiences have been enraptured ever since, and the show’s fervent gestation period mirrors that of the essential action of Guys and Dolls: shared leaps into the unknown with utopian hopes of reconciling conflicts, both instances speaking to and embodying “A Musical Fable of Broadway.”

Next Up: Beating the Odds, Part Two: America and the World.

See the PlayMakers Summer Youth Conservatory production of Guys and Dolls July 15-25.

Click here or call 919-962-7529 for tickets or more information.