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Categories: all aviation bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
Tue, 10 Aug 2010Every once in a while, I'll shoot a theatrical press photo that's just a really great photo. With Penguins, it's pretty easy for me to work with a huge grin on my face. Check those pictures out. They range from pretty good to fantastic. That's largely due to the content, though. With Clubfoot (a show about stories from an EMT), I wasn't expecting to have the same reaction. What can you do with three people and more or less no action? Certainly not anything like what you can do with Penguins. Which is why it was odd when I found myself grinning like an idiot over this picture:
It's really a fantastic picture. The composition, the lighting, the coloration, the expressions; everything came together. The subject matter isn't enough by itself ("three people looking at the camera" is not, on the face of it, a compelling idea for a picture) to grab you, yet this one does. Anyway, it's nice to come away from something like this feeling so good about my work. These are the odd little moments that I'm reminded how much I enjoy what I'm doing. Posted at 00:35 permanent link category: /theater Thu, 05 Aug 2010
A Children's Book of Revelations
You ain't seen nothin' yet.
Come down to Annex Theatre for a showing of Penguins to catch this film in all its big-screen glory. Runs from August 7 through August 27, don't miss it! Posted at 13:52 permanent link category: /theater Thu, 29 Jul 2010Feel free to skip this one, it's kind of heady, and may not make a lot of sense. So, think about how a normal consumer transaction goes. I make a widget, and it costs me $5 to produce. Let's say I spend another $5 on packaging, distribution, marketing, etc. My total cost to put a widget in a customer's hand is $10. I charge them $3 on top of that to have some profit, total $13 charge to the customer. They pay their $13, and go away happy with their widget. Don't dwell on the amounts here, just get that process in your head: cost, product, price, overhead, etc. The end of that process is that I'm out my $5 product, and the $5 I spent on marketing and overhead, but I'm up by $13, so I've made $3 at the end of the day. Pretty straightforward. Do that a lot, and that's the basis of most trades. Theater, however, is an entirely different beast, as occurred to me the other day. In theater, you spend various resources to put together a product (a show) -- time, money, reused materials, etc. Rent costs a certain amount. If you assume a fixed-length run of a show, the product cost (the cost to put on the show) is pretty much fixed. However, unlike many other transactions, the customer doesn't diminish your supply of the product. Whether you have three paying audience members, or a full house, one night of a show costs the same, and uses up the same amount of your product. You end up with the same amount of product left whether you cancelled for lack of sales, or completely sold out. So income is, effectively, completely disconnected from cost. If you spend $100 on a show that is for whatever reason a hit, your profit would be enormous. If you blow $10 grand on a show that's a complete flop, you're out $10 grand. And through all that, the amount of product you have never changes -- your show is always (within the limits of what fate doles out in the form of actor performances, tech successes/failures, etc.) the same. Time is the only thing that diminishes the amount of product you have. I don't really have a point here, it's just such a weird business to be in. The normal rules don't apply. Posted at 16:22 permanent link category: /theater Tue, 19 Jan 2010Alecto: Issue #1 opens on Friday. If I've been a bit quiet lately, that's why. Talk about a time suck. Anyway, one of the fun projects I'm doing as part of this is making a "comic book" drawing of them for their biography page. Last night, while I was getting pictures of folks, I got this entirely badass picture of the run crew (Regan, Noelle and Mike): 
I liked it so much that I wanted to share it. And I suppose it would be teasing if I didn't share the corresponding comic book image: 
Posted at 12:40 permanent link category: /theater Sat, 05 Dec 2009I just posted pictures from the Comedy Fist Fight show last night, and we had this hilarious moment with Ms. Becky Poole. Neither of us is doing anything unusual to affect our height. 
Posted at 21:36 permanent link category: /theater Occasionally, I end up with a really good picture out of a Spin the Bottle shoot. Yesterday was no exception:
Posted at 13:32 permanent link category: /theater Wed, 02 Dec 2009The Weekly apparently can't get enough. The Sunbreak thinks we're ultra-lowbrow. All featuring photography by yours truly (although my copyright notice fooled them -- I should have said "photo credit to Ian, copyright to Annex"). Ah well. I don't really care about bylines. Posted at 13:44 permanent link category: /theater Sun, 04 Oct 2009Just a quickie to point out that I took pictures at Spin the Bottle on Friday, and there are some really good ones in there. For instance:
Enjoy! Posted at 06:44 permanent link category: /theater Fri, 28 Aug 2009Tonight is the last night of Penguins at Annex Theatre, and what a run it's been. Our biggest house was 83 people, out of 99 seats, and tonight's set to break that record with a sell-out audience. As of this afternoon, pre-sales were already up to the mid 70s. One of the reasons? Maybe something to do with this:
Yep, one of the most-consulted "What shall we do tonight?" publications for our intended audience not only featured Penguins at the top of the list, but my photograph integrated with the headline. We win. I'm immensely happy to be part of the juggernaut. Posted at 19:08 permanent link category: /theater Fri, 21 Aug 2009
There it is in black and white
First time I've actually captured my own byline in a print publication. Pretty cool. On top of that, it's a fantastic review. Sure, it's just a sidebar in a throw-away free weekly, but it's a sidebar that will probably increase audience. I'll take it. Granted, that text over there is teeny-tiny, so click on it to see the huge-size version. Whee! Posted at 16:31 permanent link category: /theater Wed, 19 Aug 2009
Penguins is up, and it's getting good reviews. Time and again, Penguins shocked its opening-night audience -- a late-night Capitol Hill crowd, no less -- into hysterics. And, Helping things immensely is the cast, a uniformly excellent crew directed by Bret Fetzer, who keeps things fast, sharp, and funny. And, perhaps one of the best bits for me personally, my name is under the photo at the top of the page. I think that may be my first actual byline in a real (ie, on paper) publication. There's also a very positive review by The Examiner, a paper I hadn't been aware of until finding this review. The examiner says, Not for the easily offended, and not intended to be, Penguins plays with the kind of tongue-in-cheek violence and euphemistic humor you might find in Death to Smoochy. And, For those interested in the bawdy nightlife of comedy, it's well worth the trek down to Annex Theatre for an affordable evening of laughs Two out of two? Right on! I haven't been able to find any other reviews yet, but I'll certainly post them here when I do. If you want to come see Penguins, you'll have to act fast. It's only running this coming weekend, then next Friday, and that's it. This Friday and Saturday (the 21st and 22nd) are Pay What You Can, while Sunday's show is full price ($10 general admission, $7 TPS members, $5 students w/ID). The closing night show, on the 28th, is also full price; after these reviews and the positive word-of-mouth I think we're generating, don't be too surprised to find closing sold out. To buy tickets online (which I highly recommend, although you can't do PWYC online, only at the door), hit Brown Paper Tickets. It's the only way to get advance tickets and ensure that you'll get in. Posted at 14:29 permanent link category: /theater Mon, 03 Aug 2009Not that we're producing any posters for Penguins, the upcoming late-night show at Annex Theatre, but I had this idea for a poster. At the photo shoot yesterday, I got a couple of the actors to pose in about the situation I'd imagined, and today I spent a few minutes dinking around in Photoshop. This is the result:
Penguins opens on Friday, August 14th, and runs Fridays and Saturdays at 11, and Sundays at 8, until the 28th. You will kick yourself if you miss it. Posted at 14:27 permanent link category: /theater Thu, 30 Jul 2009Thanks to a tip from Stephanie, I picked up the August copy of Seattle Metropolitan magazine, and flipped to page 107. There on the right, we find the "MetPicks" sidebar: "Five August events you won't want to miss." And bringing in the #3 spot, we find: PENGUINS, EPISODE 1 Playwright Scot Augustson busted guts with the profane puppets of his Sgt. Rigsby silhouette shows. He's found another filthy outlet for his Python-esque cheek: This stage parody of gratuitous HBO dramas, which imagines an ongoing turf war between nuns and priests. Stunned by sacrilege? Stay home. [Annex Theatre, Aug 14-28] Almost verbatim -- they listed the old opening date, and I've updated it to be correct. Now that's some positive pre-press I can get behind! (If you haven't been sufficiently in the loop, I'm designing props for Penguins, including a delightfully obscene Ken doll, enough guns to arm a whole brace of adventurers in The Matrix, communion wafers, and a host of other sacriligeous items. The script kicks ass, the cast kicks even more ass, and it's gonna be one hell of a show. Literally. Opens August 14, 11 pm, and runs Fridays and Saturdays at 11, and Sundays at 8 until August 28 at Annex Theatre. Don't miss it!) Posted at 22:29 permanent link category: /theater Tue, 09 Jun 2009In a shocking twist, I've signed myself up to perform, on a stage, without a musical instrument. I've done this before, but it's not a common event. In 3rd grade, I played Schroeder in "You're a Good Man Charlie Brown." I couldn't tell you how I did. It was 3rd grade. I'm impressed I memorized all my lines. The only other non-musical performance I've done was perhaps 5 years ago, at a Neither/Nor cabaret night, a now-defunct event put on by the now-defunct Bald Faced Lie. I did a dramatic reading of the Time Travel Spam, set to a too-loud Yello track (tech rehearsal? what's that?). That went pretty well, aside from the fact that some people couldn't hear me over the music. Other than that, I played and performed cello in an orchestra from 3rd grade on. So, I'm not exactly a stranger to getting up on stage and performing, but it's not something I've done solo very much. The other twist, and the one that I am assured changes the game, is that I'll be reading my own work. It's a story I started writing about a year ago, and never finished. I was writing it on my oh-so-clever Alphasmart Dana (the device on which I wrote two of my novels), and ended up leaving it to sit for a while. Bad choice: the Dana has the old Palm Pilot habit of wiping its memory if the batteries run all the way down. Oops. So that first draft of the story went away. Suddenly, this weekend, I was inspired to try writing it again. This was a good choice: the first draft was getting longer and longer, and I couldn't figure out how to reign it in. I'd imagined a short story, and it was getting into novella territory. When I wrote it again, with a very conscious audience of Spin the Bottle, brevity came much more easily. The final story (which I will publish after I've read it, currently scheduled for September 4th) is only about 1500 words, and includes all the elements of the first draft. A very pleasing outcome for me. That's more like what I wanted in the first place. On top of all that, it times out to about eight and a quarter minutes when I read it aloud, and Spin the Bottle has a 10 minute limit. Perfect. The story is to be read in the final slot of the evening, which is traditionally reserved for smut. What I wrote is pretty tame for smut, but it's much more risque than my normal subjects. It's a nice diversion from my normal topics. But, the problem, I am assured, is that reading your own work is a completely different ball of wax from reading what someone else wrote. I can't see it, but I'm also not a performer, particularly compared to Bret Fetzer, who gave me this warning. He's read dozens and dozens of his own stories on stage, so I assume he's got a slightly better handle on it than I do. So if I get a strange gleam in my eye and dive for my bag when we're hanging out, chances are excellent that you're about to get a preview of the story, and I'm about to try my hand at reading in front of an audience. Assuming we've got eight and a quarter minutes free, of course. Posted at 23:26 permanent link category: /theater Sun, 07 Jun 2009I was just looking through my pictures from the latest Spin the Bottle at Annex, and came across this gem:
Haven't been to Spin the Bottle yet? You're missing some good stuff. Posted at 10:33 permanent link category: /theater Thu, 16 Apr 2009In the last few days, I've been working pretty hard at making theater happen. If you haven't been following along, I'm designing lights and doing photography for Love's Tangled Web, at Annex Theatre. I'm also doing a ton of other little tasks, as always happens in fringe theater, but that's neither here nor there. In a normal production, I'd expect to be doing the second full run tonight, the night before opening. I'd still be frantically chasing down problems in the lights, both the plot and cues. If I was a clever monkey, I would have taken the week off from work (I usually figure this out a few days before the week I should take off, which always makes me feel like a moron). I wouldn't be panicking, but I wouldn't be all that far from it. One of the reasons I've never written about this stuff before is that it's so overwhelming at the time that I simply don't have time to sit down and write about it. As I've cleverly implied, I am not in that place of near-panic now. This show has gone amazingly well, all the way from the meet-n-greet until now. Things have happened on time or ahead of schedule. We're getting our 6th(!) full tech run tonight. People have been delightful to work with. There have been no big clashes of ego, and no disasters, whether ego-induced or not. My employer even declared a week of vacation (to get us to burn off vacation hours) this week, the perfect time for me to have a week off. We open tomorrow. Thus it was that for the last few days, I've found myself walking out to get dinner at some reasonable hour, a feeling of contentment settled upon me like a cloak of finest ermine. All has, for quite a while now, been right with the world. It's a fantastic feeling. Of course, I'm still busy as hell, but I'm not freaking out. Nothing feels like it has to be rushed. It's all just... ok. Oh, and I suppose I can't tease you about photographs without offering up some evidence of the photographic goodness. Click on the below picture for a gallery of photos that we're sending out to press, and feel free to share them yourself: Posted at 16:56 permanent link category: /theater Thu, 19 Mar 2009One of the things I'm doing for the upcoming OCTV A-Team show at Open Circle is re-recording the opening voiceover. Since this is an unusual activity (the first time I've actually used the little home studio I set up in the basement), I figured I'd take a commemorative photograph.  Ian tries to look "surprised by the photographer" at the camera. Posted at 09:03 permanent link category: /theater Thu, 12 Mar 2009Once again, Ms. Ellie McKay makes my day for strange yet journal-worthy portraits:  That's from the Meet and Greet we had last night for Love's Tangled Web, the next show I'm working on (this time as light designer). She seemed very happy with the Party Mints. Posted at 13:24 permanent link category: /theater Sun, 15 Feb 2009I helped tech the Shoshinz show at the Jewel Box theater in Belltown last night and tonight. It was a great deal of fun, and I'm looking forward to working with them again. The shows were well attended, and the audiences seemed to get it. But the real reason I'm posting this? I'm kinda famous now. That's a post on their blog, which I cannot read, but it does feature a picture of me, and the text "AWESOME" (I'll ignore that they went to see "Awesome" that night as well, and assume they're talking about me). Yay for fame! Posted at 02:12 permanent link category: /theater Thu, 15 Jan 2009I was asked to take official pictures for Blind Spot, Annex's latest production. It was a lot of fun, taking both bio pictures, and media pictures. I hope I'm not ruining anyone's fun by posting this, but I was particularly fond of how Ellie McKay's picture turned out: 
To see the rest of them, you'll just have to go see the show, which opens tomorrow night. The bio pictures will be on the wall in the lounge. Posted at 14:54 permanent link category: /theater Categories: all aviation gadgets misc motorcycle theater Written by Ian Johnston. Software is Blosxom. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
