Week 7: Erika's One Act

I went to Mexico this weekend, so I saw Erika's show on the final dress Thursday. That being said I'm sure things changed because I changed things up to the very last moment. But from what I saw I was impressed! I thought there were a lot of bold choices that I wouldn't have been comfortable with using, such as highly saturate tones and different brush strokes.

In the first play, red saturate down light was the major player. I thought that it was a perfect choice for the tango scene, but due to the fact that she couldn't fit an additional down system this didn't serve her very well. If she had made the cyc extremely red and had them in a deep blue I think this would have conveyed the same feeling and worked better with the space. This way the down system could have worked harder for her. Due to the fact that the back curtain was closed for this one she would have had to talk to the director about altering a bit, but I think it would have been something to consider. In the park scene she really played with the cyc, using it to convey sky and to convey emotion, which I thought was a bold choice. Each time a character guessed what was in the box the cyc would change from a sky color to a nasty color- different depending on each choice. I thought this was interesting, but I would have played with the starting point of the cue and the fade time to completion because I felt like as soon as I realized it was happening it was already over, and it took me out of the scene because I was trying to figure out what happened.

What I really commend Erika for is her different use of brush strokes. She had shin lighting, and front fresnels. I hadn't even considered front fresnels at all in my design, and i thought that was really neat! She also used fresnels pointed into the audience for the moments when one of the characters was talking to the audience and breaking the fourth wall. I thought that this was brilliant, I would have just thought to turn on the house lights which would have been a real logistic problem for the stage manager.

Overall I thought that Erika's one acts were successful, and I really learned a lot from watching them. I can't wait to see the next ones!

P.S. My boyfriend loved it too, he loves going to see shows now!