Hello Baby Universe

While it would be more marketing saavy to toot our own production horn with the successful opening of AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS last weekend, this NY Times article seemed noteworthy. Wakka Wakka Productions has created BABY UNIVERSE-A PUPPET ODYSSEY, an hour long puppet play about the end of our current world and the desperate search to create a new one before the last human perishes.

Hmmm...you mean you can have a socially relevant "meassage" play AND be entertaining at the same time? You mean Brecht wasn't the last person to think in those theatrical terms? Who knew?








(pictures from the Wakka Wakka website and NY Times)

More 80 DAYS Travel Posters

Michael finished the travel posters for the AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS set. Here are the two 8'x5' monsters. There are 3 7'x4' posters also. They will hang above the playing area.

80 DAYS takes shape

Meat & Potato has been in pre production for Around the World in 80 Days for almost 2 months now.

Marynell made final adjustments to her translation of the French script.

Tobin designed and built a portable set which sits disassembled in his garage.

The play has been cast with 5 very capable, exciting actors: Kirt Barnes, Susan Maurer, Roger Dunbar, William Richardson, and Kent Hadfield. All five actors are new to the M&P stage.

Enid Atkinson returns to M&P and has sent each cast member a dialect tape and notes to help them with their accents. Enid is also choreographing the three dance moments in the show.

David Evanoff returns to M&P composing two new songs for the show.

Heather Meyers, having just completed a run of Hamlet at Pioneer Theatre Company, returns for a third time to M&P as our capable stage manager.

Sam Mollner, lighting designer, returns for his third M&P show--IN A ROW!

Two new artists join the M&P team in this project. Megan Crivello and Tobin worked together for two years in the Playwrights' Laboratory before she took on the role of costume designer for 80 Days.

Lastly, Michael Skorney assists Tobin with the set elements of the show by generating five vintage travel posters that will hang above the set in the Studio Theatre at the Rose Wagner. The posters highlight the various places the characters travel during the play. The pictures on this blog entry show the progression of the "India" poster and the first hours of work on the "England" poster.

We start rehearsals in 10 days!

Admiration for puppet opera

M&P loves the power of the doll. We have worked puppets into half of our productions to date. Four productions have been completely puppet-based including our DC productions of Beginnings, Hard Times, and Roshomon and our SLC production of Shadows of the Bakemono.

It is with special admiration that we acknowledge the Gotham Chamber Opera and the Tectonic Theater Project's production of “El Gato Con Botas” (“Puss in Boots”), a 1947 children’s opera by Xavier Montsalvatge sung in Spanish. Thanks for the inspiration! Please read the whole NY Times article.

LA's Mobile Puppet Theatre

We listened in awe to the NPR story about LA artist Joel Kyack and the puppet show he performs in the back of a truck on the congested freeways of southern California. The show is called "Superclogger" after the name given by locals to describe the notoriously bad traffic jams that occur on the LA freeways.

Meat & Potato is a great supporter of all things puppet and loves that Mr. Kyack and friends are taking them to the streets...literally. Mr. Kyack has even discovered a way through a short wave FM signal to pipe dialog of the show directly into the radios of the cars behind him so that drivers (audiences) can hear what's being said.

Best of luck to Mr. Kyack and thanks for the inspiration!

Lauren Gunderson's Article on the State of Theatre

Thank you to Lauren Gunderson for the opening salvo of her new blog exploring why the ancient art of "live theatre" is still with us, even in our media-filled, technologically advanced age.

A lot of her statements sound like she was either a founding member of meat & potato, or a least had sat in on some of our production meetings. Marynell and I have been striving to create "tribal" events in which everyone one in the room (actors and audience alike) are experiencing an important story together--or as Ms. Gunderson puts it: Actor+Audience+story=Theatre. As we say throughout our website, "The true origins of theatre are when one member of the tribe sat on this side of the fire and told stories to the rest of the tribe sitting on that side of the fire."

And praises to Ms. Gunderson for mentioning that ever-important element so often missing in today's "modern" theatre: theatricality. When did theatre a) become a place where screen writers "test" their scripts before sending them off to a Hollywood producer, or b) become a place where characters talk us to death, analyzing an issue to the point of "good god, when's the intermission so I can get the hell out of here? If I wanted a sermon, I would have gone to church instead"?

(Picture is from "How the Robin Got Its Red Breast", Beginnings, meat & potato 2005)

Everyman Production Shots

Stills of the Meat & Potato production of EVERYMAN & JUDGMENT DAY are now on the company's website.

(Josh Thoemke as Death and Rebecca Marcotte as Everyman.)

Everyman Set

With some luck and great advice from a couple of friends, the Everyman centerpiece hangs 9 feet above the stage floor.



The original stained glass window was found with some luck in Paris. The plywood frame was suggested by George Maxwell at Pioneer Theatre and the food color stain (yes, Food Color!) was suggested by my old army buddy-cum-set designer Maylan Thomas.

Sam Mollner helped paint the frame. Marynell was patient and encouraged when needed.

EVERYMAN Approaches: Publicity Photos

Publicity shots taken in the basement of the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center and sent to various local news outlets.

Michael Gardner as the devil Tutivillus with Julia Goldman as Angel.


Josh Thoemke as Works and Rebecca Marcotte as Everyman.


Rebecca Marcotte as Everyman and Josh Thoemke as Death.

EVERYMAN in full swing

Props and costumes for EVERYMAN and JUDGMENT DAY are coming together. Since the two plays oppose one another thematically, so too must all of the "plastics". Where JUDGMENT DAY illustrates how to get into heaven by merely accepting Christ as your personal savior and filled with devils, angels with attitudes, dead souls, and the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse--EVERYMAN shows how a person's deeds in life will determine what happens after death, and is filled with energetic allegorical characters, hip hop beats, and a rousing musical number of "We Are Family."

The devils in JUDGMENT DAY start out as displaced workers: sort of THE OFFICE-meets-a-BDSM convention. In order to avoid being judged themselves, the devils decide to repackage themselves. They transform from "Average Joe's" dodgeball team to something out of a Terry Gilliam movie. Toby and Dorcas change their names to "Misery" and "Retribution", while Tutivillus mutates from used-car-salesman to demonic chieftain. Rachael Zimmerman is costuming the show and chose a mask for the transformed Tutivillus: an exaggerated Commedia dell'Arte mask, bright red.

A picture is the mask in the the process of being built.

Admiration for Pioneer's 42nd Street

We love spectacle on stage. For us, the battles in HENRY V will forever trump the seemingly endless yammering of WAITING FOR GODOT. So when Pioneer Theatre's recent production of 42nd Street started with 20 dancers slamming out the same tap step simultaneously, we were in heaven!

And although some of the students in the Playwrights' Laboratory complained at the sappy script, they were countered by others who pointed out that there has to be a reason this story has floated across the American stage for almost 80 years. The play lives on its spectacle.

Thanks to Charles Morey's direction, Kevin Alberts' costumes, George Maxwell's sets, and Patti D'Beck's choreography for the reminder that not every play has to enlighten or save the world--that the word "play" has more than one meaning.

Photo: Lea Kohl and Jeffrey Pew star in Pioneer Theatre Company's production of the Tony Award-winning "42nd Street." (Tom Smart, Deseret News)

EVERYMAN & JUDGMENT DAY set

During our wanderings through Paris's Monmartre district last September, Marynell wanted to wet her whistle on a Coca-Cola. She popped into a drug store and I wandered into a strange looking cathedral that stood nearby--the Eglise-Saint-Jean-de-Monmartre, to be exact.

The church was designed by architect Anatole de Baudot in an Art Nouveau style (built 1894 - 1904). And it was pure dumb luck to look up and discover this stained glass window:



The stained glass is "Le cheval blanc de l'Apocalyse" (The White Horse of the Apocalypse) designed by Pascal Blanchard and executed by Jac Galland.

Marynell and I loved the imagery, colors, and power so much that we decided to make it the center piece of our spring production, EVERYMAN & JUDGMENT DAY. Both plays emerged from liturgical drama (religious stained glass connection), they address the incredibly human concern of death (figure of death), and JUDGMENT DAY specifically deals with the apocalypse (Death as one of the Four Horsemen).

I'll be constructing a facsimile of this wonderful window and will hang it over center stage. It will be back lit, of course, to really get those colors to pop.

Script-in-Hand Series, Installment 2

Meat & Potato is a proud partner with Plan B Theatre in the management of the Playwrights' Laboratory and the Directors' Laboratory. One of the goals of the Labs is to translate the classroom work and exercises into practical experiences by trying to find directors opportunities to direct and playwrights the chance to hear their plays read publicly. Jerry Rapier produces the Script-in-Hand series as a way to ensure both of those goals are met: lab directors direct new one-acts plays written by the lab playwrights.

The first, very successful, Script-in-Hand went up in March 2010, and we are to see the second installment this Wednesday. Debora Threedy and Elaine Jarvik had their plays directed by Mark Fossen and Andra Harbolt, respectively. And now:

SEVEN DAYS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE by Megan Crivello (dir. Bud Perry)
BETWEEN THE HOUR Deborah DeVos (dir. Mark Fossen)
MALICE AFORETHOUGHT Jenifer Nii (dir. Jason Bowcutt)

The actors for this round are: Colleen Baum, Daniel Beecher, Tracie Merrill, JJ Peeler, Jason Tatom.

Review for second Script-in-Hand series from Selective Echo is here.

Admiration for DJ Earworm

Marynell met this incredible talent last February as the keynote speaker at a tech convention in downtown Salt Lake City. She brought home his promotional cd and we've worn it out listening to it. Mr. Earworm is a classically trained musician whose highest aspiration was to conduct symphony orchestras. Fate presented him another road to take. He has become so respected as a master of a new art form, the mashup, that Annie Lennox personally sought him out and requested that he create a mashup for her new Greatest Hits album. Now...what would a mashup of Shakespeare's plays look like? Titus vs. Midsummer?...Hmmm...

Jason Bruffy

We had the good fortune to meet this incredibly charming, capable, and intelligent gentleman when he was hired to head the Salt Lake Acting Company in the fall of 2009. Unfortunately, Salt Lake Acting Company fired him less than 4 months later, which was a real loss for the entire Salt Lake theatre scene as Jason's vibrant theatrical vision was clearly going to make us all work a lot harder in order to avoid looking like amateurs.

We miss Jason, wish him the best of luck in his adventures, and will be watching his career with interest--stealing his inspiring ideas whenever possible (wink).

Jason Bruffy website

Pictures: Jason Bruffy, Euridice, Hamlet, Pillowman

Admiration for WAR HORSE

The mission of Meat & Potato is to tell compelling stories in the most powerful ways possible and we are constantly looking for inspiration from other sources. One particular production that has recently captured our attention is the London hit WAR HORSE. It is a clear and powerful story told through the use of some amazing puppetry. While we don't have the resources to produce productions of the magnitude or majesty of WAR HORSE, it is productions like this that encourage us to raise our work from mere "plays" to theatrical adventures.









Link to WAR HORSE at the National, with video.

1st Script-n-Hand Series

Meat & Potato is a very proud partner with Plan B Theatre Company in managing the Playwrights' and Directors' Laboratories. Jerry Rapier of Plan B produced the Labs' first ever Script-in-Hand series where Mark Fossen and Andra Harbolt direct two new plays by Debora Threedy and Elaine Jarvik. They were performed by actors I've all directed before and greatly respect: Josh Thoemke, Deena Marie Manzanares, Colleen Lewis and Stephanie Howell.

It was wonderful to have experienced these plays in their infancy as a scene or a writing exercise, and now to see them as completed pieces. It was also a very wonderful feeling to see actors going full out, and an audience hanging on their every word, all without ever really seeing the director's hand in the process--which is a great credit to Andra and Mark, who have obviously taken the to heart the opening line of William Ball's book A SENSE OF DIRECTION: "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain".

Here is the review.

SAMPLER Tickets Still Available

5 theatre companies, 5 different production, one low price! Meat & Potato, Plan B, Wasatch, Pygmalion, & Utah Contemporary theatre companies on a single bill? How cool is that?

Check it out!

Sampler Link

Tobin Atkinson in Pioneer Theatre's 12 ANGRY MEN

Tobin Atkinson, Meat & Potato's artistic director, recently appeared in Pioneer Theatre Company's highly acclaimed 12 ANGRY MEN.

Some reviews:

Salt Lake Tribune

Deseret News

Salt Lake Magazine

Utah Theatre Bloggers