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.