Small Crimson Parasol

Meat & Potato Theatre recently assisted the Calvin Smith Elementary Drama Club by building a handful of set pieces for their production of folk tales entitled TWO FOR THE SHOW: HEGGITY PEG & SMALL CRIMSON PARASOL. The latter is a retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood", but set in Japan rather than the Bavarian woods.

The Calvin Smith Drama Club is directed by Kathleen Atkinson, a M&P board member. The fight and dance choreography for the shows were directed by Enid Atkinson, former associate producer of M&P.

Here Small Crimson Parasol meets grandmother who looks a little under the weather...



Here Heggity Peg arrives at the children's house, looking through the window we built.



Here is the bamboo screen we built for the story set in Japan. The unit rotated to represent the Heggity Peg woods on the other side.

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)