The procurement process is a mystery to some, an opportunity for others, and a nightmare for many. A few come away feeling good about it, the rest want to take a shower to wash-off the spooge.

We generally don’t put a lot of effort into our buying decisions, unless a large sum of money is involved, then we can become quite miserly. …

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Sound design is usually challenging because a show is BIG. It has lots of cues, lots of microphones, lots of, well, something.

My next project is a challenge for the exactly the opposite reason: it has to be simple.

The show in question is…

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I'm sitting in the house at the Dorset Theatre Festival as my crew finishes applying molding and other detail touches to the set for Clybourne Park, our last show of the season. This production was coproduced with Barrington Stage in Massachusetts, and as part of the cost-sharing discussion, we decided it would be smart to split the physical labor--have some of the set built by our shop here, and some built in the shop at Barrington.

There were a lot of reasons to…

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It’s that time of year again for many that are school teachers – school is back in session soon. For a fortunate few, this may include moving into a new or renovated performance facility. Oh yeah. It’s like Christmas. New Toys.…

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This way: http://gizmodo.com/this-abandoned-house-unfolds-into-a-theater-for-100-1109606551

Being in the "biz" of theatre - or, for that matter, any aspect of the entertainment industry, means that you get to work with a lot of fabulous people. The up side to that is all the different people you get to know, learn from, create art with - even if you don't love or even like all of them. The down side is that you are constantly saying "good bye" to some one, either as folks move on, a season ends, a tech wraps…

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Once in a while you see a show that hits you and inspires you and makes you excited and thrilled to be an artist and makes you aspire to create work that achieves just a fraction of what you just saw. Once in a very, very great while, that work is a comedy. Once in a rare, rare, rare moment, that work is a stand up comic.

Bo Burnham was that. Absolutely incredible. He takes all of the hyperbolic language found…

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I found myself staring at a designer drawing of a simple porch column the other day: about 14' tall, with a 3'-tall brick base and a tapered square profile above. I started drawing it, and then stopped. I was stuck--thinking about different views, different construction techniques, different material choices. It was a little frustrating, frankly, but not all that uncommon: I often find myself spending a lot of mental energy thinking about how to build a piece of scenery--even the seemingly…

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The last performance of the last show of the '12-'13 season finished this past Sunday afternoon. After the audience cleared, I said good-bye to a great bunch of folks. Parting with this latest bunch of musicians, actors, and crew seems some how more "final" than previous productions of the season - maybe in part because I seemed to spend more time with this bunch and the needs of this specific production and got to…

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I love theater because it's kind of collaborative magic.

It's a sort of alchemy where somehow the end result is (usually) greater than the sum of its parts. Where you get to create something, then other people you love and trust add things to your something, and then unicorns and rainbows and explosions of awesome dust burst all over the stage. …

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Three quarters of the productions at Dorset Theatre Festival this summer have been architecturally-real box sets (not atypical for this company). One fairly standard feature for these kinds of sets is the oversized crown molding: typically the profile for molding like this is something like nine inches to a foot tall by six to nine inches wide, and features a couple of different curves and breaks to create shadow lines. Our three architecturally-real sets are no exception, all three have… Continue