2009 Season Designer Profile: Happy Days' Todd Rosenthal

In the months leading up to our 2009 Main Stage season, we’ll be profiling the creative minds behind the season’s productions—Romeo and Juliet, Private Lives, Happy Days, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—in our e-newsletters. For the February installment, we profiled Tony Award-winning scenic artist Todd Rosenthal, who will make his Cal Shakes debut this summer with Samuel Beckett's Happy Days. To sign up for our email newsletter, click here.

What are you working on currently, and what other productions do you have coming up after that?

I am designing Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance for Arena Stage in DC, Magnolia (a new play by Regina Taylor) at the Goodman Theatre, the national tour of August: Osage County (for which he won a Tony in 2008), Much Ado About Nothing at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Big Apple Circus at Lincoln Center (and east coast tour), and a few commercial projects in New York which, considering the economy, I don't want to jinx. I'm also designing a few shows at Steppenwolf.

The biggest question in my mind is, what’s the attraction for a designer to a Beckett play? I saw in your CV that you designed the set for Endgame last year in Milwaukee, and I know that the Beckett estate keeps rather tight reins on how his works are interpreted. In addition, he trafficked in such minimalism. So what excites you about this particular playwright’s work?

I remember reading Endgame as an undergraduate, and never really connecting to it. It seemed so encased in plastic. As something to be revered but not touched. But, when I designed it last year I was so struck by its raw humanity. The struggles of these characters just trying to make it has such relevance for me as I grow older. I was also struck by how funny the play is.

Looking at the images your website, I noticed what seems like a major emphasis on interiors and other architecture. But Happy Days is very much an exterior play, and our theater is an outdoor one. What’s your experience with outdoor venues, and your favored approach to exteriors?

In Happy Days Beckett again explores how we endure amidst great odds. What could be a better setting than a women being swallowed by the earth under the open sky? I tend to favor projects outdoors that are enhanced by being outdoors. I am less enamored by designs that fight being outdoors, like drawing rooms. I did Night of the Iguana outdoors; in that play the main character is constantly challenging god. The dome of the night sky was awesome. I don't think I could ever do that play indoors again.

You won a 2008 Tony for August: Osage County. What was that like, receiving that kind of recognition? Were you at the ceremony? How was that?

Standing in front of 6,000 people was a bit overwhelming. It is great to be part of such a successful play. Some people never get a chance to be part of a history-making Broadway play. I feel very fortunate.

And lastly, if you could have designed sets for any play or production in history, what would it (or they) be?

I wish Martin McDonagh was still working in the theater, and I could design all of his new plays.

New Steinbeck project video

As mentioned on this blog several times late last year, Cal Shakes hosted our third Pastures of Heaven development workshop in December. Now, finally, here's some video to prove it. Click on the screenshot to the right to be taken to the video.

Shoes, part two.

Naomi's still going through the costume shop's shoe supply. These are the latest to come prancing into the Bullpen. The difference between these and the last pair is that somebody's actually taking these home.

And yes, that IS a Dolly Parton lunch tote in the background.

Totally ridiculous (brought to you by the blog formerly known as The Bullpen Blog)

Costume Director Naomi Arnst brought these out into the Bullpen today:

She's not sure why we have them--what production they were for, how we procured them, how long we've had them, et cetera. They're made of lucite and plastic, a size 5 1/2, and they fit the very petite tootsies of one of our highers-up. But we're not saying which one.

I will say, though, that I don't think she took them home.

Open House on Monday for past and prospective campers

On Monday, February 16, Cal Shakes campers and campers to be are invited to the Holy Names High School Auditorium (4660 Harbord Dr. in the Montclair district of Oakland) for a Summer Theater Programs Open House event. From 6:30-8pm, attendees will have the opportunity to reconnect with friends, learn more about the Summer Theater Programs by meeting campers and teachers, and, for first-timers, interview for Five-Week Conservatory.

With Shakespeare as their inspiration, participants in our Summer Theater Programs spend the morning studying acting, voice, physical comedy, stage combat, movement, improvisation, text, and more; afternoons are for rehearsals, practicing and exploring the scenes or plays that will be performed on each program’s last day. This summer, Cal Shakes is pleased to offer both Five- and Two- Week Conservatories at Holy Names in the Oakland Hills, in addition to our Two-Week Camp at Bentley Upper School (Lafayette). While slightly different in class content and structure, each program is suitable for all ages. Scholarships are available, as is transportation assistance. Five-Week Conservatory is the only program that requires an interview—no audition necessary, though.

Don't miss Stephen Barker Turner performing with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra!

Thursday, February 5 through Sunday, February 8, Cal Shakes Associate Artist Stephen Barker Turner—who has portrayed, among others, Orsino in 2008's Twelfth Night, Nicholas in Nicholas Nickleby, Orlando in As You Like It, and Posthumous in Cymbeline on the Bruns stage—narrates A Midsummer Night's Dream to Felix Mendelssohn's incidental music with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra as part of their "Midwinter Magic" concert. Music Director Nicholas McGegan will direct the period-instrument orchestra in celebration of the 200th birthday of Mendelssohn. The orchestra will be joined by the San Francisco Girls Chorus and other speical guests.

Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra presents "Midwinter Magic" on:

Thursday, February 5, 8pm at Herbst Theatre in San Francisco

Friday, February 6, 8pm at First United Methodist Church in Palo Alto

Saturday, February 7, 8pm at First Congregational Church in Berkeley

Sunday, February 8, 7:30pm at First Congregational Church in Berkeley

Buy your tickets today! Visit www.philharmonia.org or call City Box Office at 415.392.4400.

Photos, top to bottom: Stephen Barker Turner in Twelfth Night by Kevin Berne; The Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra by Randi Beach.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the capacity for wonder and amazement.

Last Friday, the Cal Shakes staff got to attend a brown-bag lunch with Aaron Posner, who was in town for, among other things, some Midsummer Night’s Dream auditions. Though Posner cut his teeth in the Northeast—cofounding Philadelphia’s Arden Theatre Company and serving, currently, as Artistic Director of New Jersey’s Two River Theater Company—he grew up in Eugene, OR, which helped him fit in rather quickly with the casual-yet-enthusiastic admin staff here at Cal Shakes. And despite the fact that Midsummer doesn’t open till September, he gave us some valuable insight into where his creative process currently stands.

The first thing Posner told us was that he played Oberon in a fourth-grade production of Midsummer, wearing green tights and the torn-up lining of his mother’s coat. Years later, he was inspired to mount the play at the Arden by a friend who told him she would soon be too old to portray Helena; that production was the inaugural show at the Arden’s larger theater and Posner says that he had “the best time of my life” directing that production.

He’s thinking that the Cal Shakes/Two River coproduction will be fairly simple, scenically speaking, with a set by Erik Flatmo (Uncle Vanya, Richard III, TheatreWorks’ Radio Golf), lighting by Russell H. Champa (Pericles, Man and Superman, Berkeley Rep’s The Pillowman), and—new to Cal Shakes—Serbian costume designer Olivera Gajic, who recently did Midsummer at the Prague Quadrennial.

Posner is adamant that, “more so than any other writer, Shakespeare got that every day and every scene needs to have the capacity for wonder and amazement.” He says that the line “Lord what fools these mortals be” is central to his thinking about the play. “Shakespeare must have been in a pretty good mood when he wrote Midsummer, as he’s looking at all of these very broken people, and just lovin’ them.”

“My intuition is to go straight at it; full of love, amazement, hope, and magic. Not to get too Obama about it, but there’s a sense of optimism around.”

There is darkness in Midsummer, of course, and Posner doesn’t want to shy away from that. He cites a production of the play he saw in 1970s Eugene wherein Puck was played as a devilish satyr: “Cute pucks have since driven me a little crazy”; Loki in Norse mythology and the coyote in Native American lore are more his kinds of Pucks. “Because the world gets screwed up, you have to have someone who’s responsible for that.”

As Posner likes the idea of mythology lurking around the corners of everyday life, he says that the fairies in our Midsummer might only be implied—tiny, invisible sprites interacting with the actors. He also likes the idea of Titania and Oberon’s relationship straddling the line between royalty and “regular” marriage. “When the leadership is at odds, everyone beneath it suffers.”

Since the fairies may only be implied, the music and sound are the biggest question, still. Since Posner is firm that (referring to the fairies’ song) “no one should really be allowed to speak the word ‘philomel,’” he is playing with the idea of a mystical version of Sirius satellite radio. If Titania and/or Oberon could call up whatever music they wanted, whenever, they could just as easily conjure “Dvorak, Aimee Mann, Sinatra, or ‘The Ride of the Valkyries’” from the air as they could a bunch of trilling sprites; they could also turn it down or off, or change it as they desire, just as a human couple might do in the heat of argument.

Posner is currently working on an adaptation of Cyrado de Bergerac, a work that he says, like Midsummer, “leaves you wanting to live your life more fully.” Ultimately, the director says, he’d like the audience to walk out of the Bruns suffused with “optimistic delight.”

Click here to read more about our 2009 season, and to subscribe.