More Than Just Waving Your Hands Around

John Roscigno put it all in perspective: by the time he's waving his hands around in performance, his real work as a conductor has long since been finished.  

In preparation for coming to speak to the Arts Council this past Monday, Music Faculty member and conductor, John Roscigno, told us how he had sat down and typed out exactly what he did as a conductor. To his surprise, his list broke down into four major categories, with each getting successively shorter the closer they were to the performance date. In fact, his fourth and last category could basically be summed up as: conduct the performance.

Here's a taste of a few items from the first three categories:​
​•  Selects repertoire for each performance (starting with a long list and whittling down as he goes)  Is there a theme?
​•  Auditions students (includes marking up and distributing scores to the students to practice for their auditions)
​•  Selects players, including their rotation (1st chair, 2nd chair, etc.)
​•  Meets with soloists and the composers of any original pieces on the program
​•  Hires extra players as needed (fourteen musicians were hired for the upcoming concerts, including two harpists)
•  ​Studies scores (decide how to interpret the composer's intentions for each piece)
​•  Writes bowing markings in each string player's score
​•  Fills folders with music for each musician
​​•  Plans rehearsals
​(and now we're nearing the day of the concert...)
​•  Plans out all concert day logistics, venue diagrams for set up, ticketing information
​•  Prepares paperwork to pay musicians
​•  Meets with venue staff
​•  Runs rehearsals

Clearly, there's much, much more involved than standing in front of a large audience and getting in an upper body ​workout!  With his upcoming orchestra performances this Sunday and Monday (May 5th and 6th at VPAC), we were very lucky to have had John to ourselves for an hour. For more information on Sunday's CSUN Youth Orchestra Gala Finale 2013, click here. John will be performing Gershwin's Concerto in F - a rare opportunity to hear him solo in performance! For Monday's CSUN Symphony Orchestra performance of The Planets, click here.

The Books of Garry and Caeli

Our April 22nd's featured speakers were Garry Lennon, Chair of CSUN's Theatre Department, and Caeli Molina, who plays multiple roles in their upcoming production of David and Amy Sedaris' play The Book of Liz.​ This production is directed by Doug Kaback but, unfortunately, Doug's teaching schedule conflicted with our meeting time, and Garry and Caeli were nice enough to step in.

Garry shared with us that the department has had some exciting activities in the past few months. When budgets were a little more substantial, the Department was able to send students abroad to study theatre in other countries. With the current shrinking budgets, however, the Department has decided to bring the other countries to the students. This year, a guest artist from Mexico City came to CSUN for a 10-day residency, participating in classes, teaching master classes to students and sharing experiences of his life and work. "It was pretty remarkable. Having him in the classroom... we were able to affect a lot more students than we could have if we'd gone to Mexico City." Garry also took 10 students to New York over spring break to experience Broadway theatre and the art and culture of the city.

Caeli Molina is a sophomore Theatre major with a Musical Theatre minor. The Book of Liz is Caile's first non-musical - and first comedy - of her career, and she has the added challenge of playing three distinct characters: "Sister Constance Butterworth, a very tough Ukrainian immigrant, Oxana, and a sophisticated visitor." Caeli was very articulate, tackling our questions with poise and thoughtfulness. When asked what the difference was, for an actor, between performing in musicals as opposed to plays, she noted that "when you're singing songs, you don't always find that you're singing it a different way, whereas with lines, you have the ability to say different things in different ways, and, in turn, that can make you as an actor... respond in a different way, because it wasn't said to you the same way it was the night before."

Caeli also talked a little bit about the theatre training at CSUN. "​That's what I love about this B.A. program. You really are invested in every part of the theatre. You have experience in every single aspect of it... people don't recognize that... We have the option when we graduate to go in any direction we want."

​Next season (Fall 2013 and Spring 2014) includes the comedy LMNOP, Chekhov's The Seagul, To Kill a Mockingbird, and the musicals Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson and Sweeney Todd.

The Book of Liz opens this Friday, April 26th and runs through May 5th in the Experimental Theatre at the Valley Performing Arts Center. For more information, visit the Book of Liz web page.​

Arcadia: All Dressed Up and Beautifully Lit

On March 4, 2013 we were pleased to welcome back costumer Paula Higgins and lighting designer Dan Weingarten from the Theatre Department to talk about their designs for this semester's production of Arcadia.

First we want to congratulate Paula who has been teaching costuming at CSUN for 28 years and just this month received tenure. In addition, she has designed for L.A. Opera's educational touring shows for the past six years, costuming over 100 performers in each production.

This semester, her challenge with Arcadia was that it is, essentially, two shows - and two time periods - in one. She talked about how dressing modern shows is more complicated than period shows. "There's a trickiness to the modern... an actor in a periodshow has to trust that I know more than they do because, you know, I'm the one with the MFA, I'm the one who teaches this... but when you've got actors in a modern piece, they're usually cast pretty close to their own type. So they know best what they need to wear." Actors in a modernly-dressed play often want a costume inappropriate for the role they've been cast in: "But you're also playing 16... and as soon as you wear that, all of a sudden you're 25," she tells them. "So it's tricky like that."

An additional challenge with Arcadia was simply the script. "I've got some game but Tom Stoppard is smarter than I am, and for a chunk of time on this show I felt like I was designing a show that I didn't understand because he's working on so many levels... and you realize how complex it is, and he's brilliant, absolutely brilliant." If you're familiar with the show, you'll understand how challenging it is for designers as well as actors and directors.

Paula's Quick Trivia: 
Most challenging costume: A character who gives birth onstage
Youngest actor costumed: Age 3
Most expensive fabric purchased: $395/yard.

Paula typically designs one production per semester as well as teaching costuming, so we're looking forward to having her join us in the semesters ahead.

Dan Weingarten, Arcadia's lighting designer, came to CSUN from Loyola Marymount University, but he got into lighting through "a passion and dumb luck". As a stage manager in his early 20s, the artistic director of a dance concert he was hired to do told him that, in dance, the stage manager is also the lighting designer. And so began his career in lighting.

From there, Dan worked more and more as a lighting designer. He talked a little bit about the process of teaching lighting to CSUN students. He first works with students to develop a vocabulary for design before teaching them about the actual equipment and its uses.  From there he works on building observation and research skills, examining one's emotional connection to light and how different people's responses can be to the same type of lighting effect and color.

And the new facilities on campus have opened up new opportunities for lighting students... specifically in the Experimental Theatre. "We have an amazing light lab which is part of the new VPAC, which is great, and it's sort of the ultimate lighting classroom." He also mentioned that here on campus we have the luxury of having a good inventory of lighting equipment, whereas in larger venues much of the gear is typically rented for each production.

We are grateful that both Dan and Paula shared their Monday morning with us, and we're looking forward to seeing more of their work - and their student's work - in upcoming productions, both on campus and in the community.

"It's Impossible. It's huge. But, come on, let's do it!"

Director Ken Sawyer didn't mince words with his cast on the first day of rehearsal for Ragtime. Having seen the original production in preview performances in Toronto in 1996, "I sat down and I had no idea what I was going to see, and for those of you who have seen it, when Audra MacDonald walks out of her attic… I was crying. I was like, 'This is the best musical I have ever seen!'" And when they asked him to direct Ragtime at CSUN, "my first thought was, 'How are they going to do that here?' The level of talent to achieve this show has got to be high. And I was shocked at the auditions... It's extraordinary." In fact, one of his friends who has "done a lot of Broadway" watched a rehearsal and commented that, "This is one of the best cast shows you've ever done." And, by the way, Ken cast Ragtime along with one of our favorite speakers, David Aks.

A Julliard grad, Ken has been an actor, a sound designer and a book writer (for the as-of-yet-unproduced musical of The Elephant Man, of all things), but from the age of 16, he knew he wanted to direct. Coming to acclaim for his direction of The Woman in Black at the Road Theatre Company where he also served as its Artistic Director, Ken has a keen desire to direct new works. Directing at CSUN, however, gives him the opportunity to work with our talented students, many of whom he would gladly cast in his professional productions, should the right roles arise.

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Pictured: Ragtime director Ken Sawyer, Arts Council member Deanna Freeman and Theatre Manager and Ragtime actor Bill Taylor.

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Ragtime is selling out quickly, so make sure to purchase your tickets before heading out to the theatre! Performances are:

Friday and Saturday, March 22 and 23 at 7:30pm.

Sunday, March 24 at 2pm

Wednesday thru Saturday, March 27 - 30 at 7:30pm

Saturday, March 30 at 2pm

There is no performance on Easter, March 31st.

Entropy, Thermodynamics and Chaos... Oh, my!

Tom Stoppard's Arcadia is a challenge of language, time and mathematics, and cast members Amanda Williams and Hank Doughan are taking up that challenge with lots of energy and style. Set in an English country house in both 1809 and 2013, Arcadia explores the concepts of entropy, thermodynamics and chaos theory, utilizing Stoppard's characteristicly stylized dialogue to tell the story of one family and their decendents. 

We were treated to a short scene in which the precocious 13-year old Thomasina Coverly (Williams) bemoans the loss of the library at Alexandria, while her tutor, Septimus Hodge (Doughan) assures her that those things lost eventually return to us.

A big thanks to director Amanda McRaven for loaning her actors to us!

Arcadia opens on March 1st and runs through March 10th in the Little Theatre in Nordhoff Hall. Tickets are available by calling the box office at (818) 677-2448.