26 February Sunday

[scenicdesign71]

It's almost 50 degrees here now, but this coming week is supposed to be mostly cold (low thirties to mid-forties) with rain on-and-off all week.  They're claiming it will rise briefly as high as 56 on Thursday, but rainy.

Tomorrow morning (dry, mid-thirties) I have to report to location at 6am: someplace in the Bronx that we're dressing to look like the interior and exterior of a circa-1992 drug-rehab facility, all by noon when the shoot crew will arrive.  We might even end up working through lunch to get everything camera-ready, but that probably -- hopefully -- won't be necessary.  I'm actually hoping that, once we've handed off that location to the shooters, we'll be able to go home early, directly from there.  Even better, Tuesday might be the same drill, restoring that same location to its original colors (I'm guessing they'll be done filming there by end-of-day tomorrow, though I could be wrong).  And just like that, the week would be almost half-over after two hopefully-short, hopefully-easy days away from the studio.

Fingers crossed.  One reason I'm especially hoping for a light week is that, after taking this weekend off from those Walter Paisley sculptures, I've promised my friend Kis that I'll help her finish them up next weekend.  And since she's juggling another project for much of this week, chances are there'll be plenty left to do.

Sweeney's first preview at the Lunt-Fontaine should be into its second act by now.

[scenicdesign71]

Someone posted this on YouTube after this afternoon's performance. The curtain call clearly needs further refinement, and the walkout music sounds underrehearsed too, but whatever, it's a first preview.  Needless to say, I was hunting for clues about the set, but this clip suggests more questions than answers. 

Well, one big answer, maybe: we can rule out "environmental" or "immersive"; the proscenium-busting gigantism of Eugene Lee's 1979 original isn't on offer here, never mind the kind of 360˚ audience-enveloping world Ms. Lien created for Great Comet.  On the basis of this clip, her Sweeney set doesn't seem "intimate", exactly -- not after the Doyle and Tooting Arts reductions -- but everything shown here, at least, does appear to be tidily framed behind the Lunt's existing prosc and within Lien's semicircular stone arches.

Still, there's a lot not-accounted-for by this curtain-call look, so I'll be curious to see what else this set entails and how it moves.

I don't think I've ever actually seen anything at the Lunt-Fontanne before, but on the basis of this video, and a bunch of photos I was looking at a few weeks ago, I strongly suspect it may boast the singlemost hideously ugly auditorium on Broadway.