Well, I have opened the two shows I was working on. They are up and running, but I am not happy with them, as usual. For almost all of the shows that I design I am ultimately not happy with the final product. What I see in my head as I envision the show is always different than the final outcome. But most of the time, what is realized onstage is lacking. It falls short of my vision in it’s detail and form.

There are always compromises in the course of mounting a production. There are always more constraints on your work than anything else. Restrictions on time, space limitations for both where you are performing as well as where you are building, and you are also limited by your personnel. But the biggest thing that changes your design is production team. No matter what you do, the director always wants to change things. Or even they want something totally different than you. The actor can’t work without ‘X’, and the costume designer has a certain color scheme for different characters.

All of these things can pull you off course from what you want the design to be. And after listing those things, it seems amazing that I can be happy with anything I do. But a lot of the time I can be pretty happy with the final product. Other designers or the director can give you some good ideas, or they can lead you in a direction that you never would have thought of.

But these shows weren’t like that. To start off we only had four days to tech two totally different shows. Usually you have five or six days to tech just one show. And on Sunday, while the theater was getting set up, we pulled the set pieces out onto the parking lot to get painted. Minutes after we finished the first coat of paint, it started to rain. So we hurriedly pulled out some tarps to try to wait out the rain. But it increased to a deluge and we just had to run inside and let the set get soaked. The rain never really let up so we had to pull the wet scenery inside at the end of the day.

We never got back on track. So there was no way I was going to be totally happy with these designs. But the next set is looking promising, but I still have to talk to the director about it…