A.D. Drumm Images, LLC – Landscape, Portrait, and Fine Art Photography in Rochester MN Photography

It’s theatre season, I guess! And, for the second show I’ve shot in a row, another deep – or maybe heavy is the right word – show. Rochester Civic Theatre’s spring musical is Cabaret.

Here’s another stage show which I’d never seen before this production. I did see the Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey movie many years ago, too long ago to remember much.

Cabaret is set in Germany between world wars when Naziism was on its rise spreading its fascist themes and, of course, producing the Holocaust. By intermission, this ugly truth will clearly affect the story.

Photographing this show was a lesson in extremes. We had extreme low light throughout much of the show. We had the extreme brightness of the spots. We had the extremes of color – costumes, gel’d lights. We had big musical dance numbers with the Emcee’s antics. And underlying stories of hate and intolerance and living life in the consuming Cabaret.

In other words, lot of potential to tap!

The photos I’m posting include some from the musical dance numbers as well as a few from the quieter moments. I tried to capture some of the angst and emotion of those scenes.

We attended the opening last night. Watching the show as a regular audience member allows me to pay more attention to the story and what’s going on. It’s pretty amazing how well the show holds up almost 50 years after its Broadway debut.

By the end of the show, I was struck by the incredible talent we have here – on the stage, in the orchestra, behind the scenes.

And, opening night draws in many of our theatre friends. So, before the show, intermission, and after the show are fun times to catch up with everyone.

The show is selling well, too, which is great.

The spring musical is also the kick-off for the next season at RCT.

The 2015-2016 season was announced recently, and season tickets and memberships are now available – and at a discount for the run of this show.

More shows next season will probably keep me pretty busy. And, entertained!

Friday was opening night at Rochester Civic Theatre for Miss Nelson is Missing. It’s a family-friendly show based on a children’s book. Most of the actors are teenagers, and I think they have all been involved in the theatre and its various theatre education classes for a while.

They bring a ton of energy to the stage. That, along with the relatively short length, should make it play well to younger audiences. Melissa, who plays the teachers, Miss Nelson and Miss Swamp, has been on the RCT stage several times now, and she plays a teacher in real life. Should be interesting to find out what her students think of the show!

I shot this during the final dress rehearsal before preview, last Wednesday. I settled into the first half which used pretty good general lighting with a few spots where the light drops off. You sort of learn how to deal with that.

But then as the hunt for Miss Nelson commences, we go all low-light! I have my preferred settings – in fact, they’re dialed into one of the custom settings positions on the mode wheel – but a few times I had to bump the ISO even beyond where I like.

And, shooting live, there’s lots of movement. And, with this cast, there’s lots and lots of movement. So, it’s sort of a balancing act between shutter speed and ISO and keeping enough depth of field. Timing can be important. You also just expect you’ll have a little blur here and there, and there will be a few shots that are a background with a haze where a person was.

Sometimes I walk away from a shoot wondering did I get some reasonable shots? Then I scroll through them on the computer and realize, yes, it’s okay. I can relax!

I’ve done my first culling pass, but I have a lot more work to do. I did scan for a handful that I thought highlight the show to pass along to RCT for posting and promotion. And, I grabbed them to put here as well.

The show has only one more weekend to run, so don’t procrastinate!

Next up at Rochester Civic Theatre is Miss Nelson is Missing. It’s a show for kids that opens in a week. I’ll be shooting the show at rehearsal next week, but I was there the other evening taking a few fun photos for the theatre to use for marketing.

The Post Bulletin photographer was there as well getting a shot they will use in their story. I believe that will be in the paper’s 507 magazine insert today.

For these promo shots, we usually pose the actors in some way, try to use a bit of the set, and provide a little flavor of the show. We’re shooting under stage lights, so I just dial in my show-photo settings. The only real challenge is the lack of a completed set. These need to be taken well before the show, so costumes and sets are incomplete. There may be many costumes still in the works, but we only need one or two, and don’t necessarily need the whole cast – especially for large casts. The set can really be a work-in-progress. A lot depends on how long before opening we do the promo shots. The focus is on the actors, so the objective is to try to avoid background distractions.

We don’t always do these shoots, but they can be fun – for me and for the actors!

Rochester Civic Theatre’s holiday show this year was The Musical Miracle on 34th Street, a musical adaptation of the classic story adapted by Greg Miller, the RCT artistic director. It was also my last theatre shoot of 2014!

The show followed the well known story with various holiday songs – some familiar and some not so much – sprinkled throughout. It certainly played well for the season and, I believe, all the performances were sold out. And that’s a great thing for the theatre.

I shot this show live, as has become my preference, during the final dress rehearsal. The set was colorful as were many of the costumes. And lighting was pretty much what I expect for most musicals. Some evenly lit scenes, some stronger gels with moodier lighting, and lots of use of the spots. The spots can make the photography more challenging, but it’s what you have to handle if you are shooting a stage performance and especially musicals.

Looking through my shots, I had several I wanted to post. There’s some good variety in the lighting, the angle, the emotion. So, I’ve included a few more than I usually do. I think. I don’t really have a usual.

Ha! Well, no, I don’t usually count, but this felt like more than usual.

But I wanted to make sure I included Fred and Doris and Susan. And Santa, of course. That’s Denny, who’s been on the RCT stage many times, as Santa and, yes, that’s a real white beard.

Lynne was on stage for this performance in the ensemble. So, I’d get regular updates regarding how rehearsals were going.

And how much work was going into the dances. Folks who aren’t intimately connected to musical theatre can only guess how much work is expended to build a show. There are weeks of rehearsals, and most of the players either work or attend school. It’s truly amazing.

And the performance level is consistently top-notch. We really have a talented community in and around Rochester!

I’m happy that I get to be involved in my own way. And try to make some art from their art.

If you read my theatre shoot posts, I probably sound repetitive, but I am looking for angles and shots that help capture – and tell – some of the story being portrayed. When it works, it can be a lot of fun for me.

I’m usually looking for tighter shots, but sometimes you need to include more to get to the story – like the courtroom scene. Or I just want to include some good shots of the big numbers.

Megan, the choreographer for the show, was a model for my I Dance personal photography project a while back. We thought it would be fun to use one of those shots for her “head shot” displayed in the theatre during the show. That didn’t work out, but I can certainly include it here! She did a tap number in RCT’s Chicago production which inspired this shot.

With 2014 coming to a close, I wish all of you a happy, healthy, and creative 2015. Smile and make some art!

Rochester Civic Theatre opened their 2014-2015 season with a Broadway favorite, RENT. This show has a big following, so there was ample talent on stage. I shot this show once before in Austin at Riverland Community College.

The show seems to demand a high technical level, so the lighting was fairly dramatic for both productions, which certainly benefits me. Ben Hain, who did the lighting for last year’s Les Mis production again tackled the lighting and again gave us an excellent show.

Ben uses some LED lighting which is gaining popularity. It is somewhat more challenging for production photos. I’ve been trying to figure out why, and I think I have a reasonable hypothesis. Unlike tungsten lighting through gels, certain LED colors are very pure. Gels are good, but they’re not perfect, so I believe the spectrum from, say, a blue gel’d light is just not nearly as pure blue as a blue LED. The broader spectrum from tungsten gives our digital sensors a bit more to work with in assembling the image. That’s my guess, anyway.

For me, it’s more a curiosity than a real problem. I know photographers who worry about blue or green or red skin tones in stage or concert images, but I like the effect in general and think it provides more of the flavor and environment of the production. I really don’t want to mess with the lighting design – I want to embrace it instead.

Not all of a show will be lit with colored lighting anyway. With a show like this, we do often have the players in more neutral lighting and background colored to produce a mood.

With a very overtly colored scene, you just have to watch the saturation and maybe dial it down just a tad. I’m trying to produce a faithful representation without the screaming color the camera will sometimes generate.

I used to shoot RCT’s shows with staged poses. We’d work backward through the show and shoot various scenes the director especially wanted to capture. It’s a method that has its advantages.

But as I’ve been shooting lots of shows live, I’ve started doing the same at RCT. In addition to giving us a bit more spontaneity, it’s also tons easier for the cast and crew. I’ll shoot during a rehearsal, so they can just do their thing, ignore me, and not have to show up early one performance night so we can get the photos.

Well, it turns out RENT was doing their dress rehearsals while Lynne and I were in Italy. We had to miss opening night, too, which is unusual for us.

So, it was back to the old ways for this show. But the cast did great in acting for the camera. I think we got a successful set of photographs to document the production.

Next up at the Civic is a musical version of Miracle on 34th Street. For that show, Lynne will be back on stage. It will be fun seeing her doing what she loves!

The final show at Rochester Civic Theatre this season was Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor. The final performance was yesterday afternoon – I’ve been a bit slow to write up a blog post about it!

The show is a wild comedy in the Neil Simon tradition which he wrote as a fictionalized retelling of his time as a staff writer on Sid Caeser’s Your Show of Shows in the 1950s. It was an early time in television when TV was finding its footing. Simon’s co-writers included Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner. I’ve been watching some old Dick Van Dyke Show episodes on Netflix where Rob’s job was a similar variety show comedy writer. Most of the episodes were written by Carl Reiner and the similarity of the office interplay is amazing.

RCT’s cast for the show was terrific, topped off by Greg Miller, the artistic director at the Civic. Quoting a line from the show spoken about Max Prince (the fictional center of the show, and Greg’s role), “He does comedy.” We see Greg on stage occasionally, sometimes doing improv, and his skills are top-notch. Greg directed the show as well, and he surrounded himself with a cast who all know and perform comedy at a superb level.

On opening night, there were some prop issues – really, I guess you’d have to call them set decoration issues. Watching this cast deal with the unexpected, all in character, all reacting almost exactly together, it couldn’t have been scripted any better.

The show was great, but what about the photo-taking? I shot almost all of these during the final dress rehearsal before preview. Typical box set – the writers’ office – and pretty typical box set lighting with a few moments of lighting variation. So, the technical part of the shooting was not as challenging as, say, Les Mis. But we had nearly the whole cast on stage nearly all the time and all spread out. So finding a good angle and capturing the many interactions among the players on opposite sides was the challenge of the day.

When I return home and upload the photos onto the computer, I always wonder what I’ll find and if I’ll like what I did. Doesn’t matter how many of these shows I photograph. But I was pleased. I have a good number that I think capture the essence.

There were, however, a couple moments I just missed and wished I had caught. Usually, that’s just the way it goes. But, this time, I was able to attend the final performance, sit up close (third row) on the end and pull out the camera to grab a couple shots. One was Jim Preiss as Milt scrambling out the door holding all the coats that had been on the coat rack as he attempts to cover his white suit (which Max hates). I’m really happy with the one I grabbed, shown here. Milt’s face and expression, the looks from the other writers, all seems to work.

Another season done. Lots of summer fun will be happening at the theatre until the 2014-15 season begins in September. Most Fridays, we’ll be there listening to the free music and sipping some wine!