Ok, it is about time I got this thing going. I set it up and then went back to work and have been in a chaos frenzy ever since. The week after New Years was crunch week for 2 different shows, Steppenwolf's The Well-Appointed Room (WAR) and The Chicago Children's Theatre's A Year With Frog and Toad (F&T). WAR is a new play, set in modern times with 4 actors, 6 characters, 7 costumes...easy, right? Wrong!! After thousands of dollars worth of purchases and thousands of dollars worth of returns the show was finally all put together with everyone working on it completely exhausted (I could go into the whole craziness of the show, but really I just don't want to type that much). I haven't seen it yet, but I am going to opening night this Sunday and I am really interested to see how it turned out since we never saw any sketches, research, costumes plots, etc.

F&T was a relatively large build, or at least time consuming, but I think that it turned out really well. The concept was that the characters wore human clothing, but had animal characteristics to them (ex. the snail had a bad that looked like the shell, the birds had a lot of ruffles that looked like feathers, etc.) We were all very happy when we finally finished the show, and have heard great things about the work we did (only a few minor changes during tech).

Once these shows were done, I was thrown into our next project, Lady Madeline. This is a new play based on Edgar Allen Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher and is produced by Steppenwolf's Arts Exchange program and is part of the Steppenwolf for young audiences. For this show I am the assistant designer and I will also be doing wardrobe. So for the last 2 weeks I have been busy pulling, renting, and purchasing the costumes for this show, and then this week we started fittings. So far things have been going really well and we are in very good shape. The show opens Feb. 7th to high school groups and the following weekend to the public and then runs until the beginning of March (so basically I will be in Lady Madeline mode for a while yet).

Other than that, not much else is new here. I have started to think of what I am going to do once my apprenticeship is done, so we'll see. I am hoping that sometime this summer (or at least by the end of summer) I will have enough money to get an apartment in the city. Other then that I am just working and trying to also have a life outside of theatre (and failing...at least it is a fun place to be).