How do I make guns that look like the French Revolution and fire on stage?”
These and other questions - Can a portion of the Rogers Little Theater stage revolve? How do monkeys fly? Where does one find an actor who can play 40 characters? - will be plaguing Ed McClure for some time to come. As director of productions for RLT, he’ll be thinking a lot about the 2013-14 season - which includes “Les Miserables,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “Fully Committed.”
Choosing a season isn’t “just a matter of sitting down one day and thinking up some shows you want to do,” McClure wants patrons to know. “You really have to be diligent. It’s like trying to keep 12 plates spinning on sticks sometimes!
“I do have a formula I use,” he admits. “We try to find a mixture of old and new and things that maybe push the envelope a little bit but also traditional things we think folks will enjoy coming to see.”
And then there’s the execution.
McClure knows there’s “a lot of stagecraft that people who have seen (‘Les Mis’) done professionally will expect, and to the best of our ability, we’ll re-create it like we did with ‘Hairspray’ and ‘Chicago.’ It’s going to be challenging.”
So, he admits, will be other productions.
But “needless to say, we’re really excited about how the upcoming season turned out and really proud of the work that went into selecting it.”
Whats Up, Pages 25 on 01/25/2013