 
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
              
|
Stage Preview: 'Little Shop of Horrors' pushes the limits of student theater at Pitt
Friday, March 31, 2000 By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Somewhere deep in the bowels of the Cathedral of Learning something is growing. It started as a tiny seed and is gradually taking form, expanding, spreading its tentacles and threatening to one day establish itself as a monster.
It's Pitt's return to musical theater.
The last time the University of Pittsburgh tackled a major musical Mike Gottfried was coach, Richard Caliguiri was mayor and Ronald Reagan was president. The musical theater tradition that died in 1986 with "Grease" has been resurrected, for a trial period at least, with "Little Shop of Horrors."
Nestled between two world-class musical theater programs at Carnegie Mellon University and Point Park College, the cartoonish Howard Ashman-Alan Menken creation is being squeezed into the 550-seat proscenium space of the Stephen Foster Memorial, a stage designed more for straight-laced oratorios than carnivorous alien plant life. Fly lines are abundant, but the wings are extremely tight and a stage extension is needed to give the ensemble room to move.
With its set-intensive story and a cash-intensive centerpiece that transmogrifies to take up a huge chunk of stage, "Little Shop" is a curious choice for a fledgling production that's supposed to be field-testing the school's ability to handle musical theater. It's the biggest show Pitt has mounted in decades and the cost alone may signal a significant change at the university. While most of Pitt's main-stage straight plays cost about $10,000 to produce, this show came with a $21,000 price tag, excluding wages for the director, actors and stage crew.
Recent additional commitments by Chancellor Mark Nordenberg and N. John Cooper, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, may indicate a re-emphasis on the importance of arts on the urban campus. Pitt recently matched the naming-gift investment of adjunct faculty member Henry Heymann to turn the Foster's basement reception hall into a new 150-seat theater. In lieu of a musical theater program, Pitt is leaning on a new affiliation with Gargaro Productions' Richard E. Rauh Conservatory, which gives Pitt theater majors musical theater training and offers college credit to conservatory students.
"I think the school is showing its commitment to the value of a liberal arts education," says theater department director Attilio "Buck" Favorini. He calls the signs, "an enthusiastic thumbs up" to the arts.
"Under [Nordenberg and Cooper] there's a renewed commitment to arts as part of the liberal arts context of a campus like ours," says "Little Shop" director and faculty member W. Stephen Coleman, a former chair of the theater department. "Clearly these men have that commitment and resources are beginning to be available."
So far, however, they haven't quite coughed up all the resources that serious musical theater requires. "Little Shop" is a gaping mouthful for Pitt, one which has put a strain on the theater department.
"This project just took us to the limits," says Coleman. "[The limits] of manpower, of finances, of space. My personal opinion as director is, in the future we have to be very careful in terms of the scope of the musicals we choose, especially when it's thrown solely to the theater department's resources. "
Squeezing Audrey II and a complicated set into the Foster without going over budget was the responsibility of staff technical director and guest scenic designer Timothy J. Amrhein.
"We had a multiplicity of Assistant Everythings," he says. "Assistant stage managers, designers, lighting designers. ... This is a full student production. It's a big deal for Pitt to be doing this."
A rental Audrey would have cost much and lessened the spectacle Coleman envisioned. Robert C.T. Steele built the four-staged, talking, man-eating plant out of foam, fabric and wood at a cost of $2,500. In its final stage, it takes two puppeteers to make it work and an off-stage actor to deliver its lines.
"The plant was one department within the scenic design department," says Amrhein. "The whole concept for the set was sort of Tim Burton-esque. We wanted its own world that the plant would live it. The idea was that the city is sort of dead and everything is neutral [toned], but the shop is where life is and that's where we put the colors. As the plant starts to take over it starts to give life to everything inside the shop. We bring in all kinds of colorful flowers and the costumes shift from a gray-blue to the brighter colors of the plant."
Amrhein says a few "liberties" were taken to move "Little Shop of Horrors" beyond the script.
"I think Stephen [Coleman] really wanted to stay away from the movie and other productions," he says, "to really make this the University of Pittsburgh's own production."
Coleman says his instincts tell him that a new theater is out of the question, but the university has had its eye on the Bellefield Annex and the Masonic Temple and plans to sink some money into backstage safety improvements and a new stage platform for the Foster. On the schedule for next season at Pitt is "Quilters," a much smaller production that isn't likely to stretch the budget, personnel or spatial confines of the Foster. After that?
|
||||||||||||||||||||
WHERE: Stephen Foster Memorial, next to Cathedral of Learning, Oakland.