Wonderland

This morning I took advantage of the Company's training program and went on a tour of their workshop, just on the edge of Strats. The workshop is a huge building that looks kind of like an over-sized storage container, like the kind from season 2 of The Wire (but without the dead Russian prostitutes). It houses the Company's construction, metal work and paint departments as well as the costume and prop storage.

It. Was. Awesome.

The carpentry room was a cavernous space and, actually, was kind of quiet. Since there are a bunch of shows being loaded in as we speak, there was a ton of activity, save for a huge Styrofoam sculpture that was waiting to be painted. The paint room, however, was pretty awesome. Three paint-splattered women were working on a variety of  projects, including making a wood staircase look like it was made from marble, and all of them immediately reminded me of the girls I used to hero-worship in high school. The whole back wall of the shop is a movable frame that disappears into the floor, to aid in painting large pieces, and the other walls all had sample bits of textures, like peeling wallpaper and brick and such, on big flats.

The prop workshop was barely viewed, because it was such a small space, but from peeking around the corner I could see an 8-ft fish hanging from the ceiling, just in front of a huge net of fish that was sitting on a 1930's art deco bed, next to a red telephone booth. There were (fake) dead animals hanging from the ceiling and what I think was a mummy at one point, as well as boxes and boxes of pieces of...whatever...stacked everywhere.

That brief peek in to the props workshop would have been incredible enough, but then. Oh then.

Props storage.

There is a quote from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: "Poor people have a great passion for huge quantities of things." I have been lucky enough to never be more than graduate-student poor, but I identify with the statement. I love seeing Lots of Things. There is something just so comforting about it.

The props storage facility was everything I could dream of and more. Walls of suitcases! Rooms and rooms of chairs! Bins of flags! Boxes of ropes, shelves of biscuit tins, five statues of the Virgin, two racks of test tubes, a lion's head and a Vespa! Shrines! Perfume bottles! Books! Fake limbs! A room of crowns! I could go on and on and on. I wanted to live there...well, maybe just in the daytime. At night, it would be terrifying.

And then we left via costume storage, where we were given 10 minutes to wander the costume racks and finger all of the gorgeous dresses, capes, doublets, robes, shawls, veils and petticoats.

Theatre, man. I just...I love it.