Apologies for missing last week’s blog post! This week’s post is brought to you by Allegra C. Caldera ’17, one of the producers for next semester’s production of H.M.S. Pinafore! Thank you all so much for coming to see Ruddigore! We are so excited to start working on Pinafore. See you soon!
Written by Allegra Caldera
What a great weekend! Thank you so much to everyone who attended our production of Ruddigore; or, The Witch’s Curse, and congratulations to the cast, staff and orchestra on a successful run. Closing weekend was long, but rewarding.
We had a lively Milk and Cookies Matinee Saturday afternoon. During the backstage tour Raymond W.S. Ng ’17, one Ruddigore’s producers, explained some of the secrets of our life-sized, hand-painted ‘ghost portraits.’ If you, too, want to know how our amazing paint team captured the actors so well, or just how dark it is inside a ‘ghost box’ – well, you’ll just have to come to a backstage tour to find out!
Later on Saturday evening, we hosted a reunion-filled Alumni Night – capped off with the traditional trip to the Kong, for Chinese food and cross-generational conversation. I was lucky enough to sit with several recent alumni, who had inspiring (and cautionary) tales of life and theatre post-Harvard.
Then, Sunday afternoon, we took (well, tore) down the set. All those painstakingly painted muslin drops had to come off the walls sometime! It was bittersweet – but also therapeutic – to bring down in just a few hours the set we’d worked on for weeks. We chopped, swept, folded and drilled our whole set off the stage, right into seven overstuffed trashcans outside back of the Ag. (In case you were worried, though, no ghost portraits were harmed in this Ruddigore strike – all of them have found good homes with actors, designers, or in our own office!)
Well, fall show down…. time to get ready for H.M.S Pinafore this spring!
If any alums are interested in being involved with our 60th anniversary production of Pinafore, we’d love to hear from you – please reach out to pinaforeprods-2016@googlegroups.com!
Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan Players 