As I mentioned in my last post, I’m enjoying a lovely, serendipitous cross-promotion with Actors’ Shakespeare Project and their new production of Romeo & Juliet, which opens this week. The timing didn’t work out for me to see the whole show, but I caught a couple of hours of their tech rehearsal on Sunday night. I only got to see the last few scenes, but it looks really good! Here are a few sketches I did. They ran through each bit a couple of times, so in some cases I got multiple drawings of the same thing.
A big thank-you to Adele and Allyn for arranging logistics, and Maurice for giving me a ride back to Cambridge. The show is directed by Allyn Burrows and Bobbie Steinbach, and stars Jason Bowen and Julie Ann Earls as R&J. Also shown are Ben Rosenblatt (Paris), Ken Baltin (Capulet), Miranda Craigwell (Lady Capulet), and Maurice Emmanuel Parent (Mercutio/Apothecary).
My book launch events this weekend went really well, I think. Of special note was the event at Porter Square Books, where I did a slideshow illustrating the development of the concepts and designs for my R&J, and showed pages from the book, highlighting a few of my favorite passages. When I got the balcony scene, two teenagers who were “planted” among the audience popped up and surprised everyone (else) with a really beautiful live performance of the scene. They were Frank and Natasha, two talented young actors who recently starred in Actor’s Shakespeare Project’s Youth Program production of R&J. I want to thank them again for doing such a fantastic job — and also ASP resident actor Mara Sidmore, for working with them, helping to figure out the cuing and blocking, playing Mercutio and the Nurse, and generally helping make it all work really smoothly. Thanks also to David and Carol at Porter Square Books, and Adele and Allyn at ASP, who all helped to arrange the whole thing.
Readers of this blog will already be familiar with ASP from the sketches I’ve been doing at their dress rehearsals for several years. I love this group! I am thrilled to report that, by happy coincidence, they are staging Romeo & Juliet starting this week at the Strand theater in Dorchester, and besides participating in my launch party they are also going to be selling my book at their concession stand. I got to sit on the end of a tech rehearsal Sunday night, and it looks excellent. (I’ll be posting a couple of sketches from that in the next day or two.)
Like I said, it’s a wonderful coincidence that they’re doing the show now. But they aren’t the only ones! For those who may not be aware, there are several other high-profile stagings of R&J this month on the East Coast. Orlando Bloom and Condola Rashad star in a Broadway production that has tons of buzz. Competing with them off-Broadway is this production with Elizabeth Olsen. And here in my new hometown, The Folger Shakespeare Library has a production starting in two weeks.
Then there’s this new R&J film, which may be good or truly terrible, and which may or may not be in theaters near you next week.
Kirkus makes me very happy today with a lovely starred review — unfortunately it’s subscription-only until 8/27, but among other things they called it a “spellbinding graphic-novel production. As thrilling and riveting as any staging,” and said I “expertly abridged the original text while embellishing it with modern sensibilities.”
I have updated the main Romeo & Juliet page with sample images and a link to pre-order signed copies, so please check that out. Plus I will soon be announcing several launch events in DC, NY, Boston, and online.
At one point I was thinking about setting Romeo & Juliet in the Harlem Renaissance, and I watched some fun documentaries about it. I had a lot of fun sketching some of the great lindy routines they were doing in the dance scenes.
I haven’t been posting much as I have my nose to the grindstone coloring Romeo & Juliet. But for some reason this partially colored page demanded to be scanned and posted.
(Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio on their way to the party at the Capulet mansion, just after the Queen Mab speech.)
I thought it would be interesting to see if sculpting a few of my main characters in 3D would improve my ability to draw their likeness easily and consistently. I built a low-poly 3D base head and used Mudbox to sculpt the details. Obviously I didn’t take it to a fully-finished level, especially the hair, but this is more or less what Romeo looks like.
The jury’s still out on whether this was useful or not, but it was kind of fun anyway, and makes me feel just a little less out of the loop as far as 3D graphics.
Since I moved to NY I’ve been missing the opportunity to attend ASP‘s dress rehearsals and do sketches of each show. But this time I happened to be in Boston for dress rehearsal night, and made a point of attending. Without further ado, here are the sketches. I would like to color some of them, but right now my schedule is too crazy (why is the fall always like this??), so I probably won’t get to it. Most are drawn traditionally, but some of the ones toward the end were done with Sketchbook Pro.
The show is up until Oct. 22nd, and I definitely recommend it.
