The Hangar Theatre Kiddstuff Season
Production Manager: Colin Smith
Artistic Director: Shirley Serotsky
Sound Designer: James Eckroth
The Kiddstuff 2023 summer season was comprised of three shows: Crisscrossing the Galaxy at Faster Than the Speed of Light for a Hug, The Incredible Book Eating Boy, and Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! The Musical!
This season was a swift and exciting six week process. My involvement with each show was to go over the script with the director and assess the needs for each show. One week was dedicated to identifying the show's needs and creating them and the following week was blocked for teching the production and adjusting the timing, volume, and minute details,
Throughout the season I was able to hone many talents and experiment with multiple genres and concepts including designing for a sci-fi production, building sequences of cues with actions, and altering musical tracks to fit the vocal needs of performers.
Romeo & Juliet
Director: Megan Haratine
Stage Manager: Heather Schmitt
Sound Designer: James Eckroth
This Shakespeare classic was performed at UTA with a slant towards mixing period accurate and modern day conventions. This concept was primarily displayed in the clothing and sound design of the production.
As the lead sound designer, my presence was required at all design meetings where I actively participated in artistic and logistic discussions. The song selections were of a recent genre dubbed "bardcore", which are covers of pop music performed with medieval instrumentation, as the director requested. I chose which songs highlighted which moments and adjusted audio levels for the space down to the individual speaker, the placements of which were also up to my discretion. This experience helped me hone my skills for communicating with directors, designers, and technicians as well as cue editing, audio editing, BPM matching, and looping songs.
Theatre for Change
Directors: Jesse Humphreys, Wyatt Niemietz Efren Paredes, Deaveyon Murphy
Sound Designer: James Eckroth
This unique project was a student led event at the University of Texas at Arlington. Four students wrote and directed their own ten minute plays and cast students who volunteered. In addition to the performance elements, they reached out for students to help design for this event.
For this group of shows, I was in charge with talking to each director and finding out what they wanted for their shows. It was then up to me to acquire or create their requests and implement them during our two day tech. In addition, I was also responsible for teaching a board operator how to run the sounds for all the shows and keep up communication with the directors and actors to ensure that the execution was matching the artistic vision we wanted to capture.
Lydia
Director: Andrew Gaupp
Stage Manager: Ellie Nunemaker
Original Sound Designer: Irwin Appel
Sound Designer: Jared Land
Assistant Sound Designer: James Eckroth
Lydia is a straight play about a Mexican family in El Paso, Texas. It uses magical realism to get across the thoughts of its protagonist and the way she views the world.
For this production, we purchased the design of someone who worked on a previous production of 'Lydia'. My duties included finding copyright holders for songs that Appel used, adjusting volume levels to fit the parameters of our performance space, locating sound effects not provided, and helping decide fade ins and fade outs of many cues.
See What I Wanna See
Director: Anne Healy
Stage Manager: Valos Lowe
Audio Engineer: James Eckroth
This musical covers multiple scenarios about perspective, social expectations, and how people approach new information based on their views.
For this production, I was in charge of balancing the ten person cast plus the live band behind them. The space was a black box with no pit, so the band and their speakers were level with the performers. This lead to a delicate balance of all the elements to make sure that they were all present and not drowning out another source. Duties before tech week included setting up the sound board for the space as well as routing various speakers and equipment.