Hitch*Cocktails with High Stakes Productions

In May, I had the pleasure of photographing two Hitch*Cocktails shows at the Annoyance Theater for High Stakes Productions. The opportunity came from a referral from Distant Era bestie and world’s greatest foley artist Ele Matelan to High Stakes Productions’ executive director Bruce Phillips.

Hitch*Cocktails

Hitch*Cocktails is an improvised show that begins with the suggestion of a phobia from the audience, around which the cast of Hitch*Cocktails spontaneously creates a show, borrowing tropes from Alfred Hitchcock films and other suspense films of the mid twentieth century. That’s the Hitchcock part. The cocktails part involves a drinking game that’s incorporated into the show: whenever a character is offered a drink in a scene, they must accept it. (The audience verifies at the start of the show that the drinks are legitimate.) The result is two very funny acts in ninety minutes and a complete Hitchcock-style story, with twists, turns, murder, musical accompaniment, and cool lighting cues.

The Assignment

Hitch*Cocktails needed some new press photos showing the current cast and show as it is in May 2025.

In preparation for the Hitch*Cocktails show, Bruce Phillips kindly taped off a central zone in the audience that allowed me to move close to the stage and allowed some freedom of movement to stage left, near the onstage cocktail bar. From these vantage points, I was able to capture the onstage action from multiple angles and get some audience reaction shots as well.

Here are a few selections from the May 9 performance (Welcome to Hell-Man’s, which featured a mayonnaise phobia), showing some of the light cues, stabby knives, and wild, drink-on-pants action.

Light and Darkness

One of the challenges to photographing live performance is that more often than not, I’m shooting in a dark space, relying on stage light and available light. Flash isn’t usually allowed, mostly for the distraction it would create for the audience. To minimize distraction, most of today’s cameras have silent electronic shutters. Nevertheless, most of the theaters I’ve worked with lately use LED lights, which have a flickering frequency that creates “band” patterns on the photographs unless the camera’s mechanical shutter mode is used—which reintroduces the distracting click-click-click of the camera—or the camera’s high-frequency anti-flicker mode is enabled, which can reduce or sometimes eliminate banding from LED lights, but it’s a gamble.

I don’t know tons about LED lights, only enough to know that some produce noticeable banding and some don’t, so I do my best to gauge which kind I’m dealing with and prepare accordingly. I did this in the Hitch*Cocktails shows and eliminated the problem.

Here are some selections from the May 9 show, which featured a puppet phobia.

The other challenge to photographing live performance is shooting with a high enough shutter speed to capture action while still allowing enough light into the camera for an acceptable exposure. Today’s cameras are far better at this than they were twenty years ago, as is image processing software. It’s still difficult to take a picture of an audience reacting to a show in the dark, but it’s possible, and I captured some audience reactions for Hitch*Cocktails.

Suspense Portraits

Since the show was at the Annoyance Theater on Belmont on a Friday night, I thought it easier to take the CTA than to attempt to drive, find and pay for parking, and bring gear. I had to travel light and keep things simple. I still packed a flash though and got some fun character and cast pictures at the end of the show.

I’m using my old Canon Speedlites, the small, battery-powered flash units I learned on, with which I did my first Distant Era work before acquiring studio strobes in 2020. The nice thing about studio strobes is that they have modeling lights that let me see what I’m lighting, whereas the Speedlites are a guessing game. But by 2020 I’d gotten good at guessing. Since I need to be much more accurate now than I was in 2017, I rarely use my Speedlites except as on-camera flash at events. But I wanted to practice my small flash skills, and since they were easy to pack, I brought them along.

Small Flash Portraits

I tried a variety of things with the small flashes, using grids on the lights and firing from various angles to create stark, moody shadows. I turned over both color and black-and-white portraits, and Bruce liked the results, so I brought my Speedlites back the following week for a few more shots. This time, I brought colored gels that worked amazingly well before the show and then didn’t after the show when the lighting situation and technical settings had been reset and time was short.

But Hitch*Cocktails liked these as well and brought me back a third time to take some more portraits with other members of the cast. Bruce designed some awesome posters, which will hang in the hall at The Annoyance, showing the cast members who will be playing on a given night. I’m totally in love with this idea and can’t wait to see them on display.

Here are the black-and-white versions of the portraits from the May 9 show, as well as a pre-show flash test with Bruce.

Big Flash Portraits

For the third session, Hitch*Cocktails wanted the same sort of thing—quick and dirty flash portraits—but with more of the colored gels. Since flash portraits were the mission this time, I packed some studio gear, including two strobes, and took the CTA down to the theater last Sunday at the end of a Hitch*Cocktails rehearsal.

For these portraits, I chose four colors—red, blue, green, purple—and gelled my backlight with each of those colors, which I photographed on either side of the subject so that Hitch*Cocktails had options. Thanks very much to ensemble member Gretchen Shull for holding Speedlites for me in our second session and volunteering to be my light test subject for the Sunday portrait session.

A Personal Note

I spent my formative years as an actor in Chicago’s improv scene and completed my training at ImprovOlympic (as it was then called) under Del Close in February 1999. We opened the final show he directed to completion, the iO 5B class shows Slam Dunk and the Holy Fools that February, a few weeks prior to his passing. I later completed the improv program at The Annoyance under Mick Napier, and performed with teams on several of those stages back in the day—mostly iO, Annoyance, and the Playground, with a brief-but-glorious short run of improv shows on the Second City Etc. stage before “leaving” improv to pursue classical theatre, which began the next phase of my acting career as a traveling player.

I was never a great improvisor. At my best, I was merely competent. But that’s beside the point. I still loved it. The lessons I learned from improv became an inherent part of my being, belief system, and outlook, incorporated into everything I do, then and now. One of my teachers, Susan Messing, taught some of the wisest lessons I have ever learned. I may have stopped performing in shows, but I never stopped believing in the art or putting its lessons into practice.

Many Thanks

So it was that when Bruce Phillips inquired about photographing Hitch*Cocktails, I not only understood the assignment, I was intimately familiar with the art, believe in it, feel at home in the environment, and am grateful to have the opportunity to support it with the skills I practice today. I’m grateful to Bruce Phillips for the opportunity (and for being a great reflector holder!). Everyone at High Stakes Productions was so wonderful to work with, it felt like going home again. The Annoyance may no longer be across from the Gingerman Tavern on Clark Street; the performers may be entirely new to me; but they’re just as gracious and welcoming and wonderfully hilarious, and it was a privilege to work with them.

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