Jekyll and Hyde with Idle Muse Theatre Company

September 26, 2022
1 min read

This week we present the press images for Idle Muse Theatre Company’s production of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, written by Michael Dalberg and directed by Morgan Manasa. A few days after doing the press photography I was invited to see the show on its opening night, in which it received a standing ovation and a recommendation by attendant judges of the Joseph Jefferson Awards. The praise is well deserved, with witty writing and excellent performances, direction, and tech.

A Brief Word about Press Photos

The photography was done in available light from the theater, using Laura Wiley’s lighting and projection design, which implements a variety of contrasting warm and cool hues, possibly suggesting the duality of Brandi Jiminez Lee’s Jekyll vs. Jack Sharkey’s Hyde. Photo calls during tech week are always quick. The theater prepares a breakdown of the scenes they’d like to capture, and we go down the list and shoot those scenes. The best images are always the ones where there’s something visually interesting going on. Ideally, I think press photos ought to look something like motion picture stills—compelling images that encompass the mood and feel of the play, if not a suggestion of the narrative. Usually, press photos are carefully selected moments from a show, curated for their mood and composition, though some companies prefer to shoot an entire show, which is a different animal in which I’m running around the production snapping like crazy, adjusting for sudden changes in lighting, changing lenses, and so on.

Congratulations to Idle Muse

Idle Muse produces special, intimate, literary plays that remove the audience to another time and place. Over the years, they have become more and more specific in their focus and recruited a stellar ensemble of artists. It is a great pleasure to work with them as always, and I congratulate them on their successful opening and recommendations!

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde runs at The Edge Off Broadway space through October 23 and is Jeff Recommended.

Brandi Jiminez Lee as Dr. Jekyll; Jack Sharkey as Mr. Hyde; Joel Thompson as Dr. Lanyon; Shane Richlen as Gabriel John Utterson; Hanna Beth Mitchell as the Maid; Ian Saderholm as Richard Enfield.

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Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.

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Welcome to The All Worlds Traveller, an eclectic collection of thoughts, pictures, and stories from a Distant Era. Illustrated with Distant Era art and photographs, these pages explore the stories and worlds of people beyond the here and now, and the people and creative processes behind such stories. This is a blog about photography and narrative; history and myth; fantasy, science-fiction, and the weird; creation and experience. This is a blog about stories.

Steven Townshend

I’m Steven Townshend—your guide, scribe, editor, and humble narrator. The All Worlds Traveller is my personal publication, an exploratory conversation about stories and how we interact with them, from photographs to narratives to games—a kind of variety show in print. It is a conversation with other artists who explore the past, the future, and the fantastical in their work. Not one world—but all worlds. Where Distant Era shows stories in images, The All Worlds Traveller is all about the words.

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Distant Era creates fine art and portrait photographs of people and places from imagined pasts, possible futures, and magical realities. In collaboration with other artists, we evoke these distant eras with theatrical costume and makeup, evocative scenery, and deliberate lighting, and we enhance them with contemporary tools to cast these captured moments in the light of long ago or far away. We long to walk the lion-decorated streets of Babylon, to visit alien worlds aboard an interstellar vessel, and to observe the native dances of elves. Our images are windows to speculative realities and postcards from the past. They are consolation for fellow time travelers who long to look beyond the familiar scenery of the present and gaze upon the people and places of a distant era.

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