The Last Queen of Camelot—Idle Muse Theatre Company

March 27, 2023
3 mins read

Last week, I had the pleasure of photographing Idle Muse Theatre Company‘s The Last Queen of Camelot, which opened on Saturday, March 25, and runs through April 23. As of its opening, the show is Jeff Recommended. (The Joseph Jefferson Awards are one of Chicago’s major theatre awards, and a recommendation from the Jeff Committee helps shows get an audience.)

The narrative tells a tale of Arthur, Guinevere, Morgan Le Fay, Merlin, Mordred, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table, which artistic director Evan Jackson adapted from a late-nineteeth-century work that (I understand) borrows from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King.

The Ensemble

Photographing Idle Muse productions always feels like coming home, and the ensemble of artists they’ve gathered together are sweet and genuine, both the newer faces and the veteran professionals. In an industry of constant change/movement/turnover, seeing and working with the artists you’ve known for years is like coming home (quite literally in this case, as this production features Distant Era MVP Elizabeth MacDougald). In fact, among the many friends and collaborators working on this show, The Last Queen of Camelot involves three of the artists from the 2016 session that inspired Distant Era—Libby Beyreis (violence designer), Jen Mickelson (intimacy designer), Elizabeth MacDougald (Morgan Le Fay)—and the one that said the words that compelled me to pursue this course (Maureen Yasko) attended the preview performance I saw.

Specifically relevant to Distant Era, subjects of our past series appear on both the staff and production team for The Last Queen of Camelot, including Jennifer Mohr (Lady Elaine), Shellie DiSalvo (production manager/assistant director), and Elizabeth MacDougald. It’s through the Idle Muse scene that I’ve met other Distant Era subjects and collaborators seen in these pages, such as Erin Gallagher, Nathan Pease, and Sara Robinson.

This gathering is much to the credit of artistic director Evan Jackson and the core company, past and present, for pulling it together.

Photography

We’re evolving the photography with each new set and production in the Edge Off Broadway space that has become Idle Muse’s home in recent years, refining how we shoot, experimenting with different angles, lenses, and light each time. This production features Stina Taylor’s beautiful scenic backdrop of dragon banners, thrones, and creeping ivy, lit with Laura Wiley’s atmospheric colors, gobos, and haze upon actors decked in Amanda Freja Johanson’s (seen previously in these pages as Thor of the Jazz Age!) lovely medieval costumes so we tried to get as many of those elements into our frame as possible. For this production, that meant shooting with a wide-angle lens and bringing in some fill light on the actors’ faces.

These are the photographs Shout Media Chicago selected for the show’s press kit.

About the Play

Here’s the information about the play directly from Idle Muse’s website, including the cast, crew, and creative team.

A new adaptation from Arthurian Legend by Evan Jackson

At the twilight of a legendary age, Guinevere and Morgan, the two most powerful women in Camelot, each seek to claim control of their destiny. In a kingdom defined by magic, intrigue, and adventure, both women walk a dangerous path to overcome the other. As Arthur’s final battle approaches, romance and reality collide in a fight to determine who will shape the future.

CAST: Caty Gordon-Hall (Queen Guinevere), Jennifer Mohr (Lady Elaine/Spirit of the Lake), Elizabeth MacDougald (Morgan Le Fay), Jamie Redwood (Clarrissant/Sir Percival), Joel Thompson (King Arthur), Jack Sharkey (Sir Lancelot), Xavier Lagunas (Sir Mordered), Troy Schaeflein (Sir Kay/Shade of Accolon), Ross Compton (Sir Gawaine), Brendan Hutt (Sir Dagonet), Laura Jones Macknin (Merlin), Anasazi Bhakti (u/s Morgan), Katy Crow (u/s Clarrissant/Sir Percival), Orion Lay-Sleeper (u/s Sir Dagonet), Maxwell Peters (u/s Sir Kay/Shade of Accolon), Andre Colin (u/s Sir Gawaine) and Whitney Ann Bates (u/s Guinevere).

CREATIVE: Evan Jackson (adapter and director), Shellie DiSalvo (production manager/assistant director), Libby Beyreis (violence designer), Jen Mickelson (intimacy designer), Laura Wiley (lighting & projection designer), Kati Lechner (music director/covid compliance officer), L.J. Luthringer (music & sound designer), Amanda Freja Johanson (costume designer), Tristan Brandon (properties designer/literary manager/dramaturg/covid compliance officer), Stina Taylor (scenic designer), Carrie Hardin (speech and dialect coach), Lindsey Chidester (stage manager), Beth Bruins (assistant stage manager), Michael Dalberg (Board Member At Large), Mara Kovacevic (treasurer/box office manager) and GinaMarie Hoskins (marketing).

In the featured image, Caty Gordon sits upon the throne as the titular last queen of Camelot. We’ll close with the romantic “star” version of the Guenivere/Lancelot photograph where we dialed down the f-stop to make this effect in camera.

Check out The Last Queen of Camelot during the course of its run!

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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.

  1. Testing a New Camera at the Bristol Renaissance Faire
  2. Archival Photography for The Tempest with Idle Muse Theatre Company (Part 3): Lighting and Scenes
  3. Archival Photography for The Tempest with Idle Muse Theatre Company (Part 2): Costumes
  4. Greetings from the UK

The All Worlds Traveller

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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