The School for Scandal, with Idle Muse Theatre Company

Last week, we made the production photos for Idle Muse Theatre Company’s Jeff Recommended production of The School for Scandal, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, which runs through April 12 at the Edge Off-Broadway Theater in Chicago.

The Play

One of the great English comedies of manners, The School for Scandal follows the gossips, scandals, and confused identities of affluent characters in the upper echelons of British society around the time the play was written, in 1777. Stocked with characters whose names are aptronyms (i.e., Lady Sneerwell, Charles Surface, Snake, Crabtree, Careless, Mrs. Candour, Sir Benjamin Backbite, etc.) and whose elevated, polite conversation barely conceals the barbs beneath their banter, The School for Scandal takes place within a veritable cartoon.

Idle Muse Theatre Company describes the play this way:

People Will Talk…

Meet the School for Scandal, a cadre of social elite who invented influencer culture, catfishing and parasocial relationships 300 years before the rise of social media! Idle Muse sends up celebrity society and the idle rich in this fresh cut of Sheridan’s boundary-smashing comedy of manners, which first premiered in 1777. At the School for Scandal, it doesn’t matter what’s being said — as long as you’re the one saying it…

Cameron Austin Brown, Cat Evans, Elizabeth MacDougald.

Idle Muse synthesizes The School for Scandal’s traditional 1770s style of speech, movement, music, and wardrobe with the 1970s glam era of David Bowie and Queen. Every member of the creative team, listed in the final section of this post, contributed their own particular expertise to fashion the unique aesthetic of this production in a way that feels both traditional and contemporary at once. To list all their accomplishments would take up many more thousands of words than will fit this blog. The only way is to see it.

Idle Muse’s *The School for Scandal* poster design by Morgan Manasa.

Idle Muse Theatre Company’s production of The School for Scandal exemplifies collaborative stage work where every contribution of the backstage creative team directly influences the onstage action of the performance.

Top: Mara Kovacevic, Elizabeth MacDougald.
Center: Caty Gordon, Ross Compton.
Bottom: Erik Schnitger, Elizabeth MacDougald, Mara Kovacevic.

Photography

As usual, I brought far more gear than was necessary for the time we have to capture production photos before that evening’s technical run of the show. I did end up using one of my lights to fill in a dark area of the stage (special thanks to assistant director Libby Beyreis for holding that light!), and I used my other camera body with a wide angle (16–35 mm) lens for the following shot from above, but other than that, I could have left the rest at home.

Top: Cameron Austin Brown, Brian Healy, Brooks Whitlock.
Bottom: Behind-the-scenes photo of the shot above from Jacque Bischoff.

In an effort to be more precise, I coordinated with lighting designer Laura Wiley to establish the average light temperature for a well-lit scene in “daylight,” as defined by this production. I locked in my camera’s white balance based on that reading (special thanks to makeup designer Jacque Biscoff for her assistance). In the past, I’ve felt that the more dramatic and colorful the lighting is in a given production, the more the camera struggles to accurately represent that light, or the more I struggle to accurately represent it during post processing. The light in the scenes I photographed was relatively bright and broad, so I didn’t need to do much color correction. I tended to shoot at a lower angle in order to capture as many set elements as I could, while cropping out distractions.

Row 1: Eric Duhon, Caty Gordon.
Row 2: Cat Evans.
Row 3: Eric Duhon, Elise Soeder.
Row 4: Elizabeth MacDougald, Cameron Austin Brown, Cat Evans.
Row 5: Eric Duhon, Caty Gordon.
Row 6: Brian Healy, Ross Compton, Cat Evans.

The cast and creative artists of Idle Muse’s production of The School for Scandal came together to make a smooth production shoot during their technical run. On opening night, the audience broke into applause before the first of Sheridan’s words had been uttered.

Hearty congratulations to director Evan Jackson for a fantastically entertaining show and to Idle Muse Theatre Company on their strong (Jeff Recommended) opening! Extra thanks to company manager Kati Lechner for organizing the production photography!

Top: Brian Healy, Brooks Whitlock.
Bottom: Brooks Whitlock, Ross Compton, Brian Healy.

Cast and Creative

CAST: Elise Soeder (Lady Sneerwell), Boomer Lusink (Morgan/Snake), Eric Duhon (Joseph Surface), Cat Evans (Maria), Mara Kovacevic (Mrs. Candour), Cameron Austin Brown (Sir Benjamin Backbite/Sir Harry Bumper), Elizabeth MacDougald (Mrs. Crabtree), Erik Schnitger (Sir Peter), Andrew Bosworth (Rowley), Caty Gordon (Lady Teazle), Ross Compton (Sir Oliver), Brian Healy (Charles Surface) and Brooks Whitlock (Careless/Servants); with understudies Makenna Van Raalte (U/S Lady Teazle and Maria), Jennifer L. Mickelson (U/S Mrs. Candour and Mrs. Crabtree), Rick Smith (U/S Sir Oliver), Jacque Bischoff (U/S Lady Sneerwell), Emily Pfriem (U/S Careless and Servants) and Sam Neel (U/S Morgan and Snake).

CREATIVE: Evan Jackson (director and Idle Muse artistic director), Libby Beyreis (assistant director), Lindsey Chidester (stage manager), Beth Bruins (assistant stage manager), Kati Lechner (music director, health and safety officer), Jennifer Mohr (style coach), Mario Mazzetti (dialect coach), Erin Alys (intimacy director), Emma Rund (dramaturg), Jeremiah Barr (technical director), Laura Wiley (lighting & projection designer), L.J. Luthringer (sound designer and composer), Tristan Brandon (property designer, health and safety officer), Victoria Jablonski (costume designer), Katie Fletcher (assistant costume designer), Jacque Bischoff (makeup designer), Breezy Snyder (scenic painter) and Michael Dalberg (literary director).

Top: Cameron Austin Brown; Andrew Bosworth.
Center: Mara Kovacevic, Erik Schnitger; Erik Schnitger, Boomer Lusink.
Bottom: Elise Soeder.

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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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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.

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.