Tootsie Yr2: STL part 4
Apr. 3rd, 2023 04:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taz_39Thursday was our day to tour The Fabulous Fox!
After the first show we met Carl, our tour guide, in the theatre.
He gave us some facts about what we were seeing around us.
The stage itself is 80ft across, and the pit was designed to house "a minimum of 40 musicians". Sigh.
Pretty much all of the ornate decor that we were seeing was made of plaster, and the Fox theatre in Detroit has exactly the same casting, so they are twins in design. The theatre opened in 1929, at a time when William Fox had 305 movie theatres across the country. Not all movie theatres were "movie palaces", but this one was; the interior is elaborate for the purpose of attracting guests just as much as the movies. The idea was to transport people to exotic places, at a time when it was prohibitively expensive (and often unsafe) to travel to distant lands.
It didn't really matter which culture's designs or deities were depicted, so there was little attempt at cultural accuracy. Aztec, Egyptian, Indian, and Asian decor were all very popular at the time. This theatre features Taj Mahal-like structures on the walls, yet there's a plaster African elephant head over the stage and Welsh dragons decorating the archways. There are even a few Viking men wearing horned helmets scattered about if you know where to look. Side by side with swans, monkeys, lions, peacocks, goddesses, djins, and any number of fantastical creatures exploding from every archway and buttress and crevice.
Huge lion heads guard the perimiter of the theatre. Above them are alternating women's faces, if you look closely you can see that they are alternating smiling/frowning, so it's a play on comedy/tragedy.
Dragons, dragons everywhere.
This one is a sea serpent. These statues are in the balcony and on the lobby stairwell.
Even the carpet is special. The entire theatre is carpeted in this pattern custom-designed to look like the original, which features elephants and floral designs. All of the elephants in the carpet, wherever they are in the theatre, are facing the stage. I thought that was pretty cool!
In the mezzanine, Carl shared with us that once he had fallen asleep in one of the seats up here and had awoken to find a little boy staring at him...who promptly vanished. A ghost! Or so he believes.
From the mezzanine we had a better view of ceiling details.
Carl told us that there are 6,516 glass "gemstones" in the ceiling, mostly the eyes of various beasts and glittering highlights inlaid in some of the designs. The spherical chandelier is 13 feet across, weighs 5,280 pounds, and can put out 12,000 watts!
From here we could also see one of the theatre's organs, to the right of the stage.
There used to be an organ in the lobby as well but it was removed.
The main large organ is in the orchestra pit.
The organ is a Wurlitzer, and has a 50hp motor! Here are some of the pipes.
The main organist was a man named Stan Kann, who played for The Fox for 22 years.
He was also known for being an avid collector of vacuums, of all things.
There was a display dedicated to him in one of the upper floors of the theatre.
To get to those upper floors we rode some 1920s-original elevators, for which Carl had to manually open and close the painted wooden panel doors and then an accordion cage door. The original hand crank is still present inside, but the elevator is now automatic (you can see the typical elevator button panel). The walls were lined with what seemed like faux leather, and the little brass pins holding that in place each had a unique flower pattern on them (it was very dim in there and I couldn't get a clear pic unfortunately)
There was a long hallway marked with a golden peacock over the archway, marking a sort of record of all the shows that have performed at The Fox since it's restoration and reopening in 1982.
Along the way Carl pointed out some interesting details, like air conditioning vents.
Yes, this theatre was built with air conditioning in 1929!!
The vents were built into the architecture to be unobtrusive.
Here is another one. There are other panels featuring this same design but with solid white backgrounds instead of the black air vents.
Everywhere we looked there were little details to enjoy, and big extravagant works to draw the eye.
This staircase is both beautiful and creepy.
And the banister is being supported by little brass cobras.
On the ground level we were encouraged to look up through the inner loop of the spiraling staircase.
And I made sure to do the same coming back down!
In the lobby we found more treasures.
Huge murals at the entrance.
Facing the stairway, which is partially obstructed by merch stands and such.
But if you look at the very top of this image, you can see a latticework passageway.
That's part of the Peacock Hallway where we saw the wall murals honoring past shows.
It looks out over the lobby, facing the doors.
A picture from that passageway:
Back to the lobby, though. There was a big ceiling mural which was painted to hide water damage.
These gold drapes over the archways are original to the theatre! 1929!
I wonder if they were a brighter gold back then.
We made our way to the basement level, which is where a lot of our dressing rooms live but there are areas that we haven't yet explored.
For example, Carl showed us a tiny movie theatre down there...a screening room for the select few who would get to preview the films before they got to the public audience.
I don't have pictures of the screening room itself (it looks like a conference room anyway) but here are the projectors.
In the basement, and on every floor backstage, the walls are absolutely covered with wall tags, art, signatures, and mementos.
Some of the wall tags are massive, taking up entire walls.
Others are just small handwritten scribblings, faded by time.
Names, well-wishes, thanks to the theatre, silly little inside jokes left by actors, dancers, musicians, bands, comedians, performers, crew.
Not a single inch of space has been spared; even the stairs, ceilings, and doors are covered in writing an art left by entertainers over decades and decades of performances. It's beautiful to see, and walking through it each day to get to the dressing room makes you feel like you're walking through a piece of history. I mean, we really are!
And at the end of this week we will also get to leave our mark.
Here is our wall tag, currently under construction. I can't wait to sign it and show, in my small way, that I had the privilege of performing in this amazing and historic space.
What an incredible tour. We all thanked Carl profusely.
Also, I'm extra-glad that I recorded my personal promo videos here!
What a cool thing to be able to say, that I played in the pit orchestra at the Fabulous Fox for two whole weeks!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Friday was a weird day.
We had one show at night. I woke up with a headache and a sharp pain in my wrist (slept on it wrong? idk) so had kind of a 'meh' day of air-tromboning along with my audition excerpts, walking to the grocery for travel foods for Monday, chatting with Jameson, and posting my deluge of pictures from the Fox theatre tour.
We were supposed to get a strong storm with potential hurricanes, but fortunately it swung south...not so fortunately for the people of Little Rock, AR :( There have been a lot of catastrophic storm systems lately.
The show was fine, and I tried to practice my excerpts a little during the half hour before showtime but it was hard to concentrate.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, a slow morning of breakfast, coffee, packing a little, making calls to try and get a space to record my audition in Fort Myers.
So far no one has so much as called me back, which is very disheartening, but I've got to keep trying.
Both shows went well and seemed to fly by...I felt very distracted with worry about making the audition recording, and with questions about submitting the material, until I finally caved and emailed the audition coordinator some of those questions.
The other thing is PRACTICING the audition materials between now and Thursday.
Pretty much the only time that I can do it is today right before each show, and tomorrow the same.
Monday is a travel day, Tuesday is loading in.
I'll be able to "air trombone" so I can get muscle memory down and solidify articulations and such, but that's not the same as actually playing.
These are the problems with playing a LOUD instrument.
All of this is why I'm hunting down a space, rather than crossing my fingers that the next theatre will have somewhere that I can do this.
It WILL work out--I mean if I have to record outside for pete's sake, I will--but as an INTJ leaving things to chance is like my kryptonite :p
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday. Slept pretty poorly, but that's kind of been the case all week!
Breakfast and reaching out to more churches to ask about using their space.
Getting to the theatre for our last show at The Fabulous Fox.
I was thrilled to sign the completed wall tag!
It's way back in the labyrinth of the basement, but that's ok. It's awesome that it's there.
There are OTHER wall tags too! Everyone wants to leave their mark in this historic theatre :)
Wardrobe made one for themselves in their room:
And here is one in the Laundry room (photo taken by Katie, I had no idea this had been made):
A shiny arch for Production! (photo courtesy Molly)
This small one is above a hallway on the 5th floor, left by "The Pants"...that is, the men.
I was an idiot and didn't see that, and left my initials because the band dressing room is also on this floor. D'oh!
Our last show was just fine. We had a pretty big audience too.
A nice sendoff to Fort Myers!
When we got out it was only around 4pm! But we have a 5am bus call tomorrow, so a lot of people will probably want to pack and get to bed early (I know I do!). It's gonna be toasty in Florida, around 92 degrees!
After the first show we met Carl, our tour guide, in the theatre.
He gave us some facts about what we were seeing around us.
The stage itself is 80ft across, and the pit was designed to house "a minimum of 40 musicians". Sigh.
Pretty much all of the ornate decor that we were seeing was made of plaster, and the Fox theatre in Detroit has exactly the same casting, so they are twins in design. The theatre opened in 1929, at a time when William Fox had 305 movie theatres across the country. Not all movie theatres were "movie palaces", but this one was; the interior is elaborate for the purpose of attracting guests just as much as the movies. The idea was to transport people to exotic places, at a time when it was prohibitively expensive (and often unsafe) to travel to distant lands.
It didn't really matter which culture's designs or deities were depicted, so there was little attempt at cultural accuracy. Aztec, Egyptian, Indian, and Asian decor were all very popular at the time. This theatre features Taj Mahal-like structures on the walls, yet there's a plaster African elephant head over the stage and Welsh dragons decorating the archways. There are even a few Viking men wearing horned helmets scattered about if you know where to look. Side by side with swans, monkeys, lions, peacocks, goddesses, djins, and any number of fantastical creatures exploding from every archway and buttress and crevice.
Huge lion heads guard the perimiter of the theatre. Above them are alternating women's faces, if you look closely you can see that they are alternating smiling/frowning, so it's a play on comedy/tragedy.
Dragons, dragons everywhere.
This one is a sea serpent. These statues are in the balcony and on the lobby stairwell.
Even the carpet is special. The entire theatre is carpeted in this pattern custom-designed to look like the original, which features elephants and floral designs. All of the elephants in the carpet, wherever they are in the theatre, are facing the stage. I thought that was pretty cool!
In the mezzanine, Carl shared with us that once he had fallen asleep in one of the seats up here and had awoken to find a little boy staring at him...who promptly vanished. A ghost! Or so he believes.
From the mezzanine we had a better view of ceiling details.
Carl told us that there are 6,516 glass "gemstones" in the ceiling, mostly the eyes of various beasts and glittering highlights inlaid in some of the designs. The spherical chandelier is 13 feet across, weighs 5,280 pounds, and can put out 12,000 watts!
From here we could also see one of the theatre's organs, to the right of the stage.
There used to be an organ in the lobby as well but it was removed.
The main large organ is in the orchestra pit.
The organ is a Wurlitzer, and has a 50hp motor! Here are some of the pipes.
The main organist was a man named Stan Kann, who played for The Fox for 22 years.
He was also known for being an avid collector of vacuums, of all things.
There was a display dedicated to him in one of the upper floors of the theatre.
To get to those upper floors we rode some 1920s-original elevators, for which Carl had to manually open and close the painted wooden panel doors and then an accordion cage door. The original hand crank is still present inside, but the elevator is now automatic (you can see the typical elevator button panel). The walls were lined with what seemed like faux leather, and the little brass pins holding that in place each had a unique flower pattern on them (it was very dim in there and I couldn't get a clear pic unfortunately)
There was a long hallway marked with a golden peacock over the archway, marking a sort of record of all the shows that have performed at The Fox since it's restoration and reopening in 1982.
Along the way Carl pointed out some interesting details, like air conditioning vents.
Yes, this theatre was built with air conditioning in 1929!!
The vents were built into the architecture to be unobtrusive.
Here is another one. There are other panels featuring this same design but with solid white backgrounds instead of the black air vents.
Everywhere we looked there were little details to enjoy, and big extravagant works to draw the eye.
This staircase is both beautiful and creepy.
And the banister is being supported by little brass cobras.
On the ground level we were encouraged to look up through the inner loop of the spiraling staircase.
And I made sure to do the same coming back down!
In the lobby we found more treasures.
Huge murals at the entrance.
Facing the stairway, which is partially obstructed by merch stands and such.
But if you look at the very top of this image, you can see a latticework passageway.
That's part of the Peacock Hallway where we saw the wall murals honoring past shows.
It looks out over the lobby, facing the doors.
A picture from that passageway:
Back to the lobby, though. There was a big ceiling mural which was painted to hide water damage.
These gold drapes over the archways are original to the theatre! 1929!
I wonder if they were a brighter gold back then.
We made our way to the basement level, which is where a lot of our dressing rooms live but there are areas that we haven't yet explored.
For example, Carl showed us a tiny movie theatre down there...a screening room for the select few who would get to preview the films before they got to the public audience.
I don't have pictures of the screening room itself (it looks like a conference room anyway) but here are the projectors.
In the basement, and on every floor backstage, the walls are absolutely covered with wall tags, art, signatures, and mementos.
Some of the wall tags are massive, taking up entire walls.
Others are just small handwritten scribblings, faded by time.
Names, well-wishes, thanks to the theatre, silly little inside jokes left by actors, dancers, musicians, bands, comedians, performers, crew.
Not a single inch of space has been spared; even the stairs, ceilings, and doors are covered in writing an art left by entertainers over decades and decades of performances. It's beautiful to see, and walking through it each day to get to the dressing room makes you feel like you're walking through a piece of history. I mean, we really are!
And at the end of this week we will also get to leave our mark.
Here is our wall tag, currently under construction. I can't wait to sign it and show, in my small way, that I had the privilege of performing in this amazing and historic space.
What an incredible tour. We all thanked Carl profusely.
Also, I'm extra-glad that I recorded my personal promo videos here!
What a cool thing to be able to say, that I played in the pit orchestra at the Fabulous Fox for two whole weeks!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Friday was a weird day.
We had one show at night. I woke up with a headache and a sharp pain in my wrist (slept on it wrong? idk) so had kind of a 'meh' day of air-tromboning along with my audition excerpts, walking to the grocery for travel foods for Monday, chatting with Jameson, and posting my deluge of pictures from the Fox theatre tour.
We were supposed to get a strong storm with potential hurricanes, but fortunately it swung south...not so fortunately for the people of Little Rock, AR :( There have been a lot of catastrophic storm systems lately.
The show was fine, and I tried to practice my excerpts a little during the half hour before showtime but it was hard to concentrate.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, a slow morning of breakfast, coffee, packing a little, making calls to try and get a space to record my audition in Fort Myers.
So far no one has so much as called me back, which is very disheartening, but I've got to keep trying.
Both shows went well and seemed to fly by...I felt very distracted with worry about making the audition recording, and with questions about submitting the material, until I finally caved and emailed the audition coordinator some of those questions.
The other thing is PRACTICING the audition materials between now and Thursday.
Pretty much the only time that I can do it is today right before each show, and tomorrow the same.
Monday is a travel day, Tuesday is loading in.
I'll be able to "air trombone" so I can get muscle memory down and solidify articulations and such, but that's not the same as actually playing.
These are the problems with playing a LOUD instrument.
All of this is why I'm hunting down a space, rather than crossing my fingers that the next theatre will have somewhere that I can do this.
It WILL work out--I mean if I have to record outside for pete's sake, I will--but as an INTJ leaving things to chance is like my kryptonite :p
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday. Slept pretty poorly, but that's kind of been the case all week!
Breakfast and reaching out to more churches to ask about using their space.
Getting to the theatre for our last show at The Fabulous Fox.
I was thrilled to sign the completed wall tag!
It's way back in the labyrinth of the basement, but that's ok. It's awesome that it's there.
There are OTHER wall tags too! Everyone wants to leave their mark in this historic theatre :)
Wardrobe made one for themselves in their room:
And here is one in the Laundry room (photo taken by Katie, I had no idea this had been made):
A shiny arch for Production! (photo courtesy Molly)
This small one is above a hallway on the 5th floor, left by "The Pants"...that is, the men.
I was an idiot and didn't see that, and left my initials because the band dressing room is also on this floor. D'oh!
Our last show was just fine. We had a pretty big audience too.
A nice sendoff to Fort Myers!
When we got out it was only around 4pm! But we have a 5am bus call tomorrow, so a lot of people will probably want to pack and get to bed early (I know I do!). It's gonna be toasty in Florida, around 92 degrees!
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