Friday 5: 5 Cool Theatre Tricks

When you work in the theatre, you learn some nifty tricks.  Here are five of my favorites.

1.  Hair gel in ashtrays.  Back in the day, before e-cigs, I mean, we had to either use real cigarettes or herbal ones onstage.  Sometimes, they'd need to be extinguished. No one wants to play their scene in a cloud of smoke.  Enter hair gel.  One squirt of gel in an ashtray and your cigarette is extinguished immediately and shall ne'er smoke again.

2.  Sandpaper for matches.  Sometimes in a show, you need to strike a match.  We tend to use strike-anywhere matches, but sometimes you don't want to strike them on your set pieces.  A tiny square of sandpaper can be cut and adhered to a surface and will allow a match to be struck just about any time.

3.  Condoms on microphones.  Actors sweat.  Sweat kills mics.  Each of our body mics gets dropped into an unlubricated condom, which we buy in bulk, then nestled into a pack on a velcro belt that's worn around the actor's middle.  After the show, the mic is still dry as a bone.

4.  Shellac.  You can shellac a loaf of bread and it'll last an entire run. Just don't shellac a turkey. Seriously. Don't do it.

5.  Hairspray on mirrors.  You can not buy Spray Dull.  It keeps the mirror functional, but dulls down the reflection enough that it won't reflect every light in the sky, blinding the poor actors and audience.

This post is happily linked-up at Friday 5 over at Clever Compass.  Drop by, say hi to Alissa and submit your own list of 5!

Comments

[Alissa]

Such a fun list for the Friday 5! Thanks for linking up!

[eva]

You had me at condoms. That's a fantastic list....we never have to come up with stuff like this in my line of work but I will keep these tricks in mind as great conversation-starters/ice-breakers:)

[Gilberto]

Great article! We are linking to this particularly great article on our site. Keep up the good writing.

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