It was quite a busy summer, between Shakespeare in the Park in New York City, the Santa Fe Opera and editing the final manuscript for my book (as well as a brief trip to Italy thrown in there). I will be posting photographs  in the coming weeks of some of the more interesting projects I have completed.

You may have noticed a slight redesign to this blog. I’ve been meaning to update it for awhile, and then the whole thing sort of crashed, so I had to rebuild it from scratch. I hope it’s a little cleaner and more straightforward than previously. I’ll probably be tweaking it as time goes on, but nothing major.

I now have a site up for my book at propbuildingguidebook.com. Don’t get too excited, as there is not too much there at the moment, but it does have the table of contents and the cover. Over the next few months, the team at Focal Press will be proofreading and editing the text as well as laying out all the photos and illustrations in the interior. I should be receiving a mock-up of all that in a few months, and once I check over and approve everything, it will be sent off to the printing presses, which will take another few weeks. If everything stays on schedule, it will be available to purchase next February. I will be filming some companion videos for the book, which may begin to appear on the site in the weeks leading up to the book’s release.

In case you missed it, I also had an article in the August issue of Stage Directions magazine. “Make Your Props Pop” looks at three different props built by the shops at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, Trinity Repertory Company and Paper Mâché Monkey. The last one was built for the current Broadway production of Peter and the Starcatcher. Interestingly, this article was originally supposed to run earlier in the Spring, but it was bumped to a later issue because of space restraints. In that time, Peter and the Starcatcher won Tony Awards in all its design categories, so I reworked some of the article to include that.