Prologue/ Joseph Buquet

I am Joseph Buquet. You know the guy in The Phantom of the Opera who mocks the phantom and ends up dead? Okay. So, I’m him without the mocking the spectral and supernatural recluse and dying because of it. For those of you out there who are wondering where I’m going with this, He is the epitome of stage hands. He’s an on-the-site carpenter, and emergency craftsman, a rail man, and if you have ever read the book, he is a sailor on leave. One could equate his most useful status as the one stagehand that anyone conversed with, at least as far as complaints and demands go, to the modern day equivalent of a technical director in any of today’s theaters. Incidentally that is the position that I took for my first of two internships. As of right now, I am the “Assistant Technical Director”/Theater Intern for Hoyt Sherman Place in Des Moines, Iowa.

I am the intern for a guy named Felix. Felix’s job is the actual Technical Director of Hoyt Sherman Place. What he actually does, besides arranging stagehanding crews for incoming shows, and arranging the performance space to fit the clients’ needs, is basically what a caretaker would do. He is therefore, the caretaker of the theater.

I primarily work in the theater part of HSP, alongside Felix, but occasionally I work in the mansion part too.

Just a little bit about where I work, if you don’t mind.

Hoyt Sherman Place was originally just the mansion, built in the post-Civil War era. It was completed close to the Turn of the Century as plans for the theater were well under way. The Theater was completed in the beginning of the 20^th C. It was fitted with very ingenious, for the time, modes of heating and cooling and I’ll get into both much later on. The stage was the kind that had the footlighting that was popular of the time, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, think an elongated clam shell with an open flame inside pointed at the stage. The rail system is still a hemp system where ropes are used to move back drops and curtains in and out and are thusly tied off to the bitts, or pins mounted to pipes and bracing to allow you to figure 8 your rope to tie it off.

Antiquated and often time away from logical, the theater will be my center for the next couple of months. Luckily, when I get down time, I am allowed to wander the beautiful mansion (also antiquated) and take in the many works of art that have since come to call the mansion home. When the Des Moines Women’s Club took over the mansion, they’ve turned it into an art gallery… at least a couple of rooms. I have my favourites, and I’ll be discussing them much later too, but for now, I think I’ll close this epilogue to my internship blog.

Here I am, praying to Thesbis to let me succeed. And every time I walk into the building, I play The Phantom of the Opera in my head. I am the assistant technical director and the theater intern for Hoyt Sherman Place, and I am the modern day Joseph Buquet.

I hope you enjoy this and the hopefully many installments of my story… told in traditional stagehand styling, with a voice from the dark.

-ACS