Mr. Robert Mitchell Fore

AP Professor of Dance/Technical Director

Sing Faster - The Stagehands' Ring Cycle
Directed by Jon Else, Produced by Richard Berge

This is a video which the library presently has on tape. A DVD is also available.

The efforts of a small army of theatre practitioners, invisible to the paying customers out front, make possible the imaginative universe of most live performances, be they dance concerts, plays, or musicals. It’s a strange dichotomy. For art forms so reliant on applause, most of those who work in technical production only hear it as muffled noise from another room, if they are even present for the finished performance.

This documentary was shot during a 1990s production of the four Wagner "Ring Cycle" operas at the San Francisco Opera. To quote stage hand Spike Kirkland, "While the gods are out onstage singing about the great problems in the world, we are doing all the hard stuff."