Category Archives: News

Props in the news

S*P*A*M website relaunches

S*P*A*M (The Society of Properties Artisan Managers) is a group of theatrical prop managers, directors, and educators throughout the United States. If there is a larger prop shop in a regional, non-profit, or university theater, chances are the prop master is a member of S*P*A*M. Over the weekend, they relaunched their S*P*A*M website to include a [...]
2 Comments

It’s Props Month at Stage Directions

This month’s issue of Stage Directions has a special section on props. One of the articles, “Prop Shop Confidential” by Lisa Mulcahy, is about maintaining a props stock. This is a good companion to my own post on which props to keep and which to trash; it features a lot more thoughts on how to [...]
Leave a comment

E-Cigarettes

So your play needs cigarettes. Aaaah. In most venues by now, real cigarette smoking is viewed as the next plague. The fear is that lighting a single cigarette for a few seconds in a large, well-ventilated theater, is worse than the constant outpouring of pollution from 250 million cars, 600 coal power plants, and every other [...]
12 Comments

Original Stargate SG-1 Props

Another blog has pointed me to The Prop Store of London, which has started selling a selection of props from Stargate SG-1. They actually have props from hundreds of films, but if you’re more interested in those, you are strange and uninteresting. Many of the props have wonderful detail shots as well. This specific device even has [...]
Leave a comment

27 Visual Theatre Cliches

Though this is almost a month old, I’ve been wanting to get around to it. In Time Out London, Andrew Haydon has made a list of cliches of visual theatre that should be banned. He posits that these metaphorical objects and devices are so overused, that they’ve lost their impact. Here is the list with [...]
Leave a comment

Switch to our mobile site