End of the Week Links

American Theatre has this week’s “must read” article on jobs in technical theatre. They look at where new technicians get their training and interview a number of people working in theatre to see how they got their start. The interviewees come from a range of different departments, like lighting, sound and costumes. No props people appear in the article; probably because we were all too busy to give an interview.

The Abbey Theatre has a video up where Eimer Murphy talks about the vintage working dentist’s chair that appears in their current production of You Never Can Tell.

Propnomicon found this great video on aging glass bottles. It’s a lot better than giving your actors actual antique bottles that they have to drink out of.

Take a tour through the prop warehouse of the Food Network. In the basement of NYC’s Chelsea Market, Wendy Waxman stores thousands of vintage items which appear on the various shows and specials of this TV station. I bet a lot of my readers wish they could spend every day finding and buying quirky kitchen items.

Finally, this is short but interesting. The actor who originally played Darth Vader (David Prowse, not James Earl Jones) posted a photo of the original Vader mask that burned at the end of Return of the Jedi and compared it to the prop that Kylo Ren holds in The Force Awakens. Since the original was made of fiberglass, it turned a little “hairy”, while the prop in the new film looks more “melty”.