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Art Manke (Director) grew up in Chicago, where he produced and directed his first play at the age of 11 in his best friend’s garage. He continued to act, sing, dance and direct his way through high school, and was a theatre major in college; later, he studied acting in graduate school at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. After moving to Los Angeles, he co-founded a classical theatre company called A Noise Within. Since then, he has directed many plays at SCR, including Peter and the Starcatcher. For television, he has directed several shows including “Hannah Montana.”
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Alby Potts (Musical Director) loves music. He began playing his first instrument in elementary school and knew right away he wanted to be a professional musician. He got his first paying musical job in the eighth grade and has been working ever since. Alby's first piano teacher taught lessons in her house, which her husband had built by hand around a gigantic tree. He made it out of found lumber, stones and junk and kept the tree trunk and lower branches in the living room. He had two grand pianos and the roof leaked when it rained, but nobody seemed to mind. Alby wrote a piano concerto at the age of 13 and his great junior high music teacher, "RO," let Alby perform it with the school orchestra. Teachers who encourage their students are the best! It makes a difference for the rest of your life, just like discipline and practicing. Enjoy the show!
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Keith Mitchell (Scenic Design) returns to SCR, where he designed Anastasia Krupnick, Junie B. Jones and A Little Monkey Business, Junie B. Jones in Jingle Bells Batman Smells! and Ben and the Magic Paintbrush. Yeah, mostly shows with really long titles! He has designed sets for plays at many of the theatres in Los Angeles and around Southern California. He enjoys painting and recently illustrated a book, written by his friend JoAnn Dickinson, called I Love to Go Camping. Keith is an artistic associate of Rogue Artists Ensemble, a theatre group that makes shows with puppets, and he also is an Emmy Award-winning commercial art director. He spends his free time in a cabin that he shares with a bat, a tribe of chipmunks and a cadre of lizards. He is a University of Southern California Trojan alumnus, a member of the United Scenic Artists, Local 829 and the Art Directors Guild, Local 800.
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Angela Balogh Calin (Costume Design) is very excited to be back at SCR and to collaborate with director Art Manke again. She has designed costumes and/or sets at SCR for 14 Theatre for Young Audiences shows and more than 35 other productions including Abundance, The Whipping Man, Peter and the Starcatcher, Rest, The Whale, The Trip to Bountiful, Circle Mirror Transformation and Ordinary Days among others. She also designed sets and costumes for more than 60 productions for Denver Center Theatre Company, A Noise Within, Milwaukee Repertory, The Old Globe, Pasadena Playhouse, Georgia Shakespeare and many local theatres and in her native Romania. She has worked extensively in film and television in the U.S. and Romania, having design credits with I.R.S. Media, Cannon Films, PBS, Full Moon Entertainment and Romanian Films. She graduated with an MFA in set and costume design from the Academy of Arts in Bucharest.
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Josh Epstein (Lighting Design) has been working as a lighting designer for 16 years. In college at the University of Chicago, he studied political science and did theatre as a hobby. Although he always loved the performing arts, it wasn’t until he moved to New York and got his MFA from NYU that his career really got started. Now he travels the country and designs lighting for shows from coast to coast. In Los Angeles, where Josh lives, he has worked at such places as the Mark Taper Forum, Pasadena Playhouse, Kirk Douglas Theater and Geffen Playhouse. In addition to designing, he also teaches lighting at UCLA. When he isn’t working, Josh loves to spend every free moment with his wife and three daughters.
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Michael K. Hooker (Sound Design) is based here in Orange County. He actually started working with audio in elementary school because none of his teachers knew how to set up the cafeteria sound system. He now loves sound design as a career because very few people really know what it means. If he does a good job, you probably will hear every note and word in this wonderful show. He is most proud of the many shows he designed for Walt Disney Imagineering, all of which are in faraway Disneylands located in Paris, Tokyo, Shanghai and Hong Kong. He is a professor of sound design at the University of California, Irvine.
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Sean T. Cawelti (Puppet Design) was just three years old when he convinced his parents to buy him his first puppet at a swap meet in Orange County. Growing up, he was inspired by movies that told stories using puppets and he now is a professional puppet designer and director. He studied theatre at UC, Irvine and studied puppetry at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Sean is the artistic director for Rogue Artists Ensemble in Los Angeles, a theatre company dedicated to telling new stories with puppets, masks and media. He is the Center Theatre Group’s 2015 Sherwood Award recipient and has won awards for directing, designing things and for writing. Sean is a member of United Scenic Artists, Local 829. seancawelti.com
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Roxana Khan (Stage Manager) was an evil witch in a play a long time ago. After a while, she realized she like being backstage quite a lot more. As a young girl, she took classes at SCR, and is so happy that she gets to work here as an adult. As a stage manager, she gets to help everyone on stage by making sure that everything going on backstage happens just right. She and her team work together to orchestrate the scenery, costumes, props, music or anything else you see or hear on stage. She went to school in California and England and has been able to work as a stage manager up and down the west coast, mostly at a big theatre in the forest of Oregon called the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
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