Restoration in Progress...

One of the jobs I volunteer to do for the Playhouse is Historian. I keep a photo album of all the shows, and make sure that the lobby posters are stored safely. During my last show, I spent some time up in the balcony and noticed that the Belfry was wet. There is a leak somewhere, that can not be located. So I got all the lobby posters out of there, and brought them and the albums home with me for safekeeping until I can convince someone to build me a cabinet to put them in.

I was looking thought them and noticed that a lot of the older ones are falling apart. Te pictures have paint splattered on them, and they are all of various sizes. All of our posters are 2X3 so they can all be interchanged in frames.



This was the oldest one we have. BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE from 1973. I decided that I would reconstruct it, and the really bad ones, and put them all on standard size cardboard. The picture below is the next oldest one we have. ANASTASIA from 1978.




It too was falling apart. THe pictures were torn, and falling off. I scanned the pictures into my computer, and then used photoshop to retouch them somewhat. NOT like new, but better. Then I used my wonderful new machine THE CRICKET and cut out details to glue on the new poster.



Quite a change huh? I even made the pictures bigger so they can be seen better. So now I need to try and talk the board out of enough money to frame 8 of them, so we can put them in the main staircase going up to the auditorium. This will be an all winter project I am sure, but not all of them need to be rebuilt, just repaired.