|
|
|||||||||||||
Volunteer Spotlight: Jim French and Alison Schwartz
By Andy Smith Broadway Cares Production Manager Nathan Hurlin isn’t known as a matchmaker, but he does get credit for introducing one of our favorite couples, Fire Island Dance Festival volunteers Jim French and Alison Schwartz, who credit him with bringing them together. “Separately, they’re two of my favorite volunteers. I always know that our events will run smoothly and look great when Jim and Alison are with us,” says Hurlin. “So I remember when I found out they had become a couple, I thought ‘Now doesn’t that just make sense!’" “We should have met a number of times and had many narrow misses at Broadway Cares events,” says Schwartz, an accomplished stage manager and general manager who’s been a BC/EFA and DRA volunteer dating back to 1997’s Remember Project. Jim and Alison met briefly at 2004’s Fire Island Dance Festival but didn’t click until another dance event in 2006. “We were at a party for the Joyce Theatre and Jim was trying to use me as a way to get to my roommate,” remembers Alison, who gave French (an accomplished lighting designer) her business card anyway. Soon, the two were dating and the potentially troublesome roommate moved to LA. And, now the couple has become a welcome fixture at BC/EFA events, never letting canoodling get in the way of work—at least not for long. Now, she’s moved up from general management to producing, “which means, among other things, that I’m traveling a lot less.” Before becoming a blue woman (“And there has been one blue woman in the history of the company.”), Alison was a production stage manager for Pilobolus, the cutting-edge modern dance company and later a general manager for the company of Tony-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones (Spring Awakening). Fake a Bow “At those early meetings, the choreographer and I discuss general concepts and ideas, and if their work is unfamiliar to me, we talk style, technique, and aesthetic,” French says. “The piece stays fairly nebulous until the choreographer gets into the studio with the dancers and actually makes the movement.” “About four-to-six weeks before opening night, I distill those ideas into a light plot and hand it over to the master electrician at Cedar Lake and then in the final two weeks before opening, we load-in the lights, focus, and then spend two or three days actually creating the lighting and arranging the other technical elements of the piece,” French says. “The most difficult step of the process comes immediately after the performance; when I have to bow with the company and choreographer. “I hate bowing!” Coast-to-Coast She discovered a love of theater freshman year, while taking a theatre tech class. A little more laid back, Jim grew up in California, the oldest of three. “My young years were in Contra Costa County, in the Bay Area, and my high school years were in Long Beach, an LA suburb, followed by an undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley.” Then he moved east to pursue a masters in lighting design at Carnegie Mellon University. “I didn't surf all that much, but in high school I played bass in a surf rock band,” Jim jokes. “The other stereotypical LA anecdote I have is that the first thing I did after I got my driver's license was drive to my friend Jon's house to celebrate. Jon lived two blocks away.” Living Arrangements French and Schwartz share a number of interests, including fitness. “We’re runners, and Jim’s trying to teach me to play golf,” Alison says, adding, “Oh, and we’re both major baseball addicts. Tomorrow night we’re going to see the Staten Island Yankees play the Brooklyn Cyclones.” “We both work a lot, but when we’re off we both enjoy traveling,” says Alison, while Jim adds: “And wine.” Two of the couples’ shared vacations have included excursions to vineyard-filled locations: Italy and Sonoma County. “She’s a lightweight; so I usually finish her glass.”
|
