The stage of the historic Soo Theatre hosted over 30 performances this summer, from seminars and showcases to musicals, concerts, dance shows, and an opera. While every production featured a long list of participants, on stage and behind the scenes, only one person had a hand in every single performance of every single show: the theatre’s technical director, Paul Olson.
With the conclusion of the Haunted Theatre and Fright Fest Movie Marathon Oct. 25 and 26, Olson has now wrapped up his second season at the theatre. It was a much busier time than he ever expected when he first walked in the door in the spring of 2012.
“I had just moved to the Eastern U.P. after 17 years in Manistique,” he says. “I assumed a place like the Soo Theatre would have a wealth of backstage technical help, but I thought if I was lucky they might let me push some scenery around during a show or hammer a few nails or something. Little did I know what I was getting into.”
As it turned out, the theatre had recently lost its first and only technical director, Taylor Brugman, and was in desperate need of someone who knew his way around lighting and sound gear and could handle productions of every type and size.
“I was immediately recruited to run lights for a couple of one-act plays that were hitting the stage in a week,” Olson recalls. “I did that, and figured I was finished. But then I met Lisa Dunn, who was directing the upcoming production of Carousel. She said, ‘You must be the guy who’s designing lights for my show,’ and I said, ‘Uh … I guess I am.’ And that was it. Shows came one after another, and before I knew it, I’d spent the whole summer there. And at the end of the season, they named me the technical director.”
In that role, Olson is responsible for the lighting, sound, and other technical needs of every event held in the theatre. Before a production, he usually can be found setting up microphones and running audio cables, preparing lights, or building sets. He is also a member of the creative team for the theatre’s larger productions, such as this past summer’s big musical, Fiddler on the Roof, and opera, Hansel and Gretel, helping visualize how the shows will look and then making that look come alive on the stage. He also teaches, on occasion, as he did this year during the 2013 musical theatre camp, where he introduced the students to the technical side of theatre, while also working with them on lights, sound, and special effects for the camp’s showcase production.
“It can be awfully time-consuming,” he says. “Even something really simple, like a seminar, might require two or three hours of work before the guest speaker arrives, setting up the projector, getting the microphones ready, and focusing the lights. For the big shows like Fiddler, it’s several hundred hours of work, beginning maybe six months beforehand, when we start planning the production, and ending a few hours after the final performance, when the last of the scenery is cleared off the stage, disassembled, and stored away.”
All of that work comes naturally to Olson, who has been a theatre junkie longer than he can remember. He grew up on Mackinac Island but moved to the Chicago area in his early 20s, where he eventually found himself working as the marketing director for a large cultural arts center that hosted several dozen national touring shows a year, from major concerts to Broadway musicals. Initially, marketing was his only focus, but as time went by he branched out into other areas of theatre management, ranging from designing a new ticketing system for the box office to writing grants to actually booking many of the shows that came to the theatre, working with some of the country’s biggest entertainment agents to hire their performers and negotiate contracts. A “techie” at heart, he also took every opportunity to escape the office and get backstage, where he worked on as many productions as he could. Sometimes that meant just helping bring scenery in from the loading dock to the stage. Other times, he would operate the light board, sound, or rigging systems.
“I would keep two sets of clothes at the theatre,” he says. “I’d start the day in my suit and tie, do a quick change into my backstage clothes – black jeans and tee-shirt – do whatever I could to help get things ready, then run back up front right before the audience arrived, wash up in the bathroom, and get back into my suit. When the show was over, I’d put my jeans on again and help load the show out of the theatre, back onto the trucks that were heading to the next city.”
Returning to the Upper Peninsula in 1995, he became the editor of the Manistique Pioneer-Tribune newspaper, a job he held until 2012. But even then he would get back to the world of theatre whenever possible. For several years, he commuted back and forth from Manistique to Houghton, where he worked at Michigan Tech’s Rozsa Center on concerts, dance shows, plays, and touring musicals such as Titanic, Aida, and Miss Saigon. He was also an active volunteer with the high school drama program in Manistique, where he designed lights and sound, served as stage manager for many productions, and even donned the assistant director’s cap from time to time. In 2010, he helped lead the committee that oversaw the complete renovation of the high school auditorium, working with the engineers and architects to design the project and consulting during the construction phase, as an outdated 1970s facility was transformed into a state of the art high school theatre space.
Interestingly, all of Olson’s theatre work is only a “sideline.” His real career is writing. In addition to his years at the paper in Manistique, he is also a published writer of horror, fantasy, and thriller fiction. In the 1980s, he published his own magazine, a non-fiction trade journal for people working in the horror field, and some years later, when the Internet was still young, co-edited one of the first electronic newsletters in the horror field. He has also published two novels, two anthologies, and dozens of short stories, essays, interviews, reviews, and other work. KHP Publishers Inc. recently re-released his first novel, the vampire tale Night Prophets, in a new expanded edition. He is also editing a new anthology of horror tales which should be out by the end of the year from the acclaimed specialty press Cemetery Dance Publications, and a book called Whispered Echoes, a collection of his own stories, is due in early 2014, also from Cemetery Dance.
Olson admits that’s it’s difficult to spend so much time away from the keyboard to work at the Soo Theatre. Often, during the long and grueling production process for a show, he feels his writing calling to him, pulling him back. But he’s also intensely proud of the work that’s been done during his two seasons with the organization. In addition to serving as technical director, he is the theatre’s webmaster, overseeing their website, Facebook page, and Twitter account. He also serves on the marketing and programming committees, and helps out in other areas as needed. Those various duties have given him a clear picture of the challenges facing the organization, and an appreciation for how those challenges have been overcome.
“The Soo Theatre has to jump over hurdles every day,” he says. “Our building needs work. We never have enough money. We have some of the world’s best volunteers, but there are never enough of them. Equipment is old. Resources are tight. Supplies are short. And like always in theatre, there’s never enough time to get everything done. But despite all of that, the work that we produce on that tiny 83-year-old stage rivals some of the best work you’ll see anywhere. There’s incredible talent in the Eastern U.P., and a dedication to the arts that is positively inspiring. When you combine that with some determination and a lot of energy, you get the Soo Theatre Project. This community is lucky to have that building and that organization. It’s an incredible asset.”
A version of this article was originally published in the Soo Evening News on Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013.
