The Opera Post, Act 2

In my last post I mentioned that I had many tasks for the New Bradford Playhouse’s in-house production of Maskerade. Last time we talked posters. Today, we focus on the programme.

A 12-page booklet, the whole thing was designed to be printed in black and white on ordinary office paper. The audience got such a version, while I gifted some cast and crew members this borderless, colour cover variant. It contains the usual suspects: a synopsis, cast list, crew list, rights, a word from the director, a bit about the theatre and what’s being performed there next. A nicety is that being an internal production on a shoestring budget, there’s no advertisements. The cast pages ended up being the centre spread, which was ideal.

mask-prog-cast1


Most of the photographs were traced by hand to create an etched look, while symbols from the upcoming shows were drawn too, rather than sticking tiny poster photos in. I found the stock images used to make the show poster and recreated it for the programme cover, with a couple of tweaks and fixes.

mask-shot-soon1
Duck, plant, rose, bowl, cucumber.

The programme’s actually a Tête-bêche (reversible) booklet: Turn it upside-down and you’re greeted with 3 pages of a sample cookery book. The Joye of Snacks is a book within the play which contains many rude recipes and anecdotes; the recipes in the programme are mentioned in the play’s script. I got the recipes from Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook, a book based on the book in the play based on the book (still following me?).

The Joye of Snacks is a parody of The Joy of Sex [NSFW] – While I used an accurate title font, for the consideration of innocents the cover image was not re-created so faithfully (I assure you that the model in the photograph traced was wearing clothes).

Side A and Side B, side by side. Side.
Side A and Side B, side by side. Side.

The decorations in this second half differ to those in the first.

I had a crash course in Adobe Distiller and duplex printing. Pages would print in the wrong order/orientation at home, but fine at the local print shop. It was a close one – final amendments were made on the day of the first show!

Of course, you’d like to see… check the gallery below for the full pages laid out in reading order!