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Ready, set, design
and build
Question: What does your job entail?
Answer: I work with Vanita Rae Smith -- she's the chief of entertainment in Army's entertainment division -- and it's just her and I running an 808-seat theater. She handles the business side and chooses the shows, while I'm technical director and designer for the shows.
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Who: Tom Giza Title: Technical director and scenic designer for the Army Community Theatre Job: Designs and builds scenery for plays staged at Fort Shafter's Richardson Theatre.
Tom Giza is one of only a handful of people in Hawaii paid to work full time designing and building theater sets. His latest effort -- for "West Side Story," playing through Saturday -- is the 100th of his career. Giza, 53, moved to Hawaii in 1970 with the U.S. Navy, which he quit in 1972. He then sold shoes briefly for JC Penney Co. Inc., then coffee for eight years for Coffee Systems Hawaii. He earned a master's degree in fine arts from the University of Hawaii in 1985, and has been working for the Army Community Theatre since 1988. He has won many awards for his designs.
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A: We build all day. As the designer, I do the dreaming with the director, then as the technical director I figure out, "How can this become a reality?" Then we get volunteers to help with the labor, and then we build.
Q: Do you use volunteers a lot?
A: All the actors, musicians and stage crews, the ushers -- everybody's a volunteer. It's community theater. We've had a great group of people for the 68 shows I've been here.
Q: How did you get into scenic design?
A: I never wanted to be a designer. I wanted to be a performer. So at night, while I was still in the military, I joined the Honolulu Chorale. Then I was in Hawaii Opera Theatre for eight years, then Diamond Head Theatre.
But then Richard G. Mason, a scenic design professor at UH, saw something in me. He had seen my art portfolio and goaded me for eight years to get into designing. He became my mentor. When I finally started taking classes at UH, he said, "It's about time."
One important thing he told me was that actors here don't get paid much or at all, but they always need designers.
Q: What's the first show you worked on?
A: The very first show ever was "The Wiz," in 1981 at Kaimuki High School. I was still a student (at UH). My 50th show was "The Wiz," too. I thought that was kind of funny.
Q: What's the most unusual set you designed?
A: Most unusual? Well, my very favorite set design was for "Kismet" (a rags-to-riches story set in Arabia about a beggar who becomes an emir in a day). The stage is higher and it's bigger, and you have to make it look lush, because those people were rich.
Q: What was your least favorite set?
A: Probably the first "South Pacific" I did here at this job. It was very hard. It's a huge show and the theater wasn't set up right at the time.
The second time around, my boss, Ms. Smith, allowed me to have real waterfalls on stage. It won an award.
I gotta say, I'm very lucky to have this job, because while at UH I was worried that I had educated myself out of this state. But Ms. Smith saw my work at the shows and realized that I like this bigness that I like to do -- and have to do for this tunnel kind of a stage at Richardson Theatre -- so I have to thank her for seeing that in me.
Q: It seems like you do the same shows a lot.
A: Because we have a subscription audience, we go back to the same shows about every nine years. As a result, I have the largest musical production file in the state. I have pictures, like of Thailand where "King and I" takes place. I have DVDs, videos, CDs, books, all these resources. That's what I spend all my money on. (Laughter)
I've been trying to get it archived it electronically so I can research it more easily -- 35 years worth.
