Without Bruce and Annette Hallett, countless stage productions over the last thirty years would have been in the dark, literally. Bruce is well known on the island as a technical stage director, and Annette is well known as a lighting designer.
Bruce, 69, is Bermudian. His mother Lilian Hallett belonged to BMDS in its earliest days, and his father, Henry was the headmaster at Saltus Grammar School for many years.
Annette, 60, was raised in Lymington, Hampshire and first came to Bermuda in 1977 to work at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital as a medical laboratory technologist.
The two first met when Annette was invited by a friend, Lin Juett, to help with stage lighting of a production of Terrence Rattigan’s ‘The Winslow Boy’ in the 1970s. It was here that her interest in lighting design, and Bruce, first developed. Bruce was frequently involved in theatrical productions as a stage manager.
“We kept meeting like that for a long time,” Annette said.
There were secretly married in 1983, but didn’t tell anyone for another year. They wanted to see how long they could keep their marriage a secret on a tiny island like Bermuda.
In 1975, Bruce received the Stella Halsall award for his contribution to the theatre in Bermuda as a stage manager. Shortly afterwards, he was asked to be the technical director and stage manager of the first ever Bermuda Festival in 1976. He continued to be the technical director until 2009, when he retired. Bruce said since the Bermuda Festival first began it has changed immensely in three decades. The quality of performances has improved, the level of technical expertise has increased and the facilities have also gotten better.
Bruce first became involved in the theatre while in college at Dalhousie University in Canada, studying oceanography. One night someone came to his dorm-room door desperately seeking backstage help with a production of ‘Brigadoon’. He was hooked!
Annette found working in the theatre in Bermuda immensely rewarding in Bermuda, although the theatre combined with her job at the hospital often meant she worked long days. In her career in stage lighting, she started off as a follow-spot operator and a gel cutter. Her first production as a lighting designer was with the Somerset School of Dancing.
“As a lighting designer, you need the kind of mind that can solve problems quickly and you can keep a lot of information organised in your mind,” she said.
She first started working the lights, using manual preset boards. There were no computer facilities. Nowadays lighting cues can be programmed on a computer, and things like lighting levels and colour changes can be set in motion with the push of a button. She said this means that lighting designers now have a lot more flexibility. She designed the lighting for the G&S shows for several years, as well as for BMDS, Jackson School of Performing Arts and In Motion School of Dance. She learned a lot from working with lighting designers brought in with the various foreign theatre companies that took part in the Bermuda Festival over the years.
She has also directed a number of plays and musicals including ‘The King and I’, ‘Me and My Girl’, ‘Driving Miss Daisy’ and ‘Educating Rita’. She has also acted as a director and actor with the Jabulani Repertory Company, a theatre group that staged productions at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess.
Bruce studied oceanography in university, intending to work in Bermuda at the US Navy SOFAR station in St. David’s. He did work there for a time. The Cold War was on, and part of his job was to listen in on the activities of Russian submarines passing Bermuda. He remembers vividly hearing recordings from the underwater microphones off Bermuda and Canary Islands of the USS Scorpion explosion and subsequent hull fractures. Unfortunately, not long after he took up employment there, the American government for various reasons decided to move the operation to Cape Canaveral. He was given the option of moving to Cape Canaveral, Florida, but he decided against the move. Instead, he went to work at the Bank of Butterfield where he established and maintained their current account systems for 30 years. In 1999 he left the bank and started his own theatrical equipment rental company, Ad Hoc Systems. Its main customer base was small groups who wanted to put on drama and dance productions at City Hall but didn’t have the technical knowledge or hardware to do the job properly. They would use his equipment, or hire him to use his equipment for them. The major part of his work was with the Bermuda Festival. Bruce retired from Ad Hoc in 2009, because the physicality of the work involved was getting too much for him.
The Halletts have two daughters, Rowan and Paige. Rowan graduated from the University of Victoria with a double major in English and Philosophy, and is now pursuing a career in Restaurant Management. Paige recently graduated from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts with an Honours degree in Acting, and is now quietly starving in London waiting to find work. She was very fortunate in receiving scholarships from G&S and BMDS.
