Richard Pallaziol, the owner of Weapons of Choice, has been a stage fight choreographer for the past 30 years, during which time he has designed and taught the fights for nearly 300 productions throughout California. Both during and after studying theatre at CSU Long Beach and ACT in San Francisco, he apprenticed with several fight masters including those of the Society of American Fight Directors. In order to better inform his techniques, he augmented his studies with a mastery of seven different disciplines of Asian and Western martial arts. His fights have been seen at every level of theatre, from high school to professional opera, and he has provided fight coordination for independent films and even for the Prince of Persia 3D video game. As a fight instructor he has taught the techniques of stage combat to an estimated 8,000 actors, as well as mentoring other fight choreographers in their own technical and artistic development.

    He began his career as a ballet dancer, then moving on to actor and finally fight instructor. It was in the late 1980's that the genesis for Weapons of Choice began, when as a fight coordinator in Los Angeles he was frustrated with not being able to get exactly the right swords for his fights. In 1990 he began to rent out his small collection of rapiers and broadswords to area theatres. That has grown to 6,000 weapons covering the needs of nearly 1,200 shows each year. In addition to providing stock items, he has also designed and built hundreds of production-specific weapons for theatres across the country.