Peter Pan and the Summer of 1985

The work on a play often starts months ahead of the actual performance and if a play is part of a season of plays it may be selected more than a year in advance.

Musicals can often take a bit longer to plan than straight plays and our summer musicals were no exception.

In the summer of 1985 we were to do Peter Pan and sometime during the school year I went with the rest of the production team to see a local production of the play and get a backstage tour after the show.

The producers wanted to make sure that the flying was safe and that it was an expense and challenge that we wanted to undertake.

Twenty-seven years ago, and still today, the best choice for safe and easy flying is to use Flying by Foy.

http://www.flybyfoy.com/

After the play was over we got to see the equipment used and talk to the staff about how easy it was to run and if there were any problems.

The set needs to be designed with the flying in mind and the backstage crew needs to be able to see the actors and be able to hook the cables to the actors with being seen, both of which are not too hard to do if planned ahead of time.

Also safe places for Peter and the other actors who fly to take off and land are needed.

In addition to learning about the flying the producers also like the girl who played Peter Pan and she would end up playing Wendy in our production that summer. 

The musical calls for some fun scenery in addition to the flying.

The play starts and ends in the nursery of the darling children,  Act II is in Never Never Land and most of Act III is on The Jolly Roger .

The realistic set for the nursery was flown out to reveal the underground lair of the lost boys.

We build a 30’-0” wide, 8’-0” high cave platform that was stored way upstage and was rolled downstage for the scene.

The boys could climb on top and slide down a fireman’s pole to get into the lair.

We needed to make a tree stump that was to be the chimney of the underground lair.

It needed to have a little trap door on top and give off some smoke.

Today we could use a small battery powered fog machine but that was not available back then.

To make the puff of smoke I used a rubber hose filled with talcum powder that was attached to the bulb of a turkey baster.

As one of the actors came up to the stump they stepped on the turkey baster and PUFF we had a little smoke.

It was not a great effect but it worked.

The stump was classic scenic construction: Plywood top and bottom, 2x4 frame covered with chicken wire and papier-mâché.

Like many other items it would stay in our stock for years and was used in many other plays and acting projects.

The Pirate Ship was a side view with the ship’s railing and ropes hanging down form unseen rigging and masts.

We did have some canvas hanging down too but I do not have any photos from this show so I do not remember all of the details.

One of the Pirate actors did make his own prop telescope.

It was a simple, a couple of pieces of PVC pipe, but he had a plastic eyeball at the end that he could have move side-to-side. 

A few weeks before the show a technician from Foy came with the equipment and set up all of the flying rigs.

He taught us how to run it and take it down after the show.

The equipment was well made and easy to use.

It was designed to do one thing and one thin only and that was to fly people in Peter Pan.

The company has made many changes and improvements to the flying systems since then and that can be seen in many shows today.

The flying went well and we had no problems, well that is until the last show and one of the last fly cues.

Before a flying scene the actors would move upstage by the window curtains where there was a small hole in the wall from which the crew could attach the cables before the flying scenes.

The hook was simple, just a metal bar that slid out of two drill holes and was snap back when the cable eyelet was in place.

The high-tech method used to hold the bar in place was a rubber band, yes just a rubber band ! ! !

In the last scene time has moved on and Wendy has grown up and now has her own daughter Jane and Peter Pan returns and flys off with her.

Jane was played was played by the same actress as Wendy.

Just before her last fly cue the latch that hooked the cable to the flying harness jammed open and we could not get it to lock.

With only seconds to attach the cable I made the decision after what seemed like minutes to tell the actress the just fake it.

The young actress turned and went on with the rest of the scene, jumped up on the window sill and then jumped into the air to fly away.

She would fell flat on her face on the mats we had upstage of the window.

We all ran in to see if she was OK and as I got to her I thought she was crying, but when she turned over she was laughing uncontrollably.

Without the pressure of the show it took just a few seconds, and a pair of pliers, to free the latch and hook her up for the curtain call.

Do not feel bad for the actress, she was OK and would return a few years later to be in our production of A Chorus Line and then go on to have active career on Broadway and is directing a play this summer at The Williamstown Theatre Festival.

Check out Jessica Stone’s work on her Internet Movie and Broadway Database pages:

http://www.ibdb.com/person.php?id=74951

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0831953/ 

It seems we had another local Star in the cast and the guys on the crew all got a good laugh when they found out that the actress who played Tiger Lily was a featured dancer at one of the local strip clubs.

Some of the goys talked about going to see her in action but I am not sure if anyone really went to check out her show. 

That summer was fun and we had a good group of workers, many who had worked on previous summer productions.

We worked hard and played hard too.

Parties, Wednesday Barbecues on the loading dock and a little time away up at the lake.

I think it was that summer that I saw baseball cards at the store and said: Gee I haven’t seen these in years.” And of course bought a few packs.

The next year I bought a few more packs and the next year a few more and . . . .  well ask my wife as I have too many card now, but that is for another Blog, or better yet E-Bay.

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All the World’s a Stage

I have been working in Theatre for about 40 years and I have worked on less than a dozen full productions of Shakespeare’s plays.

Loves Labor Lost

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Richard II

Richard III

A Midsummer’s Night Dream (twice)

Much Ado About Nothing

As You Like It

Romeo and Juliet

Twelfth Night

In addition I worked on the musical version of Two Gentlemen of Verona and Bride of Shakespeare Heaven, a compilation of monologues and scenes cut and pasted together into a show.

Seems to me that I should have done more of Shakespeare’s plays but they typically have large casts and are more costly to do.

The plays can cost as much as musicals to produce but do not often draw as large of an audience.

Public schools have cut back on field trips and we no longer do as many school matinees as we have done in the past. 

The final play of my third year at Brockport was a production of As You Like It.

We did our usual six performance plus three school matinees, or as many Theatre veterans call them: Creature Features!

To begin with school matinees start early in morning, 10 AM is an average start time, plus the kids are often noisy, rude and have been known to throw things at the actors.

We had to stop a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank and move some students to the back because they were tossing candy at the actors on stage.

This may seem extreme but I remember seeing a film of an early Beatles concert where the girls in the audience were throwing jelly beans on stage because they wanted to “Touch” them.

I our case the kids wanted to mess up the actors and that school was banned from future productions.

As You Like It  was the last play of the school year and the last play for our Lighting Design teacher who was leaving at the end of May.

Like most of Shakespeare’s works the play called for multiple scenes jumping from Court of Duke Frederick to the Forest of Arden.

It is a fun play with lots of action with characters running through the woods, wrestling in the court and women disguised as men.

It also has one of the most quoted speeches from Shakespeare,

no not To Be or Not To Be,

but the following:

JAQUES: All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. 

The set was fun to build and I enjoyed the forest scene the most.

We had three layers of trees starting with real trees onstage with cutout trees behind them and finally upstage was a painted drop with even more trees.

The first forest scene starts in the Winter and we had special trees and bushes that had spray snow on them and we had white foam peanuts on the ground for snow.

At the next scene change the crew ran out to pick up the snow and turn and the bushes around so the spring flower side would show.

A few nights there was little snow showing but it still looked good.

During the recent building renovation I found that we still had the May Pole that was used in the last scene of the play but after 27 years the ribbons were faded and a bit dirty.

I got to paint some of the set and remember that I had a good time working on the show.

After it was done and school ended I would have a few weeks off and then start working on our two summer shows.

With the departure of the Lighting Design teacher and with my taking over most of his duties I was not sure what was in store for me ahead in the coming school year, but for the first summer production we had an outside Lighting Designer.

Flying up next is Peter Pan.

The Shadow Box

After a wild time with the Sci-Fi adventure the next play was completely different.

The Shadow Box by Michael Cristofer won both the Tony and Pulitzer for best play.

A powerful but difficult play to enjoy it tells three overlapping stories about families dealing with a member dying of cancer.

It is set a cabin like building used by a hospital as a hospice or halfway house for families if the sick patients.

The Shadow Box

For the second time that year I got to be both the Technical Director and Lighting Designer.

The old Lighting Design teacher was still there, but I sure he was busy trying to figure what he was going to do after May when his job ended.

They may have given him a break so he would have time to apply for a new job which he did get, but did not stay long at.

 

The set was not a bad design and did not offer too many problems to build, unlike this year when I had only 3 students in my Stagecraft class, back then I had 15 students plus several work-study and temp-service workers.

As he often did, the Scene Designer cut some live trees down to put on the set and he would do it again for the next show and again the next year.

The Shadow Box,  Lighting Design

The biggest problem with the set was the material that the Scene designer had chosen.

Back then we were still mostly using traditional canvas covered flats but for that production he chose to cover the walls with paneling.

The problem was that the paneling he chose was cheap, thin and would break very easily as we worked with it.

But that was not the real problem.

The paneling was made with glue that had Urea-Formaldehyde in it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urea-formaldehyde

It was banned for use in home insulation in 1982 but was still in many products in 1985 when we did the play.

When we cut the paneling it released the Urea-Formaldehyde and it caused many problems with the workers effecting some severely.

Burning in the lungs, rashes and other fun problems were common and I threw it all away as soon as the play was over.

As I looked over the program for the play I see that at least three of the former students have a hand in running theatres in Rochester, New York City and Los Angles.

Of those that I am still in contact, mostly thanks to Facebook, I know that many went on to do at least some work in Theatre or the related Arts.

One of my Stagecraft students from that class came back to school here last year and worked as our Prop Mistress.

The play went well and I was happy with how both the set and lights looked.

Well one night we thought that the older actress in the play had really died as she sat slumped in her wheelchair, but I am happy to report she is still alive pushing 90 as I write this post.

We the subject matter, Cancer, Death and a little Homosexuality, it was not a play that people “Liked” but enjoyed and were glad to have seen it.

The Scene Designer wanted a modern looking fireplace on the set and I adapted two Linnebach Projectors to be the top and bottom of it.

I had actually used the projectors as they were intended to be used when I designed the set for the master Builder back at Michigan.

http://viewsfrombackstage.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html

Now that school is over for the summer I hope to catch up on my blog posts and also get better scans of my slides. 

 

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