Weekend's Over
Okay... my little holiday is over. Back to work!
Actually I spent most of my weekend working. As I believe I have announced I will be returning to a summerstock where I have worked in the past, to design a portion of their season. (about half of it.) I don't leave for another month or so, but the work has already begun.
Last week they called to say that they had been offered the materials from a Broadway set, and wanted to know if I thought I could use anything from it. Instead of just guessing what might be there, and frankly unbelieving that they had the story correct, I decided to go up myself to see what was there. So KF and took a car up and made a weekend of it.
Here's the story: A major Broadway show from 3 or 4 years ago went on tour, but they used a smaller version of their Broadway set (the London version) for the tour. Somehow (and I am unclear on this) the Broadway set ended up in storage upstate. After about a year they stopped paying for that storage, and now the storage facility has started clearing out the space, scrapping some of it, selling other parts, and donating some to the theatre. This was NOT a simple set. This is a huge, multi-million dollar Broadway musical that played for quite a while and 85% of it is in this storage facility. One major prop/set piece was taken, but everything else is there.
Everything.
Platforms. Flats. Curtains. Star drops. Scrims. Steel staircases, both straight and spiral. Hydraulics. Oversized props.
Everything! I was expecting a flat or two, maybe a curtain, or a couple of road boxes but this was like theatre Christmas!! I was able to pull the types of things that would literally cost me hundreds of times my show budget in order to get normally. It shifted my whole design on some of the shows, having things that I never dreamed I would have access to. Such is the nature of summerstock, that you are pulling together disparate elements, often recycled from other shows, in order to make things work, but this is a whole different story, and I am a luck lucky boy.
Actually I spent most of my weekend working. As I believe I have announced I will be returning to a summerstock where I have worked in the past, to design a portion of their season. (about half of it.) I don't leave for another month or so, but the work has already begun.
Last week they called to say that they had been offered the materials from a Broadway set, and wanted to know if I thought I could use anything from it. Instead of just guessing what might be there, and frankly unbelieving that they had the story correct, I decided to go up myself to see what was there. So KF and took a car up and made a weekend of it.
Here's the story: A major Broadway show from 3 or 4 years ago went on tour, but they used a smaller version of their Broadway set (the London version) for the tour. Somehow (and I am unclear on this) the Broadway set ended up in storage upstate. After about a year they stopped paying for that storage, and now the storage facility has started clearing out the space, scrapping some of it, selling other parts, and donating some to the theatre. This was NOT a simple set. This is a huge, multi-million dollar Broadway musical that played for quite a while and 85% of it is in this storage facility. One major prop/set piece was taken, but everything else is there.
Everything.
Platforms. Flats. Curtains. Star drops. Scrims. Steel staircases, both straight and spiral. Hydraulics. Oversized props.
Everything! I was expecting a flat or two, maybe a curtain, or a couple of road boxes but this was like theatre Christmas!! I was able to pull the types of things that would literally cost me hundreds of times my show budget in order to get normally. It shifted my whole design on some of the shows, having things that I never dreamed I would have access to. Such is the nature of summerstock, that you are pulling together disparate elements, often recycled from other shows, in order to make things work, but this is a whole different story, and I am a luck lucky boy.
So do they get to keep all the stuff??
Wow, Cully, that is a true summer gift!! What show was it?
I don't want to say what the show was, but I was surprised that this particular company would allow this to happen, I'll say that. The theatre was allowed to take whatever we wanted, gratis. My favorite piece? A huge scrim painted like a sky, with an integrated fiber optic star drop. (!!!??)