Hurray! The set is built! Tomorrow is the first performance, and actually the last piece — the stove — is unfinished, and a new “chimney” appeared, and it needs to be painted. Between getting all this done, and also getting ready for a trip to Asia, I haven’t been updating — sorry. But here are some photos:
The first one is a shot of the builders pulling down a backdrop for me to work on.
Here’s a better shot of the chalk layout. If you look closely you can just see a few of the blue chalk lines we snapped to help me with the perspective on the left side of the drop.
A word to the wise: don’t crawl around on the drop without adequate protection for your knees!
Here’s that drop, completed, though not yet hung for the performance. The crew will even out the wrinkles by adjusting the spacing and length of the cords the drop is hanging from. I painted it using ordinary, flat house paint. A new metal garbage can lid was my palette. To reach the top of this 14′-high drop, I would just lower it partially, then raise it to do the bottom:
Here’s the other drop. It started out black, with lots of peeling paint. This photo of it shows it with a mixture of black paint and wood glue, patching the peeled spots. The next day I went over the shiny spots with another layer of flat black. It was painted with a mixture of black and white house paint, sometimes double loading the brush for effect. The only other color is yellow, but even that has a little black mixed in, to subdue the effect. As with the other drop, this one is not straightened out yet.
While I was painting drops, the crew was building the set. Here it is, finished except for a few details. Tonight is dress rehearsal, and they are still working on some of the pieces:
The platform is 6′ deep, extending to the back wall of the theater, and 6’10” high, to accommodate the fact that our Mr. Banks is about 6’6″ tall. The nursery wall is painted a lemon yellow, with “stenciling” that I free-handed in. The window on the left is painted on, and draped similarly to the French doors on the right. The blank wall to the left of that left window will hold Mary’s mirror, at that angle, so it doesn’t shine back on the audience (I don’t know why they decided to use a real mirror, but it looks cool!)
The pictures along the nursery wall are just downloads of children’s book pictures from the period. I dropped them into a standard border in Illustrator and placed them into some frames I had hanging around.
The kids’ beds are 18×48 inches, set crosswise. I toyed with the idea of adding headboards but that would have conflicted with the central dollhouse, and then someone gave me the idea of painting something that looked like a headboard along the side of each bed.
Downstairs you may recognize the basic color pattern from my sketches. The stairway is not jutting out its whole width, in order to make room for the backmost drop. The fact that the widest person in the cast has a problem getting up them (or so they tell me) just adds to the comedy. I didn’t paint the fireplace surround as I had planned, but did it in whites and grays, making it look like marble, instead.
The clock is a $4 digital clock from Target, set in a shape cut out of blueboard.
The “front door” is set back, down a little alcove, to help with the addition of the cupboard for the kitchen scene.
For the Talking Shop scene, two little girls will roll out this cart in front of the right side of the London street scene backdrop:
While not everything is totally built, the trick kitchen cabinet is operational. Here is the front, before Aye bumps into it. There will be items on the lower shelves that won’t get disarranged.
By hanging the dishes and the two shelves they are on from monofilament, they can be made to look like they’re collapsing when released, and them come back to their correct position by pulling on the strings from the back.
Tension is maintained on the strings just by hooking the washers tied to them to screws jutting out the back. Here is the “collapsed” cabinet. It makes quite a clatter!
Hopefully the lighting won’t pick out the monofilament during performances.
Another effect for the kitchen scene is accomplished with a magic-store item:
- The cake never got made!
- One of the actors covers up the evidence
- But once Mary appears on the scene, all is made right again.
An effect I made, using a frame with a solid insert, a bouquet of silk flowers, and some wire became the painting Bert presents to Mary near the end of the show.
Bert turns around in a darkened quarter of the stage, and picks up a painting hidden there:
He spins around and magically produces a painting for Mary!
Mary one-upps Bert by picking the flowers right out of the painting!
The wire loop holding the flowers in place is positioned right at the rim of the vase, but I don’t think it will be visible from the audience any way.
And here it ends
Well, tonight we will attend the dress rehearsal, but I won’t be posting any more photos, I think, as my wife and I are leaving at 6am tomorrow for Asia. The next blog postings you will see from me will likely be drawings or paintings from China. Until then!
