SCENE CHANGES

There is definitely such thing as a 'stage crew', but I think these days more and more of the work is done pre-production in order to maintain a more fluid, actor-based show.

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A little (simplified) history on Broadway Musical Set Design 101.

Early in the last century shows fell into 2 categories: extravaganzas like "Showboat" had elaborate stage machinery, elevator stages, turntables and treadmills combined with painted wing and drop sets. Sets were changed behind a drop curtain of some kind. Then there were the smaller intimate shows containing 2, 3 or 4 acts. One set per act, separated by an intermission when the stage crews would switch to the next set.

The true classic structure of the Broadway musical began in the 1930's and lasted through 50's and later. It involved alternating scenes between full-stage sets and in-one scenes played downstage of a painted drop. Drop comes in; stage crew tears around switching the set upstage (bang, bang, ouch, bang); drop goes up; behold new set upstage! Nearly all the scripts of the Golden Age (the Rogers & Hammerstein years) are structured this way.

But in the 40's great designers like Jo Mielziner and Oliver Smith began adapting more cinematic techniques to the stage. Winches began to pull wagons (castered platforms) with sections of the set on and off in view of the audience for straight plays and musicals alike. Grooves cut into the stage deck could "steer" pieces on and off stage in more and more sophisticated patterns. The original My fair Lady used 2 huge turntables to pivot one set after another into place, although even there, Lerner's script still depends on the basic fullstage/ downstage/ fullstage structure.

In the 60's those wagons were still the way to go, but by the 70's, ever sleeker pallets came into use, allowing chairs and tables to glide on and off on what seemed to be just the thickness of the carpet underneath them (actually beveled deck pieces 1 1/2" thick floating on teflon strips). If you visited the crossover space below the stages of those shows, you'd find an army of hand-operated winches with steel cables running through banks of pulleys up to the maze of grooves in the stage deck above.

And the decks above continued to employ all the tricks of the long-ago age of the extravaganza: treadmills were in constant use (2 were busy throughout David Mitchell's "Annie" carrying characters, set pieces and orphans' cots on and off stage). In Mitchell's "I Remember Mama" a turntable within a larger turntable let Mama's house rotate and glide around the stage at will.

By the early '80's computers entered the picture to operate the winches and turntables that men had run till then. The elaborate choreography of Robin Wagner's spinning light towers in "Dreamgirls" wouldn't have been possible without the computer technology that had just arrived on the scene. Even the mega-productions like "Phantom of the Opera" of Maria Bjornson, or "Les Mis" and "Sunset Boulevard" of John Napier continued to rely on winches, pallets, turntables and elevators. The decades since have only added more muscle and fewer human operators to the equation of how to get furniture on and off the stage.

There will be a pop-quiz tomorrow.

I saw the tour of "Fiddler On the Roof" with Harvey Fierstein last year. I know professional productions of "Fiddler" reproduce the original staging of the show (I imagine some amateur productions do the same. When I did it in high school, we had a whole book our director was taking some of the staging from). What I want to know is if the scenes changes I saw in that tour were the same changes made in the original production. They were very smooth, with buildings gliding from one side of the stage to another, opening up or spinning around to create a new playing space.

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*double post*

Updated On: 5/20/11 at 08:44 PM

The tour with Harvey was, indeed, based on the Robbins staging and not the Leveaux revival.

The tour opened with Topol as Tevye, with Fierstein coming in as a replacement. It is currently out on a Non-eq contract. Both legs of the tour have been produced by Troika.

The scene design is my Steven Gilliam and is inspired by the original Aronson design in some ways, but makes no use of a turntable. the production was designed utilizing an automated show deck, but was eventually redesigned (part way through Fierstein's run) to eliminate the automated show deck and feature a false proscenium that may vary in size as dictated by the host venues. THAT design is currently on tour.

Here are the designs, including shift plots, for the tour as it originally opened --
http://www.trinity.edu/sgilliam/SLG/FIDDLER/TROIKA/homepage.html

Here is the same design, as revised to eliminate the automation --
http://www.trinity.edu/sgilliam/SLG/FIDDLER/TROIKA2010/homepage.html

:)

I also love the cinematic scene transitions of the Lincoln Center production of South Pacific, particularly the first one where they go from Emile's house directly into the sailors coming over the hill. Bartlett Sher did a fantastic job in taking advantage of the depth of the Beaumont stage to make those kind of seamless transitions.

As an aside, some of the guys in sailor uniforms who were moving things around on the stage were stagehands, not actors. There was a crew helping with set changes, just not dressed in black.

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broadwayguy2: Wow! Those are cool, thanks for the links. I'm a little confused though. You said during Harvey's time on the tour, they eliminated the automated deck, and added the false proscenium. When I saw it in Atlanta, it clearly had its own proscenium arch (which I thought was fantastic), but also the set pieces were definitely moving around without being pushed & shoved by the actors/crew. I'm just wondering if the changes were staggered between different cities, of if the units were being manually controlled, and the movers were just VERY well-concealed.

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I saw Fiddler once with Topol and the automation was incredible and the set was stunning. I saw it again without the automation and the stage was too small for those big set pieces. The pieces were rather unwieldy for the cast to move, and the transitions just got clunky and awkward

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You're very welcome. I am glad to have wandered across Mr. Gilliam's site a long while back.

It would be wonderful to see the original ending to Fiddler under Robbins, much as I would LOVE to see the original Lil Abner's "Sadie Hawkins Day Race" ballet, a 20 minute dance / chase sequence where the scenery never stopped moving.

A fun point - Tharon Musser served as the Eckart's assistant for Lil Abner and their tutoring allowed her to pass the exam to join the designer's union as a set designer.

Updated On: 5/21/11 at 01:22 PM

I agree that scene changes done by stagehands can take an audience out of the play, but it really depends how it's done. I've seen shows that integrate the changes done by stagehands in a way that is clever and amusing to audiences. If you just have a bunch of people randomly come out and start to move stuff, then I can see how distracting that could be.

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