The Countess of Storyville
The Countess of Storyville was a collaboration of The University of Alabama and Theatre professionals from all over the country. The process included a professional Writer, Producer, Musical Director, Choreographer, Composer, Director, Sound Designer and AEA cast of principal characters. I was the Assistant Technical Director, which, at the university usually means dealing with labor management. On this project, however, the Faculty Technical Director divided up the engineering assignments into even shares.
If you go back and read my write up on my Sound Design for Young Frankenstein, that pointed arch doorway may look familiar. The designer liked the functionality of the door disappearing when not in use, so we built and bolted on some lancet shaped double sided broadway flats. The cap with the rose window on it is a pieces of 1/2 inch ply T-nailed on to a Steel Armature. Simple but effective.
One setting of the show is a pub, where the crime boss meets with his underlings and plots the demise of the protagonists. For this we needed a full bar unit to appear out of thin air. The bar itself is was an easy enough problem to solve-- other scene changes already required a low-profile tracking wagon that was fully automated by my mentor. All I had to do was build a bar light enough that it could be picked up and set on the wagon by the stage hands.The most interesting part of that process was actually the molding (pictured below). The edge of the bar is actually made of 3/4" MDF and parts of a hand rail that we ripped out of our storage facility (which is slated for demolition) The foot rail is also another section of hand rail. Suddenly it seemed fortunate that our storage facility was an old hospital.
This was actually the first time I used AutoCad on a project, and the bar unit in particular benefited from 3D construction drawings.
The biggest concern we had with the flying unit was rigging it in such a way that it wouldn't pitch forward too much. We needed a way to control the rigging points as they went up through the frame. Being unsure of what I would do in the long run, I resolved to leave a pair of 1/4" holes in the top of the frame so I could bolt some kind of adjustable stop-plate on the top at install. I ended up manufacturing that stop plate out of a piece of 1/4" ply.
The other issue we had was the amount of fly space we were given to work with. The gap from Line-set to line-set was only about 14 inches when the unit was designed at 24 inches deep. This meant that I had to redraw the piece the day before tech week began.
In addition to the automated tracking wagon we had on the Stage Left side, we had another tracking wagon that slid on and off on the 2 foot tall platforms on Stage Right. That was my responsibility. With the time constraints we had, and the number of other things I had on my plate, we opted to make my tracking wagon a manually operated system. Humans are, after all, the most sophisticated PLC in the industry. Here you can see it moving a piano and an actor simultaneously.
The wheels had to be offset so they didn't fall into the slot in the deck, which also had to be small enough that tap dancing actors wouldn't trip over it.
I had the shop build a frame to support the hand cranking device, which was a repurposed pneumatic hose reel.
The cables ran from the Knife on the tracking platform over the pulleys on the risers, around some muling blocks fastened to a 2x4 and up the cranking device. As far as stage machinery goes, this kind of method is older than Giacomo Torelli, but it worked really well. The operator was able to move the wagon, actor, and piano easily.
The Countess of Storyville was Directed by Mark Waldrop, Scenic Design by Andy Fitch, Lighting Design by William Teague, Costume Design by Donna Meester.
Technical Director: Rand deCelle,
Assistant Technical Directors: Russell McKinley and Mae Seay