Weathervane Playhouse

July 5 - 14, 2018

Directed by:  Christine O’Grady

Scenic Designer:  Jeremy Hollis

Costume Designer:  Madison Booth

Lighting Designer:  Dylan Bollinger

 

​

42nd Street is an enduring musical, and another in the line of show-within-a-show.  Julian Marsh seeks to set himself back up on top of Broadway by creating the show Pretty Lady.  He holds auditions for dancers and singers, and eventually has his cast.  Young hopeful Peggy Sawyer shows up, but too late for the audition.  Still, she manages to prove herself and is able to be in the ensemble.  The elderly star Dorothy Brock is the big name pulled to bring fame to the show.  During the musical, we see the star rise and fall, and the unknown talent rise to take the lead, and find love along the way.

 

This musical was the second show I’d ever seen on Broadway, and I was in a production of it several years prior to this design.  Having a connection to this show like that made it very important to me to treat the show in an honest way.  The show only needed small enhancements with sound effects, positioned in moments to give support to the story.

 

This was the first show I have ever done that relied entirely on prerecorded tracks from the licensing company.  Our agreement with them allowed these tracks to be used only at certain points during our rehearsal and performance schedule, which left me only a small amount of time to configure them into our system.  The company had created a new application for our playback computer that allowed the tracks to be downloaded in a secure manner, and allowed them to be dragged into our playback software, but ensured that the tracks could not be accessed outside of the playback software.  It allowed me to route the sounds to the sources they needed to be at, and gave me individual attenuation of their overall level to best fit songs.  Now we were able to automate level changes to fit the needs of the production, and even create repeated vamps to help our pacing.  It also made it a bit easier to balance our microphone system against the prerecorded tracks to ensure good sound balance throughout the production.