The smell of sawdust filled the air. The wide room was packed to the brim: wood blocks covered with splattered paint, whiteboards full of scribblings of measurements, students weaving through the chaos. The sputter of a drill coming to life resonated through the space. The scene shop of the Carroll theatre technology program was filled with preparations for the set of “Hadestown,” the fall musical which is set to open Sept. 26.
“We’ve been planning this set all summer; it was a very long design process with a whole team of people meeting, including our director, Mr. Barbe,” student technical theatre director AJ Sunkara said.
One of the main challenges the tech team faced was the nature of the original Broadway production of “Hadestown,” where the set opens up to signify a transition from the living world to the underworld. Last spring, Barbe thought of a new approach, drawing inspiration from a video game.
“He introduced me to this video game called BioShock, and it’s kind of a video game where there’s two very distinct worlds, and that image is very much mirrored in ‘Hadestown’,” Sunkara said.
Influenced by the world building and color palette of the game, the team figured out a way to create a sense of entering a different world with their limited resources.
“The entire look, the colors and everything, halfway through the show completely changes in basically the blink of an eye,” Sunkara said.
Another twist the department added was the symbolism of Hades, king of the underworld, being in an elevated position throughout the duration of the musical.
“He has this very commanding presence, and in our set we incorporated that by basically where he sits the entire show,” Sunkara said. “We have two platforms, and we’ve never built platforms this high before, and that’s kind of where his little world is, because, even in the underworld, he always has this higher, commanding presence.”
The Broadway version of “Hadestown” utilizes a turntable, or spinning platform, posing another challenge for the team. Barbe placed senior Sophia Kelly in charge of designing a safe, efficient turntable.
“I started planning out what we needed, materials-wise, and I used online CAD modeling Onshape and started making sketches on it,” Kelly said. “It kinda allowed me to do the right measurements, so I could visually see it, so I could have a prototype that’s accurate.”
Designing and creating a turntable that was big enough for the actors to use did not prove to be easy, however, as many of the turntables Kelly took inspiration from were around 10 feet in diameter, while they needed one with 25 feet.
“Originally, the design was for a turntable much smaller, and so as we stepped up the design, we had to increase the strength of the material,” Mr. Wallace, an English teacher at CSHS who helped out with the process due to his background in mechanical work, said.
Piece by piece, they managed to build the spinning platform, completely from scratch.
“It was kind of a lot of taking bits and pieces from different turntables that we found online and adjusting it to where it fits our needs and size,” Kelly said.
Though it may have been difficult, the fact that the turntable is such a defining piece of the original show made the building process worth it.
“We didn’t think the show would have the same sparkle and life we all love if we didn’t incorporate it,” Sunkara said.
A major aspect of technical theatre is the mathematics and logistics behind it.
“In this role, you can learn everything you want to know about carpentry, welding, engineering, painting, and texture,” Wallace said.
However, what plays out behind the scenes of theatre productions naturally differs from other engineering-based sciences.
“I think it’s such a different experience having to build it off of a story, whereas with architecture, you know, the story comes after with the people that use it and the people that live in it,” Sunkara said. “But when you’re designing a set for a theatre you have to look in that story; you have to find all the intricate little details and find ways to incorporate them.”
