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| The Meadow Amphitheatre in Tamenend Park, Southampton |
The photo above was the stage I built in Tamenend Park and used to start a Shakespearean Troupe called The Shakespeareans of Tamenend Park. That stage is now gone, I disassembled it because vandals kept damaging it and I got tired of fixing it. I lot of other things happened there, but I won't go into that now. The title above is linked to that page.
So, for The Gnomes of New Hope, the first tangible construction effort for the stage show will be an aspect of the stage design, not specifically sets but rather backdrops.
I decided that I can build a setting in the studio without worrying about staffing the show and going through rehearsals. There is a design I want to implement for shifting the setting around, which involves mechanical design. So being that I am putting a sound stage in the studio, I figure I can use that to construct this design I have in mind. Now, the stage I am building is essentially 20w x 18d, a bit smaller that some of the bigger 1600 seat houses, but I figure there are enough smaller houses 500-1200 seats that it would be worth doing for those venues.I can also design elements of that design so that it could be expandable if necessary. In terms of The Bucks County Playhouse, the proscenium there is 29', so the setting can be trimmed down to twenty, only loosing 4 feet or so on each side. I'm pretty sure I will build it in a modular design, so we can expand it if we re in a larger house or reduce it if is in a smaller house. So that will be the first stage of doing the sets. It doesn't much matter, because if the show moves into a union house, the sets will have to be rebuilt by union personnel.
So the set construction will be as I described. I'm also thinking of doing a version of the show with stick puppets for film, so we would do that in-house anyway.
More later, AG
