The Specialists Behind the Scenes
New York Times
May 23, 2004
By Melena Z. Ryzik

It takes a lot of men to make a gun, as Stephen Sondheim wrote in a lyric for "Assassins," and he probably wasn't even thinking of the people who make that gun safe enough to fire on a stage. It takes several to turn a man-eating plant into an audience-eating plant, or to send an actor crashing through a window night after night. It takes an intrepid set designer to create a moving train on a stationary platform. And it takes one brave actress to open a play with a striptease on a trapeze, yet never utter a word through all of the ensuing action. Melena Z. Ryzik asked the technical experts from five Broadway productions how they made their shows' special effects truly special.

Train Set

RIDING on Metro-North one day, John Lee Beatty wondered how wide a train really is. "So I got my ruler out and I started walking across and measuring seats," he said. "The lady next to me thought I was nuts."

If only she knew. Mr. Beatty is the scenic designer behind the revival of the screwball comedy "Twentieth Century" at the American Airlines Theater, which features a cutaway of a moving train as a set.

The set is so complex that the actors, including Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche, never set foot on the actual stage but perform on a false floor. "The stage is covered by cables and pulleys," Mr. Beatty said in a telephone interview. "It's a real danger zone."

The 20th Century Limited was a real train, and Mr. Beatty researched it for inspiration. "But there are not that many photos of it, so I just made up a lot," he admitted. His design is an Art Deco tribute to the romance of cross-country train travel, all rich wood paneling and lush lighting.

To envision the project, "I cut a window, like a proscenium of a theater, in a flat piece of cardboard," Mr. Beatty said. "I slipped a long drawing of the train behind the window and moved it back and forth so we could see different compartments of the train at different times." He showed it to the director, Walter Bobbie. "He and I, very serious adults, sat there pulling this little picture back and forth."

The idea, Mr. Beatty said, was for the set to move the way a movie camera pans over a scene, seamlessly from one focal point to another. Sometimes it's the train that shifts — 20 feet in either direction — and sometimes it's the scenery outside the train windows.

To allow for the arrival at Grand Central Terminal, toward the end of the play, the train splits into two cabins with independent electrical systems, said Corky Boyd, vice president of Hudson Scenic Studio, which built the train and its operating system. They run along a track, powered by two five-horsepower electric winches stored in the theater's basement. A technician controls the train's speed by computer from backstage. At its fastest, the onstage 20th Century can move three or four feet a second — about two miles an hour.

Still, working on a functioning train has tested the physical coordination of the actors. "Alec's really good at moving on the platform while it's moving," Mr. Beatty said. "Everything has to be timed absolutely properly. But the play's like that anyway. It's what we call a door-slammer." Or a train-stopper.

Through a Glass, Carefully

"AS a fight director, part of your job is to be a really worried grandmother about every little thing," said Thomas Schall, who designed Omar Metwally's startling entrance in "Sixteen Wounded."

In the play, which ran briefly earlier this season at the Walter Kerr Theater, Mr. Metwally played Mahmoud, a Palestinian student in Amsterdam who is thrown through the shop window of a Jewish baker (Judd Hirsch) by an angry mob. An unlikely friendship develops between the two men.

"It's much easier to exit a scene through a window than it is to enter a scene through a window," Mr. Schall said. In this case, Mr. Metwally hurtled through the glass, hitting a table and knocking off an upturned chair, then turned 90 degrees, landing in a pile of broken glass at Mr. Hirsch's feet. And the script called for him to do it the hard way: no mat to land on, just a little neoprene padding under his jacket, with a piece of clear plastic spirit-gummed over his eyes.

How to make the stunt look realistic without sacrificing safety — Mr. Metwally's and the audience's — was a factor. Mr. Schall chose an upstage window to reduce the chance that glass shards could bounce off the stage, and even taped parts of the window so it would break into larger chunks.

Mr. Schall had to decide if the windowpane would be made of costly breakaway glass, which is actually extremely fragile plastic, or tempered glass, which is real glass treated to shatter — in this case, upon detonation of small explosives — into small, relatively harmless pieces. Tempered glass is far less expensive but, according to Gregory Meeh, the president of Jauchem & Meeh, a special effects company, "the impact of the larger shards is much more emotional."

And so, at $700 a window per show, breakaway glass was the unwelcome winner. While Mr. Meeh, who was the special effects designer for the production, worked with the sound designer on a sound effect to sweeten the impact and figured out out how to ship the large panes from the manufacturer in California and how to replace them after each performance (one word: carefully), Mr. Schall helped Mr. Metwally master the art of being thrown through a window.

"The first thing to do is get comfortable with your body in the air, the kinesthetic sense of your body rotating in space," Mr. Schall said. They started with basic forward rolls and worked up to running dives and platform jumps. Through trial and error, they determined the speed Mr. Metwally needed to approach the window from offstage, the height he required to jump from a small platform, and the way his body would make the impact and land.

"At first, it seemed like so much," Mr. Metwally said. "I remember thinking, `Will I be able to do this?' " But by the end of the rehearsals, "it was almost sort of mechanical," he said. "It was two steps to the ramp, I shifted my body a certain way, then I was through. It was basically three steps."

"As I got more comfortable with it, I would actually start to think about what was happening to Mahmoud," Mr. Metwally added. "I would imagine being thrown through it. That actually helped me be less intimidated."

Gun Control

THERE is a tense moment at the beginning of "Assassins," the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical at Studio 54, when eight of the nine presidential assassins or wannabe assassins point their guns straight at the audience. The crowd would be more nervous if it knew what the actors know: the guns are not theatrical replicas; they are real.

"They're built better," said Worth Strecker, the production's head of props, in a backstage interview before a recent show. "Replicas are built out of prop metal mostly, and they're cheap. Real firing pistols are built to fire a lot."

The guns fire blanks onstage, but in case there is a problem, a prop person, Larry Jennino, who is in charge of all 14 guns used in the show, stands offstage with a backup at the ready. "I'm the 10th assassin," Mr. Jennino said.

Though the assassinations and attempts date from 1865 to 1981, many of the guns are not period pieces. Some of the original models, like the Ivor Johnson revolver that Leon Czolgosz used to shoot President William McKinley in 1901, are rare; some, like John Wilkes Booth's Derringer, are too small for the audience to see. But Lee Harvey Oswald's bolt-action Carcano rifle was considered too important (and too well known) to substitute.

The effects company that supplied the guns, Jauchem & Meeh Inc., made them tamper resistant and unable to fire a projectile. Still, there are dangers. The blanks have all the gunpowder and heat of a bullet, as the cast and crew found out on a field trip to Jauchem & Meeh's shop on the Brooklyn waterfront. "They took one of the guns with a blank in it and held it up to a piece of paper and fired, and it blew a hole three or four inches in diameter," said James Barbour, who plays Czolgosz.

Michael Cerveris, who portrays Booth, fires the first shot of the show, then, with a replica that another character has brought onstage, turns his gun on himself. The shot heard is an offstage sound effect.

The Fire Department conducted safety checks and still makes visits to the theater, Ms. Strecker said. Both she and Mr. Jennino have to be licensed to carry theatrical firearms. They take their own precautions when transporting the weapons back to the shop. "If we just have a couple of pistols, we'll throw them in our knapsack and take the subway," Ms. Strecker said. "But when it's the rifle, we'll take a cab."

She Grows on the Audience

AT 7 feet 5 inches and nearly two tons, Audrey II, the carnivorous plant in the revival of the musical "Little Shop of Horrors," is not exactly svelte. But there is something about her, said Martin P. Robinson, the puppeteer who designed the original Audrey 22 years ago and now helps maneuver Audrey II at the Virginia Theater. "She's very curvy and very feminine and, I think, very sexy," Mr. Robinson, who always refers to the plant as "she," said in an interview between shows one recent Sunday.

It takes three puppeteers to operate this feminine beauty, who grows from a six-inch seedling at the beginning of the show to a bloodthirsty monster rising 22 feet in the air in the final scene.

"She's got a huge kill zone," Mr. Robinson said, referring to the plant's reach. "She's actually limited by the confines of the set. She could hit both side walls of the theater if we were to turn her loose."

Audrey II moves via mechanical and human strength. A hydraulic lift operated with a joystick helps her stretch out. Two puppeteers play her "killer claws," and another, crouched inside the pod, moves her head and jaws with a bar so she can lip-sync.

The puppeteers, who alternate positions, had to lift weights and train for the show's physical demands. "We're all fairly big now," Mr. Robinson said. "All kinds of muscles that we didn't even know existed."

In the climactic moment, Audrey and her deadly claws take over the theater. Her head and massive jaws hover over the fifth row of the audience.

Can the puppeteer inside the pod hear the reactions? "We hear them screaming; we hear them clutching their children," Mr. Robinson said. "One child screamed out, 'This is inappropriate for children!' "

The Naked Ph.D.

LIKE so many men before him, the philosophy professor in Tom Stoppard's "Jumpers" could learn a thing or two from his secretary. For much of the play, the professor (Simon Russell Beale) is puzzling over a lecture in which he hopes to prove the existence of God. Luckily, Eliza Lumley, who plays the secretary, has a degree in the philosophy of religion from Cambridge University. Less luckily, Ms. Lumley's character never speaks.

"I turned it down originally because I didn't know how to do it," Ms. Lumley said of playing the voiceless secretary who transcribes the professor's tangled lectures as he dictates them. The director, David Leveaux, persuaded her to accept the part, but Ms. Lumley, a tall brunette with a rich soprano (she will make her New York cabaret debut at Don't Tell Mama next Sunday), was stymied. She called Anna Carteret, who originated the role. Make her as real as possible, Ms. Carteret advised. Ms. Lumley created an offstage life for her nameless character, whom she nicknamed Monica. "I'm playing her as if she's a Ph.D. with a secret," Ms. Lumley said in an interview at the Brooks Atkinson Theater.

Monica (even Mr. Stoppard calls her that now) makes a revealing entrance by swinging across the stage on a trapeze chandelier and stripping off her prim checked suit as she goes. Stagehands give Ms. Lumley a push, and two dressers — positioned behind the curtain at either end of the swing's arc — tear off another piece of her costume, held together with Velcro, each time she flies by. She ends up topless. "The trapeze was much more scary than the nudity," Ms. Lumley said.

But not as scary as the silence. In the end, Ms. Lumley said, she realized the role required as much concentration as a speaking part. "It's impossible to do if your mind wanders," she said. "It's a matter of listening." So she worked on her reactions. Some — "secretary gives him a look" — were written into the script, but others, like laughing at something the professor says, were added. "We chose the most obscure philosophical joke because she knows more than he," Ms. Lumley said.

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