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Coming June 20 to Disney+.

The SandPaper:   Surflight's Top Hat a Very Smooth Musical

Quote from: Rick Mellerup, The SandPaper June 4, 2025...Additional kudos are in order. Costume designer Keith Schneider re-created the 1930s to a tee. Then there's scenic designer David Elser's sets. If the show were on Broadway, God only knows how much money would be spent on them – I believe a small plane would even fly through the air on almost invisible wires. Surflight doesn't have a Broadway budget, but Elser did a more than credible job with what he had. I especially loved what he did with the plane scene.

I designed our custom airplane gobo in haste ten days before opening when it belatedly became apparent that projections — always intended to be a major part of this show's design, as they had been for many of my previous Surflight designs years ago — were no longer feasible with the remaining equipment at hand.  This gobo is the only projection-like element we were able to manage, and while it serves just one fairly brief and minor book scene near the top of Act 2, it elicits a gasp of delight from the audience.  Despite being as visibly patched-together from chewing gum and a prayer as the rest of the set, it becomes by default the evening's one sort of "wow" scenic (and lighting) moment.

Speaking of which: additional additional kudos are in order for our lighting designer, Cliff Spulock, who made my whole janky contraption look better than it has any reason to.  And even Mellerup's lavish praise can't do justice to our brilliant (and saintly) director-choreographer Paula and her magnificent cast.  If my own work doesn't look altogether embarassing (a big enough "if" to have me pondering whether the misspelling of my name in this review, both times it's mentioned, mightn't be a blessing in disguise), it's all due to them.

I've nursed a mild obsession with irises ever since grad school when I saw John Arnone's gorgeously simple yet striking set for Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 several times during its too-brief Broadway run.  As recently as this spring, I tried to get an irising portal of sorts into my Top Hat design; but between the summer-stock schedule and the harrowing logistics of that particular space, the only surviving remnants of that idea are a grey traveller curtain and matching header used in tandem just once, to frame a brief two-character book scene set aboard a small private airplane.  The traveller on its own — manually dragged open and closed by two assistant stage managers without the rigidly-framed edge I had designed — otherwise plays in only two or three of my originally planned nine or ten configurations, without the header; mostly, it just gets opened and closed throughout the evening for downstage "crossover" scenes covering the show's seventeen scene changes, in what has become the summer-stockiest element (against stiff and crowded competition) in a regrettably summer-stock-y-looking set.

So this New Yorker video showcasing Dane Laffrey's spectacular use of irising portals in Maybe Happy Ending, in addition to goosing my interest in seeing the show, also makes me more than a little wistful.  Even without the added cool-factor of his niftily responsive LED-lined edges, irising portals are harder to make truly clean and elegant than their seductive simplicity-in-principle might suggest; I've attempted them in several other shows, some more successfully than others, but never as effectively as Laffrey or Arnone (or countless other designers — most of them working, it should be said, with budgets and spaces I've only ever been able to dream of).

There's undoubtedly a lot more to be said about Scott Pasks's set than this short feature would suggest (more about those Mason jars, please!); but concision is good, and these pieces aren't written for nerds like me:

NYT:  In One Image:  Good Night, and Good Luck

Maybe this has been around for a while, but I just found it today. The Gypsy Tiny Desk Concert:

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/22/g-s1-60584/gypsy-tiny-desk-concert?jwsource=cl

My favorite single scenic/prop element in the show ended up being this foreshortened bed for the Bridal Suite of the Hotel Venezia, built in extreme forced perspective — a last-ditch scramble in which my associate Kis and I stayed up all night to staple and hot-glue yards upon yards of donated fabric:

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(shown here with matching pouffe, not quite as successful).

Below are a couple of other random behind-the-scenes photos:  the Hyde Park bandstand roof ("Isn't This a Lovely Day [To Be Caught in the Rain]") being hung; and the London and Venice hotel sets being painted:

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(The two hotels are really the same set — London in Act 1, Venice in Act 2 — with some parts getting completely redressed, and others built to be reversible by spinning 180º, at intermission.  The upstage walls shed a layer of plywood "skin" from London, to reveal a different paint treatment — and two pairs of previously hidden French doors — for Venice.  A change of furniture, and of battery-operated wall sconces, from angular Art Deco brass fixtures to shell-like frosted glass ones, completes the transformation). 

Ah, summer stock...   


(PHOTOS ©2025 JOHN POSADA)

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Hooray!!
I still think Max should be promoting it.   

Oooooooooh!!

Quote from: DiveMilw on Jun 03, 2025, 03:11 PMDang it, I missed it.

You didn't, though, @DiveMilw !  It's not until this coming Saturday, June 7.