Pippin Load In

From the ART Website: This is the poster image for Pippin.

For the past two weeks, work at the ART has been loading in Pippin, the big show we've been working on for over a month. Pippin is a musical that the American Rep is setting in a giant, extravagant circus setting. Load-in has included boxing hardware to send to the theater, loading trucks, shipping people over, unwrapping things from shops in New York and some beautiful stuff from Vietnam, unloading stuff, laying platforms, laying decking (the specially painted stage floor), adding the pit extension that literally extends the stage over the orchestra's head, preparing the orchestra pit with platforms and safety nets, installing a false proscenium, hanging our 2 sets of curved truss (you can see some of it below) which now stretch the "tent" fabric between them, and more and more. There is another portal behind the proscenium, a pipe with hoops and decorative chains and pennants, and then of course my "Magic To Do" light bulb effect, hung directly upstage of the proscenium.

Part of the "chute" or circus tent was up at this point. My little phone camera can't capture the sheer size of this show!

 There were a lot of challenges and details to be attended to during this load in. It seemed like we were super prepared with hardware bags for each piece and bolts carefully counted out, but in reality things got disorganized and lost quickly. We had to stay organized and out of other departments' way at times. Safety was huge; with very heavy pieces being suspended overhead, we often wore hard hats. Getting the curved truss at the right angle and height took a while; installing the false pro and the portal were team challenges; my light bulb setup was a disaster with so many cables and wires flying in a small space. It was originally designed so that each of 22 bulbs could fly separately in and out, but with a clew plate added near the end to have the pieces all flown together, most of the pieces could have been replaced with just a pipe that the bulbs would have hung off of, set at their different heights. I'm not sure why this happened, or if all the problems can even be resolved, but the last time I worked on them we resolved much of the tangling of the wire ropes and were just left with the twisting of the electrical cables.

Yesterday was my last day of this long run at ART, and I worked on notes at the theater: adding light bulbs to the curved truss, dressing the midstage masking portal, working on a trapdoor platform under the stage, and cleaning up an oval platform piece that the acrobats climb all over. That was another challenge we faced-- acrobats were often practicing onstage this past week while we had to work on notes. 

I wish I could have taken more pictures of so many interesting moments, especially when electrics started working on lights while we were doing notes!  The pace is snappy though, and given design copyrights and other rules, we aren't really supposed to take a lot of pictures to share. I will get some from the ART website to share with you come opening, however, and I hope that you go see this incredible production when it opens! The show previews through December and opens on January 3rd. For more information on tickets and such, visit the ART website here.