You get a whole new perspective on the craft of theater when you see it from above — way above. We climbed and climbed up flights of stairs at the Children’s Theatre’s new digs at ImaginOn, and wound our way up a steep spiral staircase until we were inside the top of the “toaster.” That’s the pet name for the metal-shrouded area of ImaginOn. From there, 60 feet above stage level, we looked down through the grid to see a Charlotte’s web of lines and cables, the patchwork of trap panels, and the upper edges of the sets and scenery that transport wide-eyed kids to the world that Children’s Theatre creates.
Children’s Theatre of Charlotte has been making magic for more than half a century. At ImaginOn, the company’s power to wow is even stronger.
Jeff Weeks, Children’s Theatre’s technical director, granted CL a behind-the-scenes tour of the McColl Family Theatre for a bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye view of this impressive facility.
Sight lines for every one of the 570 seats in the new theater are excellent — the better to appreciate all the excitement on stage. But it’s not just on stage where the wizardry takes place. Trap space below the stage allows actors, scenery and props to rise into view through any of the 4- by 8-foot panels in the stage floor. It’s up to the scenic designer to determine which and how many of the panels will be removed to get the desired effects — without the rest of the set and the actors inadvertently crashing through to the hard floor 12 feet below.
The proscenium, the “frame” around the stage opening, is 24 feet high. Above it, scenery and curtains hang suspended in another 24 feet of fly space. For the techies at Children’s Theatre, this is a real luxury — the theater’s former home on Morehead Street had a mere 10 feet of fly space above the stage.
The new theater has an intricate rigging system — the ropes and pulleys used to raise and lower the set pieces — with a maximum of 52 lines. The current production of The Shakespeare Stealer uses just 35 lines, but those lines fly literally tons of atmosphere — curtains and “legs” (side curtains that mask the wings and unused scenery), a pastoral scene in a huge ornate frame, and the London Globe Theatre. A crew of five performs the aerial choreography that makes these stage settings appear and disappear, and they have more to contend with than just pulling ropes.
When the seats in the auditorium are filled with awestruck kids and their mesmerized teachers or parents, the airflow in the theater is very different from when the house is empty. The 570 seated bodies affect the heating and air conditioning, and when it kicks in or turns off, the air current makes the scenery onstage flap in the breeze. When a group of schoolkids came to the theater to see the final dress rehearsal for Stealer, the stage crew found they had to contend with set pieces bumping into each other on their onstage and offstage flights. The time between the final rehearsal in the afternoon and that night’s opening performance was spent solving the problem.
Even though this glimpse behind the scenes revealed some theatrical secrets, it didn’t dispel any of the magic.
This article appears in Mar 8-14, 2006.
