Seussical provided an opportunity for me to let my students get heavily involved in the work. Up to this point, I had been the one completing a lot of tasks when we were building shows. At the end of my second year, I had enough students training on the various power tools in our shop that I could entrust them with projects and not have to worry about their safety. This meant we could work efficiently and get more done during class time. There were still challenges finishing projects in the allotted 45-minute class period, but we did our best to mitigate them, by expediting our daily rigamarole of attendance and announcements.

The Art Style

Dr. Seuss books have a very distinct style. Although I have done productions of Seussical in the past that have strayed from the art style, my colleagues and I thought that working with the exaggerated lines and contrasting colors of the storybooks would provide our students with a valuable experience. 

The Set consisted of a raked row of platforms with a stylized set of stairs coming from the highest point. Under the platforms were entrances made to resemble Who doors. On top of the rake, we built trees that rolled on and off stage via a simple wooden track. These trees were used for the Jungle of Knool. On stage were platforms painted to look like stacks of Dr. Seuss books. The book platforms would be used by the actors as downstage playing spaces. Above the stage hung 13 cook covers, and a large 16’ wide LED book in the center above the proscenium. We wanted it to feel like the large book had dropped the world of Seuss onto the stage. The design was simple, but many of the elements provided the students with new lessons and challenges.  

Broadway Vs. Hollywood

The Students at North Port High School had never built a traditional Broadway-style flat. All their flats were made from 2x2 covered in lauan. To show the students different methods of flat construction, I designed the book portal on Seussical to feature 13 Broadway flats covered in muslin.  

Muslin-covered flats in a high school theatre setting are not the best idea. tearing a muslin cover flat means that you must make a difficult repair that will always be visible to the audience. Therefore, we always used a solid-skinned flat at North Port High School. With supervision and a lot of discussion about the delicate nature of Broadway-style flats, the students made it through the production without damaging one.  

our major challenge with the portal flats was painting them. The muslin required multiple layers of paint, and with a 45-minute class period, we were struggling to get enough paint on the flats every day to make our deadline. It took a lot of time and patience for the student painters to find the right balance of meticulous painting, and clock management to be able to complete this project. It would have been less time-consuming to print the oversized images, but without room in our budget to pay for printing, painting all the flats by hand was the best option. We used an overhead projector to transfer the images onto the flats, and students traced the images onto the muslin using pencils. Students used research images to mix the appropriate colors. Each book took the students between four and six days to complete, the titles chosen are all mentioned in the script. Some of the more difficult artwork was given to advanced are students or teachers who agreed to help us finish the portal.  

Reading Rainbow

After A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I wanted to continue using the LED lights on the stage. The application I found during Seuss was to build a giant book that would hang at center stage just in front of the proscenium. This was a challenge to engineer and rig. I began by doing plenty of math about the materials that I was using and reaching out to friends to make sure I was not taking any risks. The advice I got was to have plenty of pick lines and to support the back of the structure with additional stiffeners to prevent sagging. I followed all this advice. The book was held up with enough rigging to support at least three times its weight.

The white pages of the book were made of leftover boat wrap from the previous year’s production of Around the World in 80 Days. I used a similar technique to apply the plastic to this frame, but I used larger staples and more students to help stretch the plastic tighter. Underneath the plastic, we had 8 rows of LED lights. We soldered the rows together in four pairs so that we could program each quadrant as a separate color. This allowed us to achieve gradual color shifts and rainbow effects during the show. All the electricity and DMX were run via a snake from the first Catwalk. To hang the book above the stage we installed five large D-ring plates above the proscenium and ran five more pick lines to the first catwalk over the house. We were able the lower and raise the book using pulleys. Making it easier to troubleshoot and make repairs.

Educational Design

My first three shows were really focused on exploring the limits of our production capabilities. We modified our shop projects to include more tools like jigsaws, routers, impact drivers, flush cut saws and the table saw. We also made several changes in materials so the students could become more familiar with pneumatic tools.

By modifying the paperwork, the students received we were able to teach the students to read a blueprint and use logic to look for missing information. They could make inferences about lumber thickness and the overall width of a flat to create a cultist. We used these lessons to reinforce the lessons learned in their algebra classes. It was a real-life application of “solve for X.” This type of training better prepared our students to act as problem solvers when they were working on a project. Eventually, the students would be able to find their way past roadblocks, and this would increase the efficiency of our limited class time.

Evaluation

The Design was intended to help provide new educational opportunities for our students. The students were able to work on building Broadway-style flats for the first time and learn about rigging when we began hanging the book portal. We made sure to include new tools in our instruction and we began to teach problem-solving as a part of the curriculum to increase our efficiency in the future.  

Seussical was challenging in different ways than previous sets at North Port High School, but we were able to pull it off because of tremendous work by the student body and teachers on campus. This show really emphasized the strength of the arts community at the school. I have been part of three different productions of Seussical, but the show at North Port High School stands out as the most scenically challenging and professionally rewarding of them all.