Fiddler

[NHStech]

We are doing Fiddler this year (early March). We are a high school in Michigan. I was wondering if any of you have some clever lighting/sound/FX tricks or tips that you have used in Fiddler that worked well for you (shoestring budget) that were particularly memorable you would like to share. My stage is 40' wide and about 25' deep. Thanks!

[kiwitechgirl]

I saw Fiddler done in a "bare-bones" style in a black box studio last year and it worked beautifully. It doesn't need fancy tricks or clever effects; for the Grandma Tzeitl dream sequence they just had the actress playing Grandma sitting on someone else's shoulders with a really long nightgown covering the person whose shoulders she was on and it worked really well. There's really nothing in the show that's going to call for anything spectacular.

[Dionysus]

When I did Fiddler, it was pretty Bare Bones. Amber and blue, a spot for the bed (R60) that doubled for the wedding canopy. Two instruments for breakups for the dream (to make it a little more interesting/eerie).
A followspot was about as fancy as it got.

Grandma Tzeitl was just in costume on her own and appeared behind the bed (easily masked until we wanted her to appear). The bed actually split in half and re-joined.

[renegadeblack]

I "did" (long story about that) Fiddler a few years ago. Needless to say, the Dream Sequence was the big number. We had Foy install a fly rig and we had a bed that rotates freely and was remote controlled by an actor on stage so that they could intervene quickly if the bed moved too close to the pit. Lot's of blue of course. We also added trap doors into our thrust with grave stones on the side of the door that faced the audience. It worked quite nicely.

[DuckJordan]

Yes of course Fiddler, When RHS did it about 4 years back we did use most of our budget on the black light for the dream sequence, for some reason the black light was amazing for that, we had a house set on a very large and very heavy pipe fitting with the female end attached to the house so we could swivel the house in less than 10 seconds. (the house had an outside side and an inside side) what was notably the weirdest thing is we used was a a medical gurney for Frumasara (hope thats spelled right) we had an actress step up into the back of the gurney which we had covered in fabric on top of chicken wire (it took us two days to build the thing and another 2 weeks to figure out how to fix the gurney). other than that since it was our musical they do every three years we had a fairly large budget (in comparison to our normal budget, we do five shows a year). but again a scrim and a black light seem to work really well for a dream sequence.