This show has incredible sentimental value for me: it was really the first show I ever worked on. It has incredible music courtesy Stephen Schwartz. It's not a typical Broadway-style musical; the music is more electronic and in some ways crisper than an
orchestra could yield. We had a full-out rock band in the pit, with three keyboards and two guitars.
The tree of knowledge is indeed an incredible part of the tech for this
play. Ours was at the top of an upstage center
platform 96" off the floor. Our initial plan for its destruction was to split down the middle and then swivel the halves down below sightlines. This worked perfectly exactly once. Eventually we scrapped that idea and just flew the whole tree as one piece. Essentially it sank into the
ground when it was destroyed. No one was completely satisfied with that method.
For the tree's glowing fruit, we purchased our first Colorizer glass
gobo. It was just a swirl of purples and pinks and reds and blues. We put it in a
gobo spinner and slid the whole thing into a
source four focused straight at the tree. Whenever the tree was highlighted, this spooky
cue came up with everything a few levels
dimmer and the tree brilliantly lit with this spinning hypnotic
gobo. It was really quite awesome.
Our whole set suggested a mountain. We used
chicken wire to mold rock forms to the 2x4 structure. To the
chicken wire we sewed (I know, eeew) brown paper bags, and to the paper bags we pasted newsprint in a kind of papier-mache (sp?) deal. It ended up looking really good after we got it painted.
The ring of stones is a difficult situation. It's only
in one brief scene of the
play, and if you were to actually try to
build all those rocks, it would take a long time. Our director chose to use his chorus as a ring of stones. They just stood very still, and I think the audience got the idea when the principals were like "look! a ring of giant stones!" It's an interesting issue, though, and I look forward to hearing how you deal with it.
The other major set challenge is the ark. This is the major place where our version differed from NCT's version. They flew in this giant ark that covered half the
stage for the entire second act. We imagined ours. There was a little rolling, rougly ark-shaped 8"
platform that we used for the action on the ark, and then the animals just sat all over the
stage around it. It's hard to explain, really.
But I look forward to hearing how you do things. I get the feeling there are a lot of cool ways to do this show.