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On the stage, a magic touch

Creative dentist Dr. Todd Wiener is the master of special effects for New Tampa Players' productions.

By BILL COATS, Times Staff Writer
Published January 11, 2008

Growing up in New York, he had plenty of stimuli.

Wiener's dad, an accountant, liked handyman projects. Wiener's grandfather ran an electrical contracting company in Miami Beach. Wiener worked as a young apprentice there. He helped wire the control room for The Jackie Gleason Show.

Yet the math requirements of an engineering career were daunting.

"My mother told me I was going to be a dentist," Wiener said. "Dentistry is kind of like engineering. I do bridges."

"Todd's only detriment is his puns," said Doug Wall, co-founder of the Players. "Oh, my God."

Yet Wall gladly endures the puns in exchange for Wiener's special effects.

Often, he springs them on the cast without consulting anyone.

Last summer, Wiener heard about a scene in Oliver! in which a dancer would snuff out gas street lamps at dawn. Wiener bought a pair of electric post lamps, each with three lights.

He rewired them, connecting each light bulb to a button he added at the base of the lamp. Wiener substituted flicker bulbs, creating the appearance of flames. "The next thing we know, we're at the center and he plugs them in," marveled producer Jenine Morehouse.

The devices allowed lamplighter Allison Giles, 15, to dance between the posts, pretending to lower a snuffer over each flame while she discreetly pushed the off button with her foot.

The Players agree that Wiener outdid himself for the 2006 run of the Wizard of Oz. Recalls Morehouse, "As soon as he knew we were going to do the Wizard of Oz, you could see the wheels turning."

Wiener created:

A farmhouse on rollers. During the tornado scene, the house spun on stage.

A projection of movie clips of people blowing through the sky, which appeared behind the spinning house.

A carriage in which the good witch Glenda seemed to float onto the stage, encased in lights and a swarm of bubbles.

A crystal ball crafted from an outdoor globe lamp and mounted on a table. Under the table, action from the original movie was projected into a mirror, which bounced it up into the globe.

The wizard, a 7-foot wooden face, copper colored and slightly ape-like. The actor behind the face could make the eyes, eyebrows and mouth move, and speak through a voice distorter.

"It's really not just for the audience we're doing it," Wiener said. "We're doing it for ourselves."

Wiener, who lives in Carrollwood with his wife, Doris, has been active in New Tampa since he opened his dental practice there in the late 1970s. He has been one of the most enduring members of the New Tampa Community Council.

The group's immediate past president, Mary Ann Yaney, considers Wiener the conscience of the council, partly because he preached caution a year ago as one of the group's founders, Frank Margarella, ran for the Tampa City Council.

Wiener reminded the group it could jeopardize its nonprofit status by engaging in partisan politics.

"We wanted to endorse him," Yaney said.

"We couldn't come out and say it as a board. We couldn't have a fundraiser for him."

Once, Wiener served a year as president of the Community Council.

He hated it. "Politics, politics, politics," he said. "You're trying to please a lot of people."

Margarella is more tactful. "He's probably the big cog in the wheel in the Community Council who has stayed in the shadows and let some of the rest of us be in the public eye."

Similarly, Wiener has declined to join the board of the Players. But the Players' Wall doesn't mind.

"I think his interest levels are strictly creative."

Bill Coats can be reached at 813 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com.

[Last modified January 10, 2008, 07:28:43]