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Behind the scenes
By DONNA WINCHESTER © St. Petersburg Times, published May 2, 2001 ST. PETERSBURG -- Sixteen-year-old Heather Tendl started out with 15 yards of fancy dress fabric. She cut it into a dozen pieces and padded them with white cotton batting. She covered the pieces with hundreds of iridescent turquoise and silver sequins and sewed them together to make a long cylinder. She ended up with a 21-foot teal-and-turquoise caterpillar with a lime-green underbelly. It was just the right size for 18-year-old Heather Garry to climb into to play the caterpillar role in an ambitious production of Alice in Wonderland. The caterpillar was one of many challenges met by students at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts at Gibbs High School. In less than three months, they researched, designed and constructed 76 costumes and 19 set pieces. They concocted a plan to move 51 actors on and off stage. They choreographed 22 set changes and mapped out a lighting plan that created moods ranging from realistic to fantastic. The show played without a hitch to invitation-only audiences Thursday and Friday nights at the school, 850 34th St. S. A 24-piece orchestra composed of students from PCCA's music focus will join the performing and technical theater students for a public performance May 18 at the Mahaffey Theater at Bayfront Center. Work on Alice began in mid January. Costume designers, stage managers and lighting, scenic and sound designers read Lewis Carroll's story about the girl who fell down the rabbit hole. Then they concentrated on their individual tasks until they came back together for rehearsals three weeks ago. Costume designers studied illustrations from the original manuscript and researched the Tudor, Elizabethan and Edwardian periods. Next, they made concept drawings in pencil and watercolor. They went shopping for fabrics, attached swatches to the drawings and presented them for director Keven Renken's approval. They were drafting patterns by the end of January. Many of the costumes were variations on a jumpsuit shape, costume design instructor Trish Kelley said. The students turned the sleeves into wings and increased the dimensions of the thighs and abdomens to suit different characters. Meghan Jemison, 18, designed and constructed Alice's dress. Her biggest challenge was finding a little-girl dress pattern that would fit an adult. She adjusted the skirt length and the sleeve width and experimented with different fabrics until her vision meshed with the director's. Then she spent weeks cutting, sewing and fitting lead character Melissa Skinner's ice blue costume. Meghan was one of four students who created costumes to fulfill their senior project requirement. The senior project can take a full year, PCCA assistant principal and magnet coordinator Ralph Nurmella said, and it should reflect a student's cumulative knowledge of his or her craft. Christa Angelelli designed and constructed the Cheshire Cat and the Queen of Hearts costumes. Chris Jordan created Humpty Dumpty and the Frog Footman. Kraig Fenclau constructed the Horse, which was a cross between a costume and a set piece. It had to be large enough to house the two people who propelled it and sturdy enough to support the actor on its back. Most of the fabric, including 25 yards of fake fur used for the Horse and the White Rabbit and 10 yards of lavender-green silk organza used for the Fish Footman, came from local fabric shops. Thousands of blue, green and purple feathers used for the bird costumes came from a theatrical supply company. Unlike the costume designers, who had illustrations to work from, scenic designer Brian Choquette, 18, relied on his imagination to guide his thumbnail sketches of the set. He created a system of ramps that could be moved easily. He helped with set construction and attended rehearsals to help the actors navigate around the set pieces. Brian also helped with special effects. The most challenging one, he said, occurs in the scene where Alice appears to shrink. To achieve the effect, he attached the table used in the scene to four lines connected to a pulley system. When the table is pulled toward the ceiling, the legs, which are made out of fabric, grow longer, which gives the illusion that Alice is getting smaller. But the biggest challenge overall, Brian said, was balancing the rest of his life, including his other schoolwork, with his involvement in the show. Like many technical theater majors, Brian worked ahead by attending summer school so he would have more time for arts electives. For the past eight weeks, he has been spending even more than his usual three class periods a day in the technical theater building to prepare for the show. Jessica Grimshaw and Joshua Stanton, 18-year-old seniors and co-stage managers, have been attending rehearsals since late January. Jessica said she and Joshua were hoping to prevent some of the things that can go wrong with large-scale productions: set pieces not ending up where they're supposed to be, missed lighting cues, sound not happening when it's supposed to happen. She said the opportunity to be a stage manager has made her grateful that she has worked in all phases of technical theater during her four years at PCCA. It also has given her a new perspective on management. "It's easy to say you're the boss but it's harder to be one," she said. "I think it takes an understanding of what everyone else does. It's hard to tell someone what to do if you haven't done it yourself." Technical theater chair Siobhan Archard said the students' involvement in Alice shows how technical theater at PCCA has evolved. "It's only been in the past three years that students have designed productions," she said. "When I first came here, there was no technical theater department. Theater technicians were actors who couldn't act very well." She said PCCA's program gives students interested in behind-the-scenes theater plenty of opportunity to find their niche. "Everybody learns to sew, everybody swings a hammer," she said. "By their junior year, they know what they want to do." Many technical theater majors will go to college and become professional theater techs, she said. Meghan and Jessica are headed to the University of South Florida on full scholarships. Brian plans to major in wildlife biology at the University of Florida but hopes to get involved in community theater. Mrs. Kelley said that regardless of what the students do professionally, involvement in the technical theater program is great experience because it cuts across the curriculum. "It's division and multiplication and measuring and geometry and algebra without the kids realizing it's about math," she said. But most of all, it's about problem solving. "That's probably the most important thing they learn," she said. "We know what we want, but how do you get from point A to point B? If your original idea doesn't work, what do you do? It's a phenomenal skill for them."
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