When Pigs Fly

New Conservatory Theatre Center, San Francisco CA, May 2018

This showy musical by Howard Crabtree, Mark Waldrop, and Dick Gallagher was so costume heavy that the director, Ed Decker, decided to divide the design among his three most trusted designers. Keri Fitch, Jorge Hernandez, and I  chose which segments we wanted to work on, and Keri, having designed the show before, led the effort to ensure harmony among the designs. I did a lot of painting by hand ("Stay in the Game", "Light In the Loafers", "Adam and Steve", "Freak!") and there were lots of unusual mechanical challenges such as: rigging light-up shoes ("Loafers"), making a two-person centaur ("Not All Man"), rigging table skirts to become pannier dresses ("Wear Your Vanity With Pride"), and rigging a pop-out cuckoo clock headpiece and a drop-down rubber chicken tutu ("Over the Top Finale"). This is one of the most technically challenging musicals I've designed up to this point, and it was both an intense learning experience and a ridiculously fun show to design. And now I'm only, like, two degrees of separation from Bob Mackie who simultaneously designed the stalled New York Revival production!