The curtain raises in one hour and we are backstage with the cast of “Wicked.” As you can imagine, people are scurrying with a sense of urgency, making sure the set is functioning, the lights are working and the cast is in wardrobe.
Inside the biggest and most well-equipped dressing room is Christine Dwyer. She plays the starring role of Elphaba, who we know as the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. Dwyer needed us to wait five minutes so that she could take a steam shower to warm up her vocals. Wrapping her hair in a towel high on her head, she let us in to experience the “greening.”
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Make-up supervisor Joyce McGilberry “paints” Dwyer before each show. From her fingernails to around her eyes, every inch of her body is turning green – well, at least as far as the audience knows.
“The rest is a bodysuit,” Dwyer reveals. “So anytime you see me in the show, like the sleeveless dress I wear in the first act, that’s all a bodysuit. It just kinda blends in to the hand-painting.”
So let’s talk about the body parts that do turn green: hands, wrists, chest (in between tank top straps), front and back of neck (extending slightly down her back), face, and ears.
McGilberry uses a regular water-based pancake make-up in the color “landscape green.” “It looks just like skin,” she says, stroking Dwyer’s hands with a good-sized brush. “You can still see her features in her hands.”
The next step ensures that Dwyer’s castmates don’t get green stuff on them when she touches them.
“We use a setting powder to set it to make sure it doesn’t get on anyone else’s hands that I touch in the show, and the costumes.” The entire process takes about 25 minutes.
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Just so you know, every time Elphaba leaves the stage, McGilberry is right there with powder for touch-ups.
Dwyer says having to go through this process night after night never gets old. “When I first heard the song “The Wizard and I,” I really wanted to learn how to sing like that because I wanted to play this role,” she said. “It’s definitely a dream come true.”
In addition to our exclusive “greening” video, we also found out some cool trivia about how the set of “Wicked” comes together. Read below, or click here for the article.
Imagine unloading 11 semi-trucks stuffed with sets, props, costumes, and equipment every time you get to a new city.
That’s just what happened when “Wicked” the musical rolled into town. One hundred crew members worked for 2.5 days to build the set.
When we go to the stage in anticipation of our green light to “snoop around,” the crew was scurrying around in a no-nonsense kind of fashion. It was cool to find things the audience doesn’t see – like numbers on the stage so that dancers know they’re in the right spot, to tiny holes in the stage that help create a fog effect.
For more secrets and trivia, we spoke with company manager, Erica Norgaard:
ALLISON WALKER: What is the most difficult thing about moving “Wicked” from city to city?
ERICA NORGAARD: We’ve been traveling out for four years now. So the crew is pretty used to [putting] the set together. But they do work with local people as well and so it’s just sort of managing your team to do it as fast and efficiently and safely as possible. It’s a pretty well-oiled machine, but every once in a while, the spaces vary and things like that. We have to be able to fit side to side, front to back and tall enough, so we only can go into venues that work for the show in that footprint. But then, the backstage space is always the logistics of it, where the trucks come in, how do they have to move the stuff around. Like right now, they’re using that as an elevator because it gives them extra up and down space. You work with your different logistics to make it the best thing that’s possible.
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AW: Let’s talk some numbers. How many trucks do you use?
EN: We have 11 semi-trucks worth of stuff coming into the building. So the theatre has to clear everything out of the way for us. We’re bringing in our own lights, our own sound, the floor, the hanging pieces. It’s just tons and tons of stuff. It takes 2.5 days to set up. There’s about 100 people working right now. So it’s quite a process.
AW: What’s the deal with the dragon?
EN: We actually have two dragons, so this one was last seen in Tampa. He had a break while we were in Ft. Lauderdale and now he’s back for Orlando. That’s the first thing they set up on the Monday before the rest of us get here with the rest of the stuff. So it takes so much time to set it up. It has basically its own day devoted to the dragon. It’s such an amazing piece because it’s a huge puppet. He’s up there for the whole show and he sets the tone for the audience when you come in. I think he’s a great mood-builder. I’m always happy to see him when I get to the theatre.
AW: Any secrets you can reveal about Glinda’s bubble?
EN: I wish we could all come and go by bubble, don’t you? It’s a piece of automated equipment. She actually sits in the bubble up high before the show starts all the way up on the left hand side there for about five minutes waiting for her entrance. So we have to get her in there and get her up in the air before the full show stars. So she spends quite a bit of time in it, but she does love her bubble ride.
AW: Why does the story of “Wicked” hit home to kids and adults?
EN: The story of “Wicked” is a character-building story to those characters that you’re familiar with from the movie “The Wizard of Oz.” But you don’t really think about the fact that she’s the Wicked Witch and why did she become the Wicked Witch. And some of that is talked about in the musical. And being judged based on the color of your skin or being bullied because you’re different, and that’s so prevalent to today’s – everything.
“Wicked” is in town through March 10. Click here for tickets.
Source: https://t-tees.com
Category: WHY
