<music bed>
Becca Tuteur: People always assume that there’s, like, one store that we buy stuff at.
Pam Weiner: <Laughs>
Becca Tuteur: Which, I personally find hilarious.
Pam Weiner: I would love that store.
Becca Tuteur: Oh, my God. I wish that store exists, but, like, it’s never a chair or a table. It’s the perfect chair or the perfect table, and it can’t just look right, it has to be lightweight enough for an actor to carry by themselves but sturdy enough to tap dance on. A lot of thought and effort goes into every single thing you put onstage, which is why there’s two of us.
Becca Tuteur: My name is Becca Tuteur. I’m the props master at Signature Theatre.
Pam Weiner: And my name is Pam Weiner, and I’m the associate prop master.
Adam Kampe: IN THIS ISSUE OF NEA ARTS, OUR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF EXAMINED WHAT GOES INTO MOUNTING A MUSICAL—IN PARTICULAR SIGNATURE THEATRE’S REVIVAL OF THE ROMANTIC COMEDY, CRAZY FOR YOU. TO MAKE THIS HAPPEN, WE INTERVIEWED A NUMBER OF UNUSUAL SUSPECTS. THE STAGE MANAGER, THE COSTUME DESIGNER, AND THE PROP MASTERS. TURNS OUT, CRAZY FOR YOU IS A PERFECT SHOW FOR THIS PROJECT BECAUSE, BEING SET IN THE 1930S, IT IS OVERFLOWING WITH PERIOD PROPS, FROM CHANDELIERS TO A MODEL A PICKUP TRUCK TO A PLAYER PIANO. ALL THIS BEGS THE QUESTION, WHERE DO PROPS COME FROM AND WHAT EXACTLY DEFINES A PROP? BECCA TUTEUR AND PAM WEINER.
Becca Tuteur: A prop is everything that goes in a moving van if you’re moving. So the scenery is the floor, the walls, the windows, the doors, sometimes the roof. We do all the furniture, all of the rugs, wall coverings, lights. Both flying lights and lights on walls, and then also all the things that actors touch. So suitcases, books, drinking glasses, cups, plates.
Pam Weiner: Topiaries, statues or park benches.
Becca Tuteur: Flowers.
Pam Weiner: The leaves on trees sometimes.
Becca Tuteur: Yeah. The trees.
Pam Weiner: Sometimes the tree itself.
Becca Tuteur: Sometimes umbrellas and parasols, sometimes not. We typically like to say that umbrellas are props, parasols are costumes. Cause parasols have to match one's outfit, but that's different on every show. Yeah, it also depends on how the thing is used. I mean, things that need to be …
Pam Weiner: Like a telephone booth, I think, is a really good example of a really blurry line that …
Becca Tuteur: Yeah. So, like, there’s a telephone booth in Crazy for You that had to be a custom build because somebody gets in it, disappears out the back, there’s a false back, and then appears on top of the phone booth. And tap dances on top of it, while it’s latched into a piece of the scenery, so it doesn’t fall over. And so that was a discussion that I had with the technical director. Being like, “Okay, who is doing what part of this?” Because it interacts so much with the scenery and also has to be such a structural thing for safety, but it also needs to look right. And so we landed on they built the steel structure and then we’re cladding it, making it look like a phone booth, making it look right. But they built the part that supports the weight of a tap-dancing person.
Pam Weiner: I would say that props make it real. So if you have, like, a staged reading, you know, you might have a piece of scenery or a chair, but you don’t believe that the actors are where they are supposed to be. I feel like the scenery builds a location, but the props build the world.
AK: BECCA TUTEUR
Becca Tuteur: So, I do most of the larger building pieces. I build any of the furniture that needs to get built for the show. I do all the welding. I do my fair share of the painting, most of the molding and casting.
We can’t wear jewelry at work. It’s not safe.
<music bed>
Becca Tuteur: I should be wearing leather shoes when I weld. I don’t, which is bad.
Pam Weiner: We should be wearing steel toes.
Becca Tuteur: We should be wearing steel toes. I have burned myself through my shoe before. I’m always like, “Oh, I should buy leather shoes now,” and then I always forget. Yeah. Because falling sparks.
Welding sound in the shop
We are currently in the scene shop of our space looking at a Model A pickup truck that I’m building for our upcoming production of Crazy for You. It’s definitely the biggest prop I’ve ever built, especially by myself. In the past when I’ve built something like this I’ve been an apprentice or something and working under somebody. So figuring out how to do this kind of from scratch has been the biggest challenge, I would say, on this one. And it started because we need a car on stage that has to get on stage under its own power and has to fit through our very tight wing space and store backstage, and so, you know, obviously, you can’t have a gas-powered car in an enclosed space because you’ll kill everyone. And so we bought plans and a kit online to make a, like, very rudimentary pedal-powered car and I’ve been kind of using those parts, visiting a bike shop probably once a week to just like talk to them about gears and gear ratios and all those things you don’t really think about—and wheels. Wheels and tires to support a thousand pounds of weight and make it possible for the actor to pedal that in a recumbent bike style.
AK: PAM WEINER
Pam Weiner: So my duties in the shop are typically more the upholstery, soft goods, anything with fabric or sewing. I have a much stronger background in that because I’ve worked in costume shops as well. I also do a lot of the paper props and ephemera ‘cause I really enjoy doing that research. And there’s a lot of random paperwork in this show and deeds and deeds of trust and so.
Becca Tuteur: Travel guides.
Pam Weiner: Travel guides and …
Becca Tuteur: Pam made a travel guide for the show.
Pam Weiner: Yeah. I mean, it’s really, specifically, it’s the Fodor’s, much like Fodor guides now. Like, they actually did start in the ‘30s, and they started doing all of their stuff then. So I didn’t go as far in this show as to like actually buy one of the period ones to get it. But I did start looking through, like, green books and other things that would’ve been available to people at the time who were trying to look through and go through cities, and I found one vaguely period from Nevada and printed that out and sort of, I like to make things so that actors can get into the world of the show.
Becca Tuteur: Actors love it. I think it helps them really get into their character and like the feeling of it.
Pam Weiner: I end up doing a lot of these smaller finicky bits of things that are less important to functionality but more important to aesthetic. There’s a lot of crossover costume props, so it’s sort of, “Well, okay. Are we buying this? Are you buying this? Is this something that you have that we can modify? What is this costume so that we can match something to it?” There’s some phone handsets in Crazy for You that we’re casting, but they want the handsets to go with the costumes.
Becca Tuteur: Complement the girls’ costumes.
Pam Weiner: So sort of talking to them and saying, “Okay. What do these actually look like? What are their glove colors so we’re not matching that?”
Becca Tuteur: Yeah. Because, you know, the note that we got from the director was, “Make them purple like the girls’ costumes.” So we talked to the costume designer, and he’s like, “Well, there’s four different purples in the costume,” so which one do we think would look nicest? And we actually ended up making them pink to complement an accent color on the costume, but then it wouldn’t blend into the gloves because we are worried about it disappearing in their hands and looking like a weird thing.
We try to start as early as we possibly can.
Pam Weiner: We started reading scripts, we’re like, “There’s two shows this season that need a player piano.”
Becca Tuteur: Now we have a player piano and we bought it. Pam made it work.
Pam Weiner: Because we started so early, I started looking into how you would go about making a player piano into an electric instrument. And then figuring out with the electrics department, you know, “How big of a battery do we need to run this giant vacuum pump that is not sitting in the base of it, and what else do we need to make sure that that is safe and doesn’t kill the battery because it’s sitting?” For Crazy for You, it wheels on stage, and then it magically turns on.
Becca Tuteur: Someone shoots it.
Pam Weiner: Gunshot, bang. It’s going.
<Piano Play up and under>
Pam Weiner: The piano itself came from Baltimore. The vacuum pump we got off of eBay from Texas, and we’re getting new scrolls from the actual company that still makes piano, the player piano scrolls, I think. And there’s vacuum suction happening, so it pulls air in through this cylinder. That’s the word I was looking for. Through the cylinder, and based on which holes are uncovered, that makes the notes happen, so there’s a huge mechanism back in here that hits the hammers, and so, it’ll also make the keys move, which is the effect that we’re going for, ghost playing the piano.
Becca Tuteur: You should never know how much effort went into everything we did. Like, it should just be like, “Oh, yeah. They went to the props store and just got that table, and the table integrates so perfectly into the world that of course, it’s that table. It would never be any other table.”
Pam Weiner: So a lot of effort went into making it look effortless and making it a good experience for the people that are coming to see it. Enabling them to be immersed in somewhere else for the length of a show.
Excerpt from Crazy for You
Adam Kampe: THAT WAS PAM WEINER AND BECCA TUTEUR, PROPERTY MASTERS AT SIGNATURE THEATRE. TO SEE THEIR HOMEMADE PROPS IN ACTION, YOU CAN SEE CRAZY FOR YOU UNTIL JANUARY 14. DON’T FORGET TO CHECK OUT THE OTHER NEA ARTS STORIES ABOUT THE UNSUNG HEROES BEHIND AND IN FRONT OF THE STAGE.
FOR THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, I’M ADAM KAMPE.
MUSIC CREDITS:
“Nice Work if You Can Get It” composed by George and Ira Gershwin and performed by Signature Theatre’s orchestra, used courtesy of Signature Theater.
Excerpts of the following are from WFMU’s Free Music Archive:
“Gathering” and “Many Hands” from Encouraging and “In and Out” and “Everybody” from Carefree, by Podington Bear.
Excerpt of “Seeding” by Evan Schaeffer from Big Splash.
