They Fight! Peter Pan Edition, Also- They Build

Another summer post!
Heather's summer camp season for the YMCA included both Bye Bye Birdie and Peter Pan. This meant more work on my end helping out, though I only had a small hand in Birdie. An hour or so in photoshop gave her an Elvis style poster starring her lead. The interesting part is that the picture we had to work with only showed one arm, so I had to clone the good one, meaning he's got two right arms. I don't think anybody could tell. Then a nice parent took it to work and printed it on a giant sheet of foam board, pretty nice for not a lot of work.










For Peter Pan I made Heather 8 rehearsal cubes, 2 large windows, a base for a sonotube mast, and then helped walk through how to make a few other pieces. I spent a day cutting out panels at her branch and then took them back to my shop to assemble. By the end of the day (probably 4 hours of work) I finally had all 48 panels cut, was covered in caked on sawdust (it was raining) and had a nose full of junk too (should have had on a dust mask). I also made a hook for Hook out of a $12 hay bale hook and some leather.

 If you were ever curious how much stuff you can cram into a Prius C, here's your answer. 2 tool bags, a bunch of clamps, a sword box, a table saw, 2 drills, a router, a circular saw, box of screws and a few other things. This is AFTER I'd taken a bunch of stuff out.








The fight choreography was interesting for this show. I did all the choreography and had one day of instruction with the kids (which only was about an hour of work) and Heather did all the actual running of the fight, troubleshooting, training and fight calls. I wish I could have been more hands on but I was too heavy into my own summer work to be there. So when I finally saw it again was the night I saw the show. It needed a little more polish for sure and the night I was there they bobbled a couple of times, BUT for middle schoolers with only a week or so of training, they did a pretty good job. I'm always critical but for two young kids completely new to sword fighting they definitely put up something presentable.

Full set with the rope ladder and mast in place

The windows unfinished. These were flown in for the house scenes at the start and end of the show. They ended up stained a golden brown.

 I took this chance to build a lockbox for on site storage. The big sword is my Hanwei hand and a half sword. We did not use this. The other one however is an Amfence blade, we had 3 of these for the show.

My shop on assembly day, this was the easiest part of the job. Glue, staple, flip, staple, move on.