The Dream

The Dream
Summary
Location RS2
Creative Team
Director Andy McGregor
Assistant Director Adam Butler
Set & Costume Designer Jack McLean
Costume supervisor Maia Winton
Scenic Art Manager Amy Dunlop
Lighting Designer Aisha Oyedepo
Sound Designer Maddy Frost
Production Team
Production Manager Neal Clark & Ros Maddison
Assistant Production Manager Fraser Mackie
Stage Manager Anne Peart
Deputy Stage Manager Thomas Ohear
Assistant Stage Managers Ryan Smith Iz Brett Jordan Alsoudani
Production Electrician Pippa Reilly
Deputy Production Electrician Ewan Fraser
Lighting Programmer Dominic De Mountfalcon
Lighting Technicians Noah Dunnett Nommy Soplantila
Head of Stage Scotty
Deputy Head of Stage Tom Sedgwick
Stage Technicians Sandy Cairns
Production Sound Engineer Lewis Brown
Sound No.2 Dylan McLean Jamie McDonnel

Overview

The Dream was a mashup of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo & Juliet.

Technical Stage Department

The Dream, an unsupported small-scale show, became extremely technical stage heavy. From a 4m x 5m pallet wall to a flying pallet and microphone.

There were originally large issues with the scale of the show as the model box was made to the size of the room, not the size of the truss. This took a lot of sorting out. The set consisted of The Pallet Wall, two wooden structures made out of stools and tyres to look tree - like, and steel decking to give 3 different Levels.

Sustainability Scotty reached a 100% sustainability goal on this show by sourcing each pallet from COP 26 which was running alongside The Dream. Each pallet was broken and the company Events Cycle helped us by sourcing all excess wood used on COP 26 and donating it to us for the show. The Tyres for the Stool trees were recycled from a local dealership.

Pallet Wall The design consisted of a 4m x 5m high pallet wall which could be projected onto throughout the show. To build this, we assembled the pallets based on their size and structural integrity and made them into 4 individual flats with A - Frame braces at the rear.

Rope Cross One moment that was used in the show to jump between worlds almost was the 'rope cross' in which a tomb like entrance was formed using 4 lines of hemp. As our hemp is stock and cannot be cut the decorative solution was to use a Heaving Line Knot. This knot allowed the excess to be tidied away neatly while making each rope identical. It was shortened to the exact length needed so that when the knot sat flush on the ground, it made an identical cross shape, sadly the actors never used it in that way, leaving it squint.

Flying Pallet

RS2 is a venue made out of Self Climbing Truss And therefore didn't have access to counterweight flying like the Ath. To solve Juliet's flying balcony we used a tank trap screwed into the ground with a heavy bit of steel scaff pipe from the workshop and a cleat held on with half doughty couplers. Scotty picked the lightest pallet from COP 26 to use for the balcony, it used a Barrel Knot and 2 x Screw Eyes plus the leftover rope from Pyjama Game.

Stage Management

In this production, we needed to use blood following Mercutio's death. We used a plastic bag on the inside of his waistcoat that held a sponge which we soaked in fake blood (mixed with water and washing up liquid) so that he could reach inside and squeeze the sponge and it would look like he had been stabbed and he was touching the wound underneath.

After this, Benvolio follows him off and comes back with blood on their hands. To do this fast we had a bowl prepped in the wings with a small bottle of blood mix (fake blood, water and washing-up liquid) that we poured onto their hands, so they could run on and blood would drip off as if they'd just held Mercutio as he bled out. We had set scraps of cloth on stage right so they could clean their hands off onstage after this scene so they could play the piano. This included wet wipes and microfiber cloths.

This moment was just before the interval giving us ample time to come on and clean any blood that had dripped on the floor.

Sound

PSE For this show, the setup was a fairly standard setup for a show in RS2 using the self climbing truss. We had an additional two spot speakers at the left and right of the stage, these originally were going to be wireless but this proved to be challenging and expensive so using wired speakers in the end worked very well.

We used;

4x KV2 EX6 2x Roland Cube Speakers (AV Store) 2x EV Subs (With the ev sub amp)

We had our RF Paddles attached to a scaff bar that was coming off the truss, this allowed us to have full levels of RF throughout the show with no issues. The wireless workbench file for this show was slightly difficult to set up. It is always worth checking what frequencies you have a licence to and making sure that all of your channels fit in these frequencies.

For this show, we had 12 Cast Mics using UR1 Transmitters, as well as 4 additional UR2 Transmitters that we used for our band, made up of a piano, two guitars and a ukulele. Guitar 2 and ukulele had pickups, which made these a very easy setup. The other guitar however, we taped an MKE MKII to just below the sound hole which gave us a pleasant all around sound with it being too harsh, or too boomy. For our piano, we were able to strap the UR2 transmitter to the leg of the piano, and run an MKE up just above the keys, and using tape we manages to push it away from the wood just enough in order to get a full-sounding tone, with some emphasis on the higher keys. Ideally, I would have liked to stereo mic the piano with some good small diaphragm condensers, but sadly this was not an option visually.

We also used a Sennheiser e906 to pick up a glockenspiel, we found that 6 inches above the keys was the ideal place for this mic. We used a D112 for the back of the cajon, again I would have liked to put an SM57 on the front of the cajon to pick up more of a snare sound, but we got a very punchy kick sound from the D112 with just enough high end to keep us happy. Lastly, we had a bass which ran through an amp, we then took the direct out of the amp and ran it into a DI Box before sending it to our stagebox.

Power plans were made in order to ensure no issues with power draw would occur thankfully even with in rush current (from the UHFR rack) then this never became an issue. For this show, I ran only one 16A cable up the truss, before splitting it on the truss into a 4-way 13A to power the speakers. This was great, as it meant that only one cable was coming down from the truss instead of 4. Sadly, we still had 4 XLRs coming down from the truss, in retrospect I would have liked this to be a 4-way XLR loom, and then we would only have two cables going up to the truss. I used this theory also when running lines on stage, I used an 8-way 20m Loom in order to act as a kind of stagebox.

Sound design

The dream was quite complicated for sound it featured a cast of 12 that all had hairline radio mic's for all the performances as well as filming and a band of seven instruments plus live foley. the most interesting part from a sound design perspective was the use of different effects on the casts voices. we wanted to create the idea of switching between the real world and an almost dream like state. In order to create these effects i used the built in effects on the SQ5 (reverb, Delay and a vocal plate) in various combinations and programmed them into scenes so that I could easily jump in and out of the effects.