Movie magic is easy, with CGI and special effects. But doing magic on stage is far more difficult. I can think of several moments that were amazing. )These were all professional touring companies)
The Book of Mormon. In the song, “Turn It Off,” the missionaries, wearing their white shirts and ties, start tap dancing. The stage goes black for about four seconds, and suddenly everyone is wearing colorful vests that came out of nowhere.
The Drowsy Chaperone
The Man in the Chair puts on the record and leaves to go to the bathroom. The song plays – but its the wrong record from a completely different musical. The characters all have different costumes and the scenery is nothing like it had been before.
Peter and the Starcatcher. Well, the whole play, really, but especially notable is the Mermaid’s song, and “Oh, my God!”
What sort of magic moments have you seen on stage, especially those that word because it’s a live performance?
My niece’s school just did Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. In the fairy godmother scene, Cinderella is twirling about in her rag dress, and all of a sudden, she’s twirling about in her beautiful blue gown. I literally blinked and missed the transition, but my niece (who was involved in that particular bit of magic) told me about it: At the beginning of the twirl, they switched actresses with another girl in another rag dress, quick-changed Cinderella just off-stage, and then quickly switched back, while the Fairy Godmother provided the distraction to keep the switches from being too noticeable.
Handspring Puppet Troupe (people may be familiar with their War Horse?) did a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream which was the first professional stage production I ever saw. Oberon and Titania were represented by giant puppets - the actors voicing them stepped out of them whenever the humans weren’t around. The switch between giant puppet and human actor was quite magical (as was the rest of that production). I think it spoiled me for all other live MND productions (and I’ve seen them in Stratford and at the Globe…)
The Organic Theater Company of Chicago’s three-part comic book/science fiction play Warp was a virtual extravaganza on on-stage special effects, including
– Levitation
– Disappearance (using a bright flash)
–Multiple arms
– Fluorescent costumes.
Add to that the heroine gamely trying to keep her back arched through the show in order to present a comic-book-heroine-type bust, and it was a wonderful set of evenings of illusion.
Our local theater always has an event when the new season was announced. A couple of years ago, I went, and the newspaper mentioned there would be a “special, non-human” guest there. So they’re going through the six plays. The fifth was The Book of Mormon. And I was thinking, “What can they do to top that?” Then I remembered the hint in the newspaper and realized it had to be War Horse, and they brought the “horse” on stage. Wondeful.
The Cirque De Soleil production of Love starts with the stage hidden by ceiling to floor curtains. The music starts low, the theater gets smokey, and with a pyrotechnic flash the curtains disappear and the shows begins. I suspect the curtains are pulled down by springs or mechanical help to make them appear to disappear so quickly. It makes quite a visual impact.
I saw Spamalot at a local dinner theater. When the Lady of the Lake quick changed her gown to a wedding gown, it was magical. (Yeah, velcro, etc., I know, but it looked real.)
The first thing that came to my mind was also an amateur production of Cinderella - the magical costume change took place off stage, over quite some time, but crucially while Buttons entered through the rear fire doors with a real live white pony. By the time the audience’s attention had returned to the stage, they were convinced there had been an instantaneous transformation.
The second thing that comes to mind is similarly non-magical magic. A student production of Toad of Toad Hall, in a black box space adapted from an old community hall, which still had a proscenium arch (but no stage, the floor was level both sides of the arch). We did almost the entire show with projected paintings as backdrops in the arch and the action in front. When Badger et al eventually enter Toad Hall for the battle with the stoats and weasels, the curtain goes up to reveal a magnificent set behind, bigger than the space used for the rest of the show, complete with grand staircase, pillars, chandeliers etc.
One of the things that isn’t often appreciated is that Dracula always was something of a magic show – a lot of the illusions that convinced people of Dracula’s supernatural nature were basic stage tricks. as David J. Skal points out in Hollywood Gothic (and in other of his books about Dracula), the reason Dracula has that cape with the high collar – not stipulated in Stoker’s novel – was so that he could disappear onstage using a common stage illusion. Dracula turned his back on nthe audience, and the high collar hid his head. The cape stood up brief by itself using an internal wire frame while Dracula disappeared down a trap door. A moment later, the cape collapses ans everyone reacts as Drac ula “disappears” (On tours, where no trapdoor was available, they used a different disappearance gimmick).
I saw the 1970s Dracula revival and saw both the disappearance and some very clever “flying bat” effects, much better than the “bounce a rubber bat up and down on a string” sort used in the movies – the bat apparently flew in and out of windows, which woiuld seem, at first, to eliminate strings as suspension. It doesn’t. The printed edition of the play gives detailed instructions for the illusions.
Two scenes come to mind neither on Broadway (I suppose I expect it there…) One was the official outdoor musical drama of New Mexico, Billy the Kid. Billy and Pat Garret are having a shooting contest at a line of cans lined up on a water trough. They would shoot and the can would go flying. I knew they couldn’t be really shooting bullets, but it was so believable…(I learned how and it was surprisingly low tech). The other was from Cinderella (her change from princess looking young woman to the lowest stepsister as she ran behind a pillar and continued running - It had to be timed perfectly)…it was by a double hiding during the entire scene behind that pillar. The two Cinderellas alternated as leads and double for the run. Small thing but very magical.
The most impressive professional one I’ve seen was a touring company of Phantom of the Opera. The Phantom and Christine are running along a number of catwalks criscrossing the stage. As soon as they leave the stage on one catwalk, they appear on another one, without a chance to climb a ladder from one to the other. Obviously they were using doubles dressed as the two leads… except that the first transition and the last one had to be using the real actors, since they were contiguous with actual acting parts, and that would have left them on the wrong side of the theater. All I can figure is that they just ran really fast from one endpoint to the other around a back way.
Mine is just a teensy one, whihc Mrs R and I saw at a live-action version of the Wizard of Oz a few years ago.
Dorothy has just arrived in Munchkin land. The Wicked Witch arrives, and while she and Glinda have an animated conversation, holding the audience’s attention, Dorothy quietly takes one step back behind the proscenium side pillar. She steps back out just as Glinda gestures with her wand, and voila! The Ruby Slippers are on her feet!
Insanely effective, especially given how simple it was.
There was one at a local high school that was created by simple staging. The director there did some amazing and ambitious things over the years.
This was in Annie Get Your Gun. During “I’ve Got the Sun in the Morning and the Moon at Night,” the actress playing Annie is singing one of the choruses on one side of the stage (the stage, BTW, was exceptionally wide – the width of two professional stages, at least). While your watching them, the male characters quietly moved on the other side and formed a line, where they started singing and dancing when their turn came up. Because of the staging, you didn’t notice the move until they started to sing.
