Fiddler was the third set in a row I did at a high school auditorium in Newark, the other two being Les Miz and Spamalot. Once again, we had the forty-foot-wide by twelve-foot-high stage, as well as a need to accommodate a large cast, several production numbers, and various locations.

The design solution here was to create a cutout backdrop (a ground row) of a stylized village and have several small scenic units, on wagons, move in front of it as needed. The units were suggestive rather than literal, and had cutouts to reveal the sun disk painted on the sky backdrop. About three feet of space between the village cutout and the sky drop allowed for lighting instruments to create different effects on the sky. The lighting designer did a very nice job of isolating the acting areas for the more intimate scenes and lighting larger parts of the stage for the production numbers.

Stage 1 Theatre, Newark, CA