My Fair Lady Set Gains Momentum

Hi everyone and welcome to my take on all things scenic at PFT.

First of all perhaps I should introduce myself. I’m Allie and I am a production artist for PFT. For those of you who don’t know what that is, don’t feel bad I didn’t either to begin with! It means I am one of the people who paint all the scenery for our productions.

Having already completed the sets for Trelawny of the Wells, Henceforward and See How They Run this past 3 weeks we have been working very hard to get My Fair Lady ready to go over to the stage for it’s fit up and technical week. I have to confess with the weather having been so nice concentration has occasionally wandered and we have tried hard to get it outside to work on, need to top up that tan for opening night after all. My Fair Lady is a beautiful design but a bit of an unusual set for us painters, in that there is hardly any paint involved! Instead we are pasting thousands of pieces of text and posters to it. It has been really enjoyable but when we get the workshop back to normal, and not looking like the Andrex puppies have gone berserk with the loo roll it will be great. There is one thing I am certain of after this process and that is that I will never have wallpaper in my own home, far too much mess, it will be paint all the way.

Last weekend for me was one of the best parts of the process. The fit up, where the carpenters put the set together on stage. It is always really exciting for us as we finally get to see it out of the workshop and in context. It also means we get a chance to work on stage with everyone else which is nice - though they are fond of jumping out of the wings in the dark on a certain unsuspecting scenic. I have to admit that the set looked big in the workshop, nothing to how it looks on stage! We have just managed to get the floor painter, a simple design  of a black satin finish but the size of the stage here makes it take a couple of hours and roughly 30 litres of paint per coat!

Nearly done but just in case you are worried we have been very well behaved with the text on the My Fair Lady set. We've kept it clean, tempting though was it to make the odd stray sentence  appear. We have also resisted putting in chunks of the script, in case any of the cast forget their lines, though I am sure they wouldn’t mind if we did that. There is still time though for us to sneak in something which you will have to keep an eye out for.

So until next time all the best.

Allie