For the spring 2015 slot, Brown University Gilbert and Sullivan presented "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum", songs by Stephen Sondheim, book by Burt Shevelove (Brown '37) and Larry Gelbart, originally produced on Broadway by Harold S Prince and presented in agreement with Musical Theater International.
The director's vision for the show was to be influcend by commedia del'arte. The show required to have 3 houses, a house fo Marcus Lycus and the courteseans, a worn down house for Erroneous, and a house for the family of Senex. The direcot specifically did not want to have roman architecture and wanted it to be set in a modern day neighborhood. I decided it would be a fun idea to have simple structures that were covered in graffiti to match the owners of each house.
The House of Marcus Lycus, as indicated by the sign, was painted red because of it's function in the neighborhood as a brothel. The graffiti on that house reatures several silhouettes naked women.
The second house, the yellow house was the house of Senex, the most affluent house out of the three. I wanted this house to have a clean look, but it had to have some form of graffiti to collaborate with the other two houses. I decided to paint a tree and hand stamp the leaves on the trees.
The last house was the house of Erroneous, an old man whose children were taken from him by pirates, a man who has since then been on a journey to find his children. Since this house was abandoned for more than 10 years, I thought it'd be appropriate for the house to be covered in the most graffiti and have hints of having been patched up, although not in the neatest way.
Below is a sketch of the first preliminary set design and more photos of the set during the show. The design was not converted to the real set because of several reasons, one of which is the problem we faced with MTI acquiring rights for the show which reduced the time we had to produce the show by 2 weeks, and issues with the budget.
Director: Paul Martino, Brown '17
Assistant Director: Ani Mack, Brown '17
Costume Designer: Jess Tran, Brown '16
Props Designer: Jonathan West, Brown '16 and me
Lighting Designer: Ryan Lessing, Brown '17
Technical Director: Galen Kirpatrick, Brown '17
Assistant Technical Director: Stacie Farrows, Brown '18
Paint Crew: Heather Jue-Wong, Brown '16, Rose Thomas, Brown '16 and Celine Schmidt, Brown-RISD '17
