The musical, which originally opened in the same year, played at the city's summer-long Chichester Festivities arts festival. The production was directed by Martin Duncan, designed by Francis O'Connor and choreographed by Stephen Mear. Lighting design was by Chris Ellis.
At the centre of the set is a large ceiling piece that serves several scenic purposes and is required to fly in and out, along with a large light box. Both elements also had to be removed to the dock between performances whenever the afternoon and evening slots featured different productions. Complicating matters, the building had been designed without flying facilities - as Festival Theatre production manager Damien Partington says: "The theatre has a 30-year history and because there's no fly tower, regulars know that if something flies here it has tended to be a bit wobbly. But now, for the first time, they're witnessing controlled, automated flying."
He continues: "When we first saw the model for How To Succeed, we realized that the design didn't lend itself to the theatre, or any rigging techniques we had here, so we were on the point of cutting the pieces. As well as the repositioning manoeuvre, a key problem was the need to quickly remove the piece to the dock in the changeover for the next performance. With a counterweight system we would have had weight transfer issues."
There followed, he explains, a conversation with Vertigo Rigging: "Paddy Burnside mentioned the CyberHoist system, which they'd recently acquired, and the quietness of the system . . . it became obvious that this would be a very neat and elegant solution.
"With this system the weight transfer isn't an issue; we just drop the piece onto the floor and unclip it, so the fast turnaround's easily achievable." House technician Pete Waterman, he adds, learned to programme the system's InMotion 3D software in two days.
Burnside himself rigged the hoists with help from the theatre staff and carried out the initial programming and training. He comments on the programming: "Our brief was to allow a 5m by 2m piece of scenery to go from a vertical position midstage to a horizontal position, flown as close to the roof as possible - in a theatre with a low roof and no ability to fly whatsoever. This was achieved by using four CyberHoists. Two were positioned downstage suspending the top of the piece, one was placed centrally and a fourth upstage suspending the lower, upstage end of the piece.
"During the move from horizontal to vertical, the upstage motor lowered the bottom of the piece, the downstage pair lowered the front while the central motor raised - which moved the piece upstage as well as into a vertical position. In reality, the cue was more complicated than this, with delays between the various motors moving to allow the move to look seamless. The InMotion 3D software allows for complex moves to be programmed rapidly with both timings and positions easily tweaked even within a complex cue. A light box also flew on two more CyberHoists as part of the same cue sequence. The initial request was for just two positions, but when the designer saw the system he asked for many more intermediate positions to be programmed in."
Waterman adds: "The majority of the scenery is trucked around the stage; the two flying pieces in the show move simultaneously, so to get them to fly at the right speeds and guarantee that they would start and stop at the right places seemed impossible, but by putting both pieces onto CyberHoists we achieved that."
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