Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” and Creature Shop

I’m super excited for Undercroft Opera’s production of  Mozart’s The Magic Flute opening a week from tomorrow (May 29th-June 1st at the Antonian Theater).  Rehearsals have been going splendidly music-wise, and as Creature Designer I’m happy to report that we’ve come a long way with Papageno’s flock of birds, the Giant Serpent and Animal masks and feet.  This weekend is the final phase of puppet and monster making, much sewing and paper mache to be done, and I can’t wait to show the audience what my team has been working on! For some details about how we used mostly recycled and re-purposed materials to make the animals, check out our article from the Undercroft Opera blog pasted below and/or check out our Behind-The-Scenes photo gallery on Facebook.

Crafting Creatures for The Magic Flute – by Bonnie Bogovich

Hello Undercroft Opera fans! For those familiar with Mozart’s classic “the Magic Flute”, you know it is a fantasy involving story characters such as kings, princes, damsels in distress, and also a variety of creatures and animals.  When we started to prepare for the show, I volunteered to help with creature design for the production to see what we could do to add some extra magic to this flute. As the opera’s Creature Designer, I assembled a team of helpers from the show, and we set to work designing and building our menagerie of beasts: a flock of birds for Papageno, animal masks and feet to dance along with Tamino, and our biggest challenge, a 30 ft long giant serpent for the first scene in the opera!

As we are a community nonprofit opera company, I started planning with cost in mind, as well as a goal to try to keep our animals as environmentally friendly as possible by using recycled, reused and repurposed materials as much as possible.  For about a month we collected boxes and paper tubes at home, and thanks to my office undergoing a company move recently was able to take home lots of used foam core, sheet plastic, and other to-be-discarded supplies perfect for puppet craft. We also purchased some smaller supplies (like gloves and thread) from The Pittsburgh Center for Creative Reuse.

Here are some examples of how recycled and reused materials were utilized:

Giant Snake:  The frame of the snake uses a string of ‘hula hoops’ tied to a central spine. We built our own hula hoops using pvc and connectors, and the original test spinal system was made using sheet plastic. The head of the snake and tail is cardboard.  The whole body of the snake will be covered in a body sock, sewn from drapery fabric rescued from the bin by our costume department when a department store closed its doors. Using ‘all parts of the drape buffalo’ we even used the metal rings to help create internal fabric-to-hoop attachment points. Thread and eyeball plastic was purchased from Creative Reuse.

Birds:  Being a diehard Jim Henson fan, the design for the birds was a simplistic flapping material on a rod design based loosely on the “batty bats” from Sesame Street, using silhouettes of wings carved from cereal boxes with underbody and mount from cardboard paper towel and toilet paper tubes. Bird poles are a combination of discarded black tent poles and painter poles. We also turned two suitcase-style boxes and tubes into a storage rack for the bird poles.

Animals: The  animal masks were all created from a variety of different types of boxes. As they were pairs of animals I used one type of box for each animal, so they would have similar textures and used the folds in the original boxes to help shape their features. The paws for the cat, foxes, and deer were cardboard, and the frog feet were sewn with reused foam core for circle inserts. (“Paper mache for animal ma

sks and feet made from junk mail and newspaper”)

Special thanks to these super-crafters on ‘Team Creature’: Gwen Schmidt (bird and animals!), Jordan Speranzo (snake tamer!) and Liz Rishel (frog foot seamstress!) for their help in creating this wacky menagerie!

To follow our behind the scenes progress as we move from prototypes to final creatures, you can follow our up to date gallery on Facebook at “Creature/Puppet Craft for Magic Flute: Behind the Scenes”  check out our gallery on Facebook.

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