Foy flyers set the stage for ʻMary Poppinsʼ
EL DORADO — When Mary Poppins (played by Barton Junior High’s Ella Langridge) makes her grand entrance on the stage – she will enter like many Mary Poppins have before her – she’ll fly!!
Andria Gleghorn, BJH teacher and director of the play, selected 45 students to star in “Mary Poppins,” which will be presented at 7 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the El Dorado High School Auditorium.
Jason Wilson, one of the flying directors of Flying by Foy, a company based in Las Vegas, arrived in El Dorado recently to set the stage for Mary Poppins to make her dramatic entrance and exit. Flying by Foy is the most prolific and widely-respected theatrical flying service in the world.
“I don’t know that it’s (flying on the stage) has ever been done in El Dorado or been done in a long time,” Gleghorn said, explaining that Wilson spent two days on the stage in the auditorium, showing her and other BJH teachers, Jeannie Strother, Karen Millican, Mark Smith, Sally Baldwin and Lark Tommey and Principal Sherry Hill, how to use the flying mechanism. After Saturday’s final performance, those teachers will dismantle the device and pack it in crates. It will then be picked up by at truck for the ride back to Las Vegas.
Flying by Foy was established in 1957 by Peter Foy, whose innovative techniques and patented mechanical inventions revolutionized theatrical flight in the second half of the 20th century, elevating the ancient practice of stage flying to a modern art form, according to the Foy website.
In addition to the Las Vegas office, Flying by Foy also has locations in the Eastern United States and the United Kingdom and provides flying effects, Aereography® and stateof-the-art automation for Broadway shows, London’s West End, professional and not-forprofit theatres, ballet and opera companies, high school and university theatre programs, churches, theme parks, cruise ships, concert tours, industrial events, feature films and television productions worldwide.
Peter Foy’s creation of the Inter-Related Pendulum helped define Mary Martin’s barnstorming performance as Peter Pan for the 1954 Broadway musical and ushered in a new era of spectacular, highly-controlled, natural-looking free flight.
In the years that followed, Foy introduced a series of wholly new flying systems, each created to remedy a problem or redefine a flying aesthetic. He created the Floating Pulley system in 1958, as a means of flying actors in low-height venues. His determination to preserve the magic of theatrical flight by concealing its mechanism from the