ELF EXAMINATION
How a Persephone Theatre holiday musical comes to life
For most of the performers you’ll see onstage during Persephone Theatre’s production of Elf: The Musical, the rehearsal process started a few weeks ago.
For most of the production team behind the scenes, it’s been a longer process than most people know.
“This process started about eight months ago for me,” director Sarah Rodgers said with a laugh. “I think a lot of people don’t realize that as the director, we’re working for months and months and months with the concept of the show.”
From the balcony of the theatre, the stage below looks set for the beloved musical — based on the Will Ferrell holiday movie of the same name — to get started. A brightly coloured archway frames the front of the stage, with three tall rotating set pieces — called periaktos — set into the painted stage floor and allowing for rapid set changes as the three-sided structures spin around.
“It is always, for me, a breathtaking moment when I walk into the theatre and it’s our first day with the set on the stage,” Rodgers said.
It’s taken hundreds of hours of hard work from a few key people to bring the show to its feet, from builders to designers to technical crews. And all the hard work to bring this slice of Christmas to life is certainly not lost on the director.
“The production staff for us at Persephone Theatre have been our little elves,” Rodgers joked.
Before Elf ’s set can find its curlytoed footing on stage, everything starts with a small, barely larger than a shoebox-sized model.
It’s called a maquette, a scale model used to visualize what the set will or could look like once everything has been built.
For set designer Cameron Porteous, it’s how he connects with the director and with the construction crew.
“You have to take all of the (design) and translate it into terms to communicate to a staff to actually build it,” Porteous said. “I don’t build it ... I just create it.”
The model is practically fully functioning, with little wired crossbars that allow pieces to “fly” in and out of the model just like the fly system in the theatre, and three periaktos around 15 to 18 cm tall that Porteous can spin around to see what the different settings can look like.
Rodgers and Porteous, who have worked together in the past, had a number of conversations that led them to a storybook-style esthetic. Each spin of a periaktoi and each scene transition, Porteous said, is like turning to the next page of the story.
Like Rodgers, this has been a multi-month project for Porteous. He’s not a Saskatoon resident, so he has flown in and out of the city to meet with Rodgers and make sure their vision is brought to life.
But there comes a point during
Persephone Theatre’s production of Elf: The Musical runs from Dec. 4 to Jan. 5.
the design process where it’s time to hand the reins off to the next group.
“I’ve always said to design students, what’s on the stage is not your work. What’s on the stage is the work of the scenic artist, the carpenters, the painters, the lighting people, everybody else,” Porteous said.
In late October, Persephone Theatre’s production of W.R.O.L. (Without Rule of Law) was on the main stage. At the same time, the set for Elf was being finished up backstage, bringing Porteous’ maquette to life in a larger-thanlife way.
By the time November was nearing, the set painters had been working diligently for about two months — and the set, from the iconic Macy’s sign to the giant Christmas tree, was starting to take shape.
“When people come to a show, they see a beautiful set and they think of the actors and director,” technical director Jody Longworth said. “But they don’t realize the amount of work that goes in behind the scenes to put that set on the stage.”
Longworth’s job, in particular, is incredibly far-reaching. While Rodgers gets final say over the artistic and creative decision-making process, Longworth is the self-described “go-between” for set, props, costumes, light and sound, and the designers.
And while Longworth and the rest of the crew work to finish up set pieces on the main floor, costuming is well underway upstairs. Head costume designer Bonnie Deakin and her team had a very particular look to create for star Felix Leblanc, who plays the titular role of Buddy the Elf and needs to look the part in a very green costume — reminiscent of Ferrell’s movie outfit.
The difficulty, as Deakin puts it, is creating something new without taking away from anything that made the original show work. But even with a core design already in place, Deakin and her designers have to make the costumes “foolproof” for the musical.
“It’s such an icon, the film ... so don’t fix it if it ain’t broke,” Deakin said. “Finding the right fabric is a challenge. Figuring out how to make the hat and the shoes work, that’s all part of the job.”
Before the actors even take their first steps on stage, there have been weeks and months — hundreds of hours — of work put into bringing Elf to life.
At a late November rehearsal, as Leblanc’s Buddy danced around the stage with a bevy of Santa Clauses, Rogers took a moment to reflect on how the long and occasionally hectic process of getting Elf to the stage came together in the end.
“That’s the beautiful thing about theatre ... it’s kind of like a school project,” Rogers said through laughter. “And you go ‘this is due, this is due in a few days and we have to get this ready.’ ”
As the choreography rehearsal filled with Santas wound down, most of the production team were in the theatre. Rodgers, Porteous and Deakin were all out in the nearly vacant theatre, still discussing little things to make everything work just a little bit better. There are shoes to fix so they don’t slip, set pieces to move or adjust to make more room, and a million little things to still take care of.
But the hours of work have been well-spent. The stage is set. And everyone is ready to show an audience what they’ve accomplished — even if they won’t be on the stage to receive any accolades. “There’s so many beautiful elements to making the magic, especially with a large musical,” Rodgers said. “To walk into a theatre and see it up is always miraculous.”