‘CAT IN THE HAT’ KEEPS STAGEHANDS PRETTY BUSY
Getting all the props in place is too big a job for one person
Alejandro Pesina, looking dapper in his Cat in the Hat costume, spent some of his pre-show time ahead of a preview performance stretching backstage.
So did Madeline Gutierrez, whose role in Magik Theatre’s production of “The Cat in the Hat” is pretty demanding, too, though only folks backstage see it.
Gutierrez is one of two stagehands stationed backstage at each performance to man the prop tables, a job that helps the show zip along at just the right speedy clip. She is based mostly at stage left, while Carrie Daniels is at stage right.
“They had not budgeted having two people backstage, and I said, ‘I need two people backstage,’ ” said director Jon Gentry, who has also played the Cat in a national tour of the show produced by Childsplay, the acclaimed Arizona-based children’s theater. “There’s a lot going on back there.”
The script, he noted, is deceptively simple-looking. It runs about eight pages, and all of the dialogue comes directly from Dr. Seuss’ slim kid-lit classic about two bored children whose rainy day is jazzed up by the chaotic arrival of the Cat in the Hat. The complication in the show comes from all the cues and props, listed alphabetically. It’s up to the production team to decide what to use and what to discard, he said.
That means that no two productions are the same.
“That’s the fun of the show,” he said.
The Magik staging, which clocks in at just over 40 minutes, calls for 80 props, including balls both large and small, a rake, a net, a vase, a birthday cake, kites and the teapot in which the disapproving fish (a puppet handled with aplomb by Brennan Loy) spends much of the show after he is displaced from his bowl.
Daniels and Gutierrez stand in the shadows, ready to grab a tennis racket or to wheel set pieces such as the front door into place. Because their hands might sometimes be visible to some folks in the audience as props are handed off, Gentry briefly experimented with them wearing white gloves.
“They were like, ‘If we see your hands, at least it looks like it’s part of the world,’” Daniels said.
Ultimately, the white gloves proved more of a distraction, so they were 86’d.
The stagehands also grab the bike when it’s ridden offstage, carefully repositioning it so that the actors can race back onstage.
“We could not do this without them,” Gardner said. “Thankfully, the backstage help is really great, because then we can throw things off and they grab them and put them away.
Sometimes, that’s literal. Balls are tossed backstage, and Daniels and Gutierrez usually catch them. And they make sure that the pathway for the bike is clear when Pesina rides it from one side of the stage to the other.
“It’s like backstage choreography,” Garcia said.
Gardner and Garcia contribute their own moves to the behindthe-scenes dance, positioning props throughout the show.
“The actors do a lot on their own,” Daniels said. “We’re here for backup support mostly. If we had to do it all, it would be a lot more intensive.”
Their support extends beyond the prop tables. Daniels helps with the lickety-split costume change that Garcia and Gardner, who play Thing 1 and Thing 2 and Kitten 1 and Kitten 2, have to make near the end of the show.
“They come offstage, I unzip them both, and then they have maybe 30 seconds or less (to make the change),” Daniels said.
Along that same line, when Garcia had a wig malfunction during the preview, Gutierrez helped maneuver the hairpiece back in place.
And when the door opens and the children’s mother arrives, just her leg visible as she steps across the threshold, Gutierrez is the one holding that prop.
It took a few weeks to get all of the moves down. But it all will have to be re-jiggered next month when the show moves a few blocks away to the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre.
“Things are going to change, because it’s smaller,” Pesina said. “And that’s a whole new set of rehearsals.”