Houston a better venue than Dallas

Defying gravity (and dragons): Backstage with Wicked production stage managerPeter Van Dyke

Walking into the grandeur of the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, there's a man pulling on a rope to adjust a giant metal dragon holding court over the stage. It's all part of the marathon prep for Wicked, the Broadway hit running in Houston from June 30-July 25.

CultureMap took a tour with veteran production stage manager Peter Van Dyke to learn about the ins and outs of the Wicked stage, what makes Hobby great and what musical paved the way for the today's blockbuster tours.

CultureMap: There are so many elements to this set. How long does it take to get everything set up? How big of a crew do you have?

Peter Van Dyke: It's really just three days. Yesterday was a 10-hour day, and today is the long day. By the end of tonight pretty much everything will be in place. Tomorrow is just finishing up and then rehearsal. We travel with a crew of 24 and we hired 54 local carpenters and probably overall have about 100 people working on the set.

CM: What do you think about Hobby as a theatre?

PVD: It's a great venue, really. The size really works, particularly the loading dock space and room at the back of the stage. Plus it's a beautiful theater and it makes our set look elegant in it. It's big, but on the stage it still feels intimate. In Dallas, where we just were, for example the furthest seat is probably twice as far from the stage.

CM: What are the big differences between the tour and Broadway versions of Wicked?

PVD: It's essentially the same show. In New York the actors do a couple of songs out of the main stage on the side, but of course we don't have time to build that kind of addition on the tour. But in some ways I kind of like that better, with everyone staying within the frame that we've created without the distraction of performing near a balcony or something. In New York there are also monkeys that fly out over the audiences head, but that's about it.

Plus all of our elements are designed to be portable, so sometimes you'll see a piece of scenery or lights with wheels hidden on the side, just because everything has to be portable and able to be broken up into pieces small and light enough that two men can push them.

CM: What element creates the biggest logistical challenge?

PVD: Well, we bring in our floor to go over the stage floor, because it has lights pulleys and other elements in it. So when we come in, the first thing we have to do is see how the flying scenes will work, and then we have one piece that has to be exactly in the right place to correspond to that, and then we put the rest down around it like a jigsaw puzzle.

There's always little adjustments at different theaters with the lights and projectors, but we mainly have the rehearsal to get the sound right.

CM: How do you decide what cities to go to? Do you think of Houston as a big theater town?

PVD: It's pretty typical. With Wicked we end up at a four- or five-week run in most cities but we could generally stay longer and still sell out.

Actually when picking theaters one of the first things I do is see if The Phantom of the Opera has been performed there. The tour set was designed with the parameters of Phantom in mind, and actually the set designer who did Phantom also is the designer for Wicked.

Back when Phantom of the Opera came out, it was so popular that many theaters were actually redone in order to be able to stage it because everyone wanted the show to come to their town. The holes in the ceiling that we are using here for the dragon and other elements were probably put there by Phantom of the Opera for the chandelier.

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Movie Review

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 doesn't match the first movie's enthusiasm

Blumhouse

Five Nights at Freddy's 2.

Blumhouse Productions first made their name with the Paranormal Activity series, establishing themselves as a leader in the horror genre thanks to their relatively cheap yet effective movies. In recent years, they’ve added on “soft” horror films like M3GAN and Five Nights at Freddy’s to draw in a younger audience, with both films becoming so successful that each was quickly given a sequel.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 finds Mike (Josh Hutcherson) and his sister Abby (Piper Rubio) still recovering from the events of the first film, with Abby particularly missing her “friends.” Those friends just so happen to be the souls of murdered children who inhabit animatronic characters at the long-defunct Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, children who were abducted and killed by William Afton (Matthew Lillard).

A new threat emerges at another Freddy Fazbear’s location in the form of Charlotte, another murdered child who inhabits a creepy large marionette. Mike, distracted by a possible romance with Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), fails to keep track of Abby, who makes her way to the old pizzeria and inadvertently unleashes Charlotte and her minions on the surrounding town.

Directed by Emma Tammi and written by Scott Cawthon (who also created the video game on which the series is based), the film tries to mix together goofy elements with intense scenes. One particular sequence, in which the security guard for Freddy Fazbear’s lets a group of ghost hunters onto the property, toes the line between soft and hard horror. That and a few others show the potential that the filmmakers had if they had stuck to their guns.

Unfortunately, more often than not they either soft-pedal things that would normally be horrific, or can’t figure out how to properly stage scenes. The sight of animatronic robots wreaking havoc is one that is simultaneously frightening and laughable, and the filmmakers never seem to find the right balance in tone. Every step in the direction of making a truly scary horror film is undercut by another in which the robots fail to live up to their promise.

It doesn’t help that Cawthon gives the cast some extremely wooden dialogue, lines that none of the actors can elevate. What may work in a video game format comes off as stilted when said by actors in a live-action film. The story also loses momentum quickly after the first half hour or so, with Cawthon seemingly content to just have characters move from place to place with no sense of connection between any of the scenes.

Hutcherson (The Hunger Games series), after being the true lead of the first film, is given very little to do in this film, and his effort is equal to his character’s arc. The same goes for Lail, whose character seems to be shoehorned into the story. Rubio is called upon to carry the load for a lot of the movie, and the teenager is not quite up to the task. A brief appearance by Skeet Ulrich seems to be a blatant appeal to Scream fans, but he and Lillard only underscore how limited this film is compared to that franchise.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is better than the first film, but not by much. The filmmakers do a decent job of making the new marionette character into a great villain, but they fail to capitalize on its inherent creepiness. Instead, they fall back on less effective elements, ensuring that the film will be forgettable for anyone other than hardcore Freddy fans.

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Five Nights at Freddy's 2 opens in theaters on December 5.

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