Babes In Arms

By Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart

Produced: August 1984 and August 1992
West Hartford Summer Arts Festival
Director: Haig Shaverdian
Scenery: Arthur Dirks
Facility: Hall High School Auditorium

The fun of this show is that it is one of the great theatre clichè shows. The "kids" fight adversity and put together a show in a barn that gets them Broadway contracts. Never mind that it forever brands theatre artists as non-professionals in the minds of the public. For this design we created a barn on a turntable wagon, so that the interior really was the reverse of the exterior. I don't think I could have got the exterior treatment right if we weren't in New England, but then maybe I wouldn't need to. We did it with corrugated cardboard (and flameproofed paint) for shingles. We did the show twice, and built from prints from the same drawings. As the two bottom images show, I went for a little more color and punch in the second production.