Lifting the Curtain on Theatrical Effects

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I've started every episode with that tagline for over 10 years. But this episode really goes directly to the heart of those two questions. How do we create them? And why do we suspend our disbelief? Living in New York...

People often recommend theater and casual conversation. And until recently, I had never heard anybody recommend a live show solely based on the special effects. That has changed with two plays. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and Stranger Things The First Shadow. One of the biggest practical effects companies in New York is called J&M Special Effects. The company is 40 years old.

They worked on shows from Phantom of the Opera and Cats to Hadestown and Disney musicals like Frozen, Aladdin, and Mary Poppins. They also do effects for film, TV, and commercials. But I wanted to know about theatrical effects. What's changed lately? What hasn't? And what goes on behind the scenes? Jeremy Chernick is a partner and designer at J&M.

He actually went to London to help them develop the effects for the Harry Potter play before it came to Broadway. And he gave me a tour of their warehouse in Brooklyn, which is over 10,000 square feet. So we divide up the shop into different areas. To the left of me is just literally just an entire shelf of different pumps. If I ran a hardware store...

I would probably look at this place with a lot of envy. They have amassed an arsenal of devices from floor to ceiling. If you want snow, rain, fog, fire on stage, they have all the raw materials. and there's a staging area to experiment with effects. And then if we walk through here, one of the things that I really love about this particular part of the shop is we're in what we would call the yellow bin area, but essentially it's our library. We have just pieces of hardware.

for anything from plumbing to pneumatics to electronics to heating coils to blood kits and also a lot of this stuff is old some of it is hasn't been made in a long time. And we have it still because the company is old enough that we've held on to things that are unique and are harder to find now. It is the place where... If I don't have it already made, I could spend a few hours putting it together. And ideally, most of the parts are already here and ready to go.

It's funny because like on one hand you have to be so creative in your thinking and on the other hand you have to be kind of a nerd when it comes to valves and caps and gaskets. absolutely absolutely i mean i i'm really good with my hands i always have been i've always been good at like figuring things out with my hands um building things i'm not necessarily good at building a thing that is going to last for years and years

When I first started doing theater, a lot of shows like off-Broadway shows, they run 16 weeks. And I'm always good at making something that will last exactly 16 weeks. As long as there's been theater in the Western world, there have been theatrical effects. The ancient Greeks used a device that was kind of like a crane for actors playing gods.

I did a whole episode about a device from the 19th century called Pepper's Ghost, which creates projections on stage. These moments of wonder are often made with nuts and bolts, but the bar keeps getting raised. with new technology, and what audiences expect to see on stage. And since J&M has been doing theatrical effects for so long on Broadway, in some ways, their fiercest competition

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What was the state of theatrical effects when he first joined the company 20 years ago? When I first started, I was very crafty. I could build things with my hands and I would often put things together with parts that I found. In catalogs, I started under in I started working for a man named Gregory me who did this before I did. And he came from a farm. So a lot of his early.

thoughts and technology came literally from farm catalogs. He is, for me, the one of the inventors of rain on stage. And he really did it with their irrigation. Right. Like, I think I read you in an interview said like. Making it rain on stage is not as hard as figuring out where does the water go afterwards? Absolutely. Bowdoin Bushell is a production coordinator and pyrotechnician at J&M. A great deal of what we do is bespoke.

nobody's ever done that thing before and so we have to not speculate on how it will fail we have to see how it will fail um and to do it very publicly i am and i'm often in a room and i go let's see how this works and then something Just doesn't work. And then you have to go, okay, next. For instance, Bowdoin was telling me about how Gregory Mee, one of the founders of J&M, worked on a 2002 revival of Into the Woods.

It's a classic Stephen Sondheim musical, which mixes different fairy tales together, including Jack and the Beanstalk. There are giants in the sky. There are big, tall, terrible giants in the sky. One of the effects in the show is a giant who comes down from the beanstalk and wreaks havoc on the characters.

The giant approaching the screen was an electromechanical effect that was quite literally pieces of aluminum that were cut out and were actuated by rods and screws. And so as the giant... approached the light backstage that was shining on a a drop it was physically changing size and getting larger and so we still have that giant and it's a it's a mechanical

object that does a thing it sort of marches left right left right and the arms swing and the head gets bigger and the arms get bigger and the torso gets bigger and now you just ask your video programmer to create that object and you put a short throw projector back there and bob's your uncle didn't exist and you know if you wanted to change how the giant looked

You had to sit down and cut new pieces of aluminum and make new electromechanical things that happened. So that level of artistry of the mechanical artistry is rarer. because so many of the tricks can be automated into flat 2D surfaces. He says the best thing about new technology is that it gives them new workarounds to old problems. The advances in 3D printing and the advances in miniaturization of objects have made it so that you can hide things inside things.

So that means that we can now take little computers and stick them places that we could never do. We just didn't have the technology. You might have tried maybe a garage door opener or something like that, but it was all going to be much, much cruder.

That is crucial in theater because everybody is constrained by physics. For instance, the musical Frozen used to be at the St. James Theater in Manhattan. That building is almost 100 years old. Jeremy Chernick was a bit overwhelmed when he realized how much they needed it to snow on stage. One of the solutions was to cover the stage itself with a blanket of low-lying fog, which could look like a blanket of snow.

That way the actors can perform their choreography and not worry about slipping or tripping. But snow still has to come down from the ceiling. One of the things that I fight with every day in my job is real estate on a stage. But when I looked up at the drawings of what the... overhead of the stage looked like. It's filled with lights and video projection. So I started by going like, OK, there's no space for snow the way that I would have normally done snow in the olden days are.

big, long stage long, like 30 foot wide, eight inch diameter kind of tumblers or drums filled with snow. And then those drums have perforation. And when they rotate, you drop snow. That's a pretty classic. way of dropping snow. Here, I had no space for any of that. And we figured out, okay, there are all these lights, but between every single light, there is...

18 inches of space. So I started by thinking about like, well, OK, so I can have like a a tube that's vertical that's filled with snow. And then I want to release a little bit of snow every few. seconds or whenever I want. I want to control the release of snow in like what I called a pinch at a time. Eventually we came up with a snow delivery device that you could put like a

a bunch of snow in a hopper and it would, with technology, rotate. Every inch of that was designed with 3D printed parts, with custom circuit boards and circuit. breaker technology so that it would do exactly what we wanted in the space that we wanted. I can program things within a hundredth of a second.

Bowden says they can program things as carefully as they want, but the shows don't always go off like clockwork. One of the ways they try to control mishaps is by making sure that as few people as possible are responsible for making effects happen. especially if those effects could be dangerous. Any fool can push a button, have something blow up. It's knowing when not to push the button that is the hard part. Somebody's going to yell at you.

and say why did you miss your cue and you're gonna say well that person was standing there or something was wrong and then you have to defend yourself so you have to be completely sure that you're capable of standing up to absolutely everybody in the room and saying this thing wasn't going the way I wanted to. So I didn't push the button to make the thing happen. I don't ever want to be in a situation where I go, well, I hope this works because that is not a sentence you want to.

Typically, the person responsible for pushing those buttons is a stagehand or stage manager. But sometimes the actor has to push the button. For instance, J&M worked on the musical Beetlejuice. Oh, yeah. All I gotta do is say my name. But I don't know your name. Well, I can't say it. How about the game of charades? Yes, let's play it. Two words. Okay. Second word. Right. Drink. No. Beverage. No. Wine. No. Yes. Okay, first word. Okay. Bug. No. Answer. Close, but no.

When I asked Jeremy what were the hardest effects to do in that show, I thought he was going to mention the big ones. I mean, they recreated a lot of the creatures from the original film, like the giant sandworm. But Jeremy says the more subtle effects were often more difficult. For instance, there's a character in the original film named Juno. She runs the bureaucracy in the afterlife. And she smokes.

But when she speaks, the smoke comes out of her throat because, presumably, she died from having her throat slit. It's a very Tim Burton gag. On a film set, they can have a lot of people outside the edge of the frame making that effect happen.

and the length of a scene in a movie can be short. But how do you pull off that effect in the midst of a live musical? That trick is done entirely by the performer herself, and the... little tiny smoke machine that she's wearing in an uncomfortable place strapped to her body and has then a tube running up the center of her throat. has then a button down her sleeve and none of it works on a timing that is easy. In other words.

you can't push the button and the smoke doesn't come out at the same time you push that button and then there's like this i would call it one second delay so the action that the performer had to do was smoke the cigarette, but also know, understand that they might have to hit the button before they hold the cigarette to their mouth. And there's something hard about that for a performer because you're.

just doing something a little bit out of order and backwards, working with those actors to really get that. That's the challenge. It's hard to be like, I'm really sorry. I know you're in the middle of acting, but you have to push the button at the wrong time or what feels like the wrong. On my show, I've talked about how actors on film sets sometimes find it frustrating to work in totally digital environments. Everything around them is covered in green fabric.

They're shown a ball on a stick and told, this is an alien and it's your best friend. Actors often say that they like working with practical effects because they can see them and touch them. But Jeremy says that's not entirely true with theater. The choreography, singing, and emotional arcs all have to unfold continuously on stage. And while the actors are rehearsing all of that, this team of special effects people come in and say,

You also have to do this potentially really dangerous complicated mechanical thing in the midst of your big number. At one point in the Beetlejuice musical, the character of Barbara Maitland sees that her hand is on fire. That's the ghost character that Geena Davis played in the original film. Jeremy says lighting your hand on fire is a trick that many magicians have mastered, but it takes a long time to master it. You might have a performer who's nervous about...

having fire on their hand. You might have a performer who isn't as interested in the sort of subtle handhelds, all of the action they have to do. how they have to hold their hand, how they have to hold it so the audience doesn't see, how they have to hold it so it doesn't burn, how they have to put the fire out, which they have to do themselves, how they have to get rid of the object that was on fire. There's a whole slew of things associated.

with that. And that one took a lot of trust and communication between certainly me and the performers who do that. J&M also worked on the Addams Family musical. And once again, Jeremy told me that the big effects weren't as difficult as the little ones. There's a scene where Wednesday Adams shoots a crossbow into an apple, which is right on top of her potential boyfriend's head.

In a TV show or a movie, that effect could be done with CG or cross-cutting, but it has to happen in the middle of a song. Pierce the apple, not the liver, or we're dancing on my grave. Place it in the boat and steady. Can't you shoot that thing already? Wait! That was really fun. We made... a crossbow that you could put an arrow in and when you pulled the trigger the

The string and the bow snapped like it fired, but the arrow fell inside of the body of the crossbow. The young man went against a tree, and this is one of those things where I had to... Like I went to the floral district and bought 50 types of fake apples.

because i had to find one that i could like kind of bore out but essentially the performer would lean against the tree on the back of the apple there was a little piece of red velcro so the apple was always in the perfect position and then through the back of a tree we had an incredibly fast moving piston with the feathers of the of the bolt it's called or the arrow all of that was timed again very carefully with stage management where you know

She shoots the gun. He's put the apple in the right place. There's a lot of people staring to make sure that everything is right because. if it's wrong the apple goes flying off or if it's wrong he could hurt himself or there's a million ways in which we we put safety into into all the things i do but then this essentially back of the arrow comes out at lightning speed and

the apple is stuck on the tree. I asked Jeremy if he's ever gotten into a situation where they develop something that works perfectly at the warehouse. Then they transfer it to a theater and all of their meticulous planning has to be thrown out. Yeah, it happens all the time.

there's no right way to solve that problem. The hardest thing for me is Okay, we work really hard and we put all this technology into a piece of scenery and it comes out of this one place and it's perfect and it is safe and everyone is happy and we get into rehearsal on stage with performers. And for any reason, the director is like, oh, could it be three feet to the left? So you just have to kind of figure that out. I did. This is a good, a good story I did.

The Scottish play, The Macbeth, starring Daniel Craig. And that show happened right as he finished being James Bond for good. And it was a thing I think he really wanted to do to sort of shake off the bond of it all. One of the things that was decided in that production was that it was going to be unbelievably bloody and that he wanted to die.

terribly covered in blood and in maybe an undignified way. In that show, he's doing the final duel where he does eventually die and he wanted to be stabbed in the groin. where there's a big artery that you would bleed out of and die. And so we had a scene where they were fighting and the two of them are scrabbling up against the wall and his back is against the wall. And then he would reach between his legs.

and he would remove a knife and then a gush of blood needed to come out. We had like kind of a secret hidden spigot. of blood and that spigot of blood would turn on and every night we were we were frustrated like it looks like you turned a faucet on it doesn't look naturalistic it's not like blood is pouring out it kind of just looks like we turned on a blood faucet backstage between his legs and then in an epiphany i was like you know what we need to do we need to turn the faucet upside down

So that instead of it shooting down, we're just going to turn it up and it will then shoot up into him and it will go everywhere. It won't. It won't gush down. It'll just fill his whole, all of his pants with blood. Can't believe that never happened in a Bond movie. I don't know why. Building a business can be like putting on a play or a musical. You might dream of being a showboat, but sometimes your growth can outpace what you can handle and it feels like anything goes.

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I never used to expect special effects in theater to compete with movies or TV. But as theatrical effects have gotten better, that can raise the audience's expectations. Again, boat and bushel. I think there's a real challenge that we have gotten used to the idea of jump cuts. We've gotten used to the idea of being able to change POV and do those kinds of things. And so on the shows that I've worked on. Very often we're helping the director point people in a direction.

And yeah, we're trying to deal with the fact that we're used to being able to go into somebody's eyeball with a camera and then suddenly be in that world. When we did Tarzan. on broadway is a beautiful beautiful scene where they open up and the pair of them are shipwrecked but they're shipwrecked from an overhead shot, which is difficult to do in a theater. But what they had done was they had rigged the actors onto the back wall and you were looking at them from overhead.

Put your faith in what you most believe in. As they crawled up the beach, they crawled down the wall onto the floor. and then the beach scape was snatched out using a drop that just pulled out into a little snoot so suddenly you were able to do what cinematically would have been an overhead shot into a cut to, you know, a wide shot on a beach in a different way. And sometimes audiences want to see on stage exactly what they saw in the film.

Jeremy says on the musical of Frozen, Elsa, the magical ice princess, has to build a magical castle around herself. And she has to be able to change her dress from her normal princess wear to the ice princess that we all know Elsa is supposed to look like. It took us a long time to figure out how to spectacularly. change her dress. You can watch the live musical on Disney+. And this moment is really quick and subtle. The actress gestures with her arms. Her dark dress zips off into oblivion.

and reveals a sparkling blue gown underneath. As I was trying to figure out how they did it, my brain was still thinking like it was the movies. I was imagining that she was wearing like a motion capture suit and the dresses were digital, but no. As I mentioned before in this show, there's a low-lying blanket of fog, which doubles for a blanket of snow. There's also a trapdoor on the floor. And from below the stage, one of the stagehands reaches into the fog, grabs the hem of the dress,

and yanks it off with perfect timing. And that's not the only special effect that happens during that song. She has to pull off a glove in the beginning of the song because that's iconic from the movie. And then the glove goes flying away. It took us a good while before that glove flew out of her hand in a way that didn't feel like it was a bad.

stringed glove, but actually flittered away. And that's the other advantage of working for a company like Disney. Occasionally they do have the resources to just keep working on something.

over and over again in different ways to improve upon it. They don't give up. You just keep working at it. Bowdoin says sometimes they can be too good at their jobs and raising people's expectations. I was called by an advertising person who said they wanted to make an apple levitate. And I said, well, the trick of doing that is that you have to use a little wire or this thing. I'm like, no, no, we want to actually make an apple levitate. I said, I'm...

not aware of a way to make a non-regular object hang in space. Well, yeah, they have to reach in and they have to grab the apple.

and then take a bite out of it be able to walk around at 360 and there's no trick and so i called a couple of people and everyone was like well the trick would be to use the super fine wire etc i'm like no they don't want a trick and they're like well then they don't want it to be live have there been some examples like the apple where somebody asks you to do something and you're just like like there's a line in the prestige i love where um michael cain says uh we're magicians not wizards

Where you had a moment like that, but then you actually did figure it out where you were like, oh my God, I can actually do this. So there's a show called Holiday Inn. It was at Studio 54, and the Roundabout was producing it, and they wanted to reproduce the famous Fred Astaire tap dance sequence with firecrackers.

you can't do firecrackers on the stage it's just like pieces of bits flying around and having somebody with a pocket full of explosives and throwing them into a crowd seems like a bad idea even if it is for fun so we came up with this myself and the team at J&M came up with this idea that what if we made a fake firework? And the fake firework was a combination of air, glitter, dust, an Arduino, MIDI triggering, and all of these.

pieces that and the deep programming that went into it with the sound effect it was so convincing that once it was tuned in, people asked me who the pyrotechnician on the show was. And at the beginning, it was a terrible idea. It was so complicated. There was so much machinery and it all had to work just the way it needed to.

Speaking of trying to do the impossible, Jeremy Chernick was the main special effects designer on the London production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child before it came to New York. You're Albus Potter, and I'm Scorpius Malfoy. Our parents didn't get on. It's an incredibly ambitious show, but it's also a fantasy world that audiences have already seen. with Hollywood style special effects. The hardest thing was that one of the producers who came from film just didn't understand.

some basic things like you can't take a tiny stick and point it at anything and a giant red light. can come flying out and maybe the other person has their green light comes out and then those two lights fight in the air. The team. that that worked on that, including myself, worked on a visual and physical language, which really originated with Stephen Hoggett, the choreographer to do.

Things that felt spectacular and felt within the world of, you know, Harry Potter, but didn't feel like a film. They felt like human beings and their bodies doing a thing that. conveyed the story in almost like a dance. And then we layered technology on top of that to enhance it. So a good example is there's a duel in that show, a wand duel between between two characters.

those characters are are moving and doing really exciting you know sort of wand action but they're doing it through choreography with their bodies and the elements that we added to it were Small and precise. in a way that wasn't like we're not trying to do a giant movie. We're trying to surprise the audience by doing it so differently and in such a sort of dance way.

In those scenes, there are stagehands covered entirely in black, moving the actors in props when they're being affected by magic wands. The audience can't see the stagehands because of the lighting. Then you layer on top of that the reaction of the actors, and it's totally convincing. I asked Jeremy, what was the hardest trick to get right on that show? Oh my God, the whole show.

That show was very hard. We worked on that for about two, I think I worked on it for two years before an audience saw it. Some of the most challenging stuff were things that didn't make it to the stage because they were just too fussy. They meaning the effects.

there were certain effects that were just too fussy and they didn't make it to the stage there's the dementor effect where they pull the soul out of people's mouths we i had been trying to deliver that sort of like smoke pulling out of someone's mouth for a long time. It just never was too clunky. It didn't didn't work. It wasn't fast enough. So it's the things that sort of don't make it to the stage that are hard. They added a writing moment in that show where.

They killed a character on stage using Avada Kedavra, which is the death spell. And it is in the writing is a green like blast. And we had to add green. blast of fire kind of once we were already in the production. Like I believe that was added when we were already in previews and we had to figure out how to do that. pretty quickly i mean there was a fast run of like what is a green fire machine and then what is it and how does it fit so it took a while to

to convince people that this is a play and we're going to do it in a theatrical way and not deliver like CGI movie in real life. And talking with Jeremy and Bowden, I kept expecting them to reveal.

more high-tech solutions. I was surprised how often that wasn't the case. It's like if you look at the history of painting over the last 500 years, every generation of painters figured out how to paint more realistically. until it got hyperrealism. New technology helps along the way, but it all comes down to human ingenuity, ambition, persistence, and perfectionism.

Learning how J&M pulls off these tricks made the shows even more impressive to me. I feel like too many people these days take live performance for granted. I get... so mad when somebody takes out their phone in the middle of a darkened theater to check their texts or scroll through Instagram. It breaks my suspension of disbelief and I want to yell at them.

Respect this moment, respect the people around you, respect the performers and the work that this team is doing to cast a spell on all of us. If the folks at J&M could make those phones disappear... That would be true magic. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Jeremy Chernick and Bowden Bushell at J&M. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.

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