Dashiell Zaman, Set Crew Chief, Shawnee Mission East Performance
Dashiell Zaman is a senior at East who has been taking theater classes since his freshman year, but he’s been working with the East theater for two years. He is a set crew chief, so he helps manage the sets, and he also works the fly system.
It takes about 2-3 months to produce one musical. If you want to help with the musical, you can do any job like painting, building, working the fly system, being on run crew, or working the lights. The directors pick what musical to do each year, and their most recent musical was “Bye Bye Birdie.”
A simple rundown of how the sets are made is that the directors decide what to make, and they plan everything out. And then they start building everything mostly out of wood. They also have scaffolds that they build bases around. And they also use metal stairs as a base, too. Then, once everything’s built, they can paint it and add whatever decorations they need to.
Also, if they need some set equipment, they can check their old set equipment archives for anything they need. For some musicals, they need backdrops, so they have a certain store they buy all their backdrops from.
The run crew works while the musical is being shown, doing things like moving things on or off set and working the fly system, which is a system that lets them control the curtains.
Dashiell said that his favorite musical that he’s worked on is “Zombie Prom” because the sets were very intricate, so a lot of building was involved compared to “Bye Bye Birdie.” And they had to figure out certain mechanisms for some scenes
during the show.
He said that the hardest musical he’s ever worked on was “Bye Bye Birdie” because they had to figure out how to move all the set pieces quickly and efficiently while the show was running, so there was lots of trial and error involved.
If any of this has been interesting to you, you should either check out one of their musicals or, if you’re able to, work on one of the musicals.
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