- [Promoter] Live from your public media studios, WVIA Presents "Keystone Edition Arts," a public affairs program that goes beyond the headlines to address issues in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania.

This is "Keystone Edition Arts."

And now, Erika Funke.

- Welcome to "Keystone Edition Arts," where we'll part the curtains and step backstage for a very special tour.

Roger DuPuis leads the way.

(transition whooshing) (upbeat music) - [Roger] Santo Loquasto was born in Wilkes-Barre in 1944.

In 2023, he was in the first class inducted into the Luzerne County Arts and Entertainment Hall of Fame.

Between those two statements lies a wealth of experience and accolades.

One of his early jobs was a scenic designer for the Broadway plate "That Championship Season" written by Scranton native Jason Miller.

Since then, Loquasto has worked steadily establishing a reputation for designing collaboratively in theater, film, dance, and opera.

In 1977, when he won his first Tony Award, Loquasto described his approach to set design, saying the scenery should aid revealing the point of view of the play and the production.

The way the furniture and spaces are put together can create tensions that illuminate what the actors are doing.

A graduate of King's College, Loquasto returned for a visit with theater students in 2017.

He told them about seeing "Hello Dolly!"

on Broadway in 1966.

Many years later, Loquasto received the Tony Award for best costume design for the revival of the same musical.

This award joined three previous Tony Awards for costume and scenic design.

Loquasto also has received Academy Award nominations for his production and costume design in several Woody Allen movies.

He was the production designer for "Big" and "Desperately Seeking Susan" among many other films.

His work designing sets and costumes extends to ballet.

He's collaborated with a few recognizable names, including Twyla Tharp, Jerome Robbins, and Mikhail Baryshnikov enriching the performing arts world with his unique vision and expertise.

For "Keystone Edition Arts," I'm Roger DuPuis, WVIA News.

- One of the stories told most frequently on stages across our region is "Cinderella."

The Community Theater League in Williamsport gives us a key image with the show poster for their March, 2024 production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella".

How about that for a glass slipper?

In September, 2023, Music Box Playhouse in Swoyersville was pleased to present the Broadway musical "Cinderella", longtime home of one of our guests.

In December, 2024, the Scranton Shakespeare Festival adapted "Cinderella" and prepared an original panto version hoping to establish the British tradition here in the States.

And Emmy award-winning lighting designer Dennis M. Size returned to his hometown for the Ballet Theater of Scranton production of "Cinderella" in May of 2019.

There have been many other Cinderellas losing slippers on stages regionwide.

We might ask though, how many times is a shoe or a pair of shoes in the spotlight like that?

The "Wizard of Oz" too, of course, but even when we're aware of ballet dancers and their point shoes, they're not part of the storyline.

They're designed to support the dancers so they can tell the tale.

We are shining the spotlight on shoes and other aspects of stage production that matter very much, but which when they're done so well and are part of an artistic whole, don't necessarily stand out.

We welcome as our guests, Michael Gallagher, board Member Emeritus and former technical director of the Music Box Playhouse in Swoyersville, award-winning set and lighting designer and recipient of the Paul Harris Fellowship from the Rotary Foundation of Rotary International in recognition of tangible and significant assistance given for furtherance of better understanding and friendly relations among peoples of the world.

And Megan Esty, a graduate of the University of Scranton with a double major in theater and communications.

She went on to New York where she worked as a freelance dresser wardrobe supervisor and she has since become a full-time production supervisor in the costume department at the Metropolitan Opera.

We'll also meet Stephen Hendrickson, who is retired Tunkhannock.

He's been a production designer and art director in film and television since the 1980s, known for "Wall Street," "Arthur," "the Muppets," "Take Manhattan" and many others.

Welcome Megan and Michael.

We're so glad to have you both with us.

Megan, before we get to the Metropolitan Opera, tell us how you became excited about theater and costumes and props back home here in Scranton.

- Sure, I've always been involved in theater in some way.

I started as a dancer very young.

And my mom is really into community theater and has always been a part of that.

So it just was always in my life.

And I went to school at the University of Scranton and I majored in theater and it was truly the best experience of my life.

And it just fills me with such joy to do it full-time now.

- Wow, did you do tech things when you were at the university?

Did you act, did you do costume the whole spread?

- Yeah, at the University of Scranton, they have a very well-rounded program where even if you want to specialize in technical work, you still do have to perform every now and then.

So I did act once or twice, but I primarily focused on stage management and wardrobe, and working in the costume and wardrobe department was what made me the happiest.

- Now we started out by talking about and playing with the notion of Cinderella and her lost slipper.

The Met has done "Cendrillon" by Massenet and "La Cenerentola" by Rossini over the years, but you are dealing with shoes each and every day at productions where the shoe is not center stage.

What are you responsible for?

- I am a production supervisor at the Metropolitan Opera, and I specialize in the shoes for the chorus men and women, the actor men, the children's chorus, stage hands, and the animal handlers.

So I cover all of those departments and make sure their shoes are in good shape and that they still fit and they're comfortable.

- What about then, what makes a good shoe then?

Because we know about the stresses of whether you're a chorus member or you are a dancing in an opera.

What do you look for?

- We look for well-made shoes (chuckling) that have good support in them.

Some of our foresters or performers have a wider toe box, so sometimes we have to work to get shoes that are wide enough for them, 'cause they stand in these shoes for hours and hours.

Like the operas are relatively long-ish for performances and the rehearsal period is long too.

So we wanna make sure that they're comfortable.

And sometimes we have shoes custom made too, so we'll measure their feet and have shoes made for the performer.

- What about the design of the shoes?

Now you are excited about the upcoming production?

In fact, the day after we talk, tomorrow in this time as we're meeting about the opening soon to be of the Met Premier of "Moby-Dick" by Jake Heggie what about the shoes?

Tell us what you have to do and what you might tell us about the shoes if we go to the HD if it's there.

- The shoes play a very important role in "Moby-Dick."

The are all sailors on a ship, and so the shoes are very distressed and they look worn in.

But "Moby-Dick" was an interesting challenge because the performers have to climb ropes that are 26 feet in the air.

So they wanted the shoes for rehearsal as early as possible so that they could get comfortable climbing in them and making sure that they can take them on and off relatively easily and that they'd be safe.

We have to put safety rubber on the bottom of all the shoes to make sure that there's enough traction to keep the performers safe the entire time.

- What about the research?

Do you, in your position, have to do any research to make sure that the period is right and the image is right of the shoes?

- I don't always do the, we have a resident costume designer who I work with, Sylvia Nolan, so sometimes I'll research out, like sourcing shoes as options to bring to her.

If somebody needs a pair of riding boots or, you know, ankle boots, colonial style shoes, I'll source them and then bring them to our resident designer and she will ultimately make the decision.

Or sometimes she'll source something different and give me that and say, this is what we would like to try for the performer.

So I'll order the shoes and I'll have a shoe fitting for the performer.

- Now you said shoes are important in "Moby-Dick," but we all know the story and Ahab has only one leg.

Is the leg that is not his part of your, well you said he's a principal, so that's not your assignment, but it is key, isn't it, to get comfortable and get him fitted for the wooden leg?

- Yeah, that performer is a principal artist, so he doesn't fall under my bracket, but I have seen Ahab's leg and it's very intricate and interesting how they put it on him.

And I have so much respect for him as an artist because he has to, you know, he just works with one leg and has to balance on his other.

And the leg itself is like a work of art.

It's amazing.

- Wow, wow, Megan, we will come back and maybe ask you about a special, we hope to have time to ask you about a special story behind the scenes story about shoes.

But we have Stephen Hendrickson who has retired to Wyoming County, where he often does marvelous dioramas for the Dietrich Theater in Tunkhannock.

And he paid a visit to the WVIA radio studio in 2021 to talk about his work in film and TV, and later to give WVIA producer Kris Hendrickson a tour of his miniature stage sets at the Dietrich.

(transition whooshing) (bright music) - The theater was a natural part of my life.

When I got to New York, I started at the very bottom of the rung as a painter on film crews.

And eventually somebody asked, "Can anybody here draft?"

So they took me up to the art department and since that day, I never left.

This is the lobby gallery of the Dietrich Theater in Tunkhannock.

And there are six showcases that on a monthly basis have different of local art, local history.

And then at Christmas, they're specifically decorated for the Christmas season.

And about 17 years ago, I was asked if I wanted to do one.

And being a stage designer in the beginning of my career, I figured, well, these are sort of like stages.

I can make a little theater and put it in there with a Christmas theme.

And I enjoyed doing it and the community loved having it.

So it sort of became a habit and it grew and grew.

(Christmas music) This is a setting of the inside of a clock tower, which is a wonderful both architectural space and mechanical space.

I'm always looking for characters to put in the models because it starts with having a story of what the characters are up to.

And then I found these little monkey musician characters.

Suppose the monkeys have run amok in the clock tower on Christmas Eve, so that's what I titled it.

It's Christmas Eve mischief in the clock tower, who let the monkeys in?

We were in Paris and I was actually thinking of a possible production of "Hunchback of Notre Dame," so I thought I better get up there.

So we did, and you climb this enormously tiny but high stone stairway that circles around and get all the way up.

And you are in the top of those towers and you're right beside the bells.

You could practically touch the bells that are the size of this room.

And it's all giant wooden beams that we're used to in barn structures, but bigger, just unbelievable the scale of it.

So it isn't a clock tower, but it is a similar tower.

So that architecture informed what I was doing here in the proscenium surround here with all these beams and this structure that holds up the clockwork.

"Muppets," you're in a fantasy world.

You're in a dream world, you know, and things can look like a fantasy and can look like a dream because in fact they are.

And "The Muppets Take Manhattan" had a very specific color scheme of blue and pink that comes outta baby colors.

And that was a theme through the costumes and through the sets, even through the lighting.

Even though the muppets move around in a real world, you see them on the streets of New York and so forth.

And you can't make the streets of New York blue and pink, but in the areas that you can control, you do control it.

(upbeat music) Other movies are all, have at least one foot in reality.

And "Wall Street" has both feet in reality, except when we see Bud's apartment being built, we're building a fantasy for him of a power player who isn't quite there yet at very nouveau riche in a weird way.

There are all these steps we went through to sort of try to satirize 80s decorating, which had a whole deconstructive thing going on.

So this was obviously a critique of 80s excess and greed.

- Stephen Hendrickson, longtime set designer and art director for films, like "The Muppets Take Manhattan," "Wall Street" and "Arthur."

And we were so glad to visit his little, little sets.

Michael Gallagher is an award-winning scenic designer who studied with the distinguished set and lighting designer Klaus Holm at Wilkes.

Gallagher went on to establish a theater program in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, and honed his skills at the Colorado Springs Opera Festival.

He also designed sets for Scranton Public Theater, Theater Under the Tent on Montage Mountain, and the Masonic Temple.

He retired after 36 years at the Music Box Playhouse and is now a board member Emeritus.

And along the way he played some unforgettable characters, Hansel in Lederhosen, is that right Michael?

- It is quite a sight I was.

- So good to have you with us.

- Thank you.

- You are known as a wonder worker among those who are part of the theater community in this region.

You've created sets of all shapes and sizes for the admittedly, admittedly small stage at Music Box and you amaze audiences and crew alike, whether you take us to "Anatevka" or "River City" or to "The Land of Oz."

And we want to know what drew you to the art of scenic and theater design in the first place?

- When I was a very young lad, probably when I was 17, I was invited to go to the first summer theater workshop in this region for high school students, for juniors and seniors at Wilkes University and then Wilkes College at the 2-year-old Dorothy Dickson Darte Center.

It was a state of the art theater and one of the finest facilities on the eastern seaboard at that time.

Believe it or not, The National Endowment of the Arts provided millions of dollars for colleges throughout the country to have a workshop where they would bring high school students together with graduate students who were teachers of English and theater and high schools.

And the idea was to try to improve theater in high schools.

They'd bring us together with these graduate students, the graduate students would direct us in plays.

And we were supposed to go back to our high schools and to try to lay a foundation for the improvement of theater in high schools.

In the 70s, rather the 60s, there wasn't a whole lot of theater happening in high schools.

This workshop was six weeks all day.

We went from nine to nine.

And the great thing was, that's where I learned to love.

I mean, I was a kid in a candy store.

This theater is magnificent and it still remains one of the best facilities in this region.

It had a full fly system.

It had this amazing new lighting system that even Broadway theaters didn't have that Heim have.

And so it was a wonderful experience and I did have, I broke in being not in performing, but we had to, all of us in students become a part of one of the technical aspects of the show.

One week I'd work on lights, the next week we were in props, the week after that set construction and lighting.

One of the things I remember was that we were building a flat for one of the shows, and one of the student directors asked me to get a pair of pliers.

I went to the tool room and came back with a crescent wrench.

And he looked at me and he said, "Do you know the difference between a crescent wrench and a pair of pliers?"

And I said, "I guess not."

What I did was a kid who was with me who knew a lot about tools said, "I'll take you to the tool room and I'll tell you exactly what everything is."

But that's where I started.

I went to Wilkes then and I loved being part of the backstage crew and building sets, and.

- What about Klaus Holm, was he there at the time?

- Klaus Holm when I was a sophomore, or junior, 1970, he became the technical director and scenic designer for the theater.

The reason why he got there is he was working for a firm called the Donald Oenslager's, a Theater Consultant Company.

Now, Donald Oenslager was one of the greatest designers of the 20th century in America.

So Klaus worked for him in addition to having been also a set designer and lighting designer himself in New York.

(coughing) And also he also designed industrial lighting for the 1960 world sphere, for example.

He did the, all of the outside lighting, the lighting stanchions and everything.

(coughing) I'm sorry.

And so Klaus was the first person I met who I ever saw paid a backdrop and he taught me how to do that.

He was a great scenic painter and he had consulted on the building of the theater.

So Al Groh, who was the director of the theater, brought him in then to become the technical director.

And Klaus, took it up.

He was a great mentor, a great teacher.

- What about working with Jason Miller, the Pulitzer Prize winner for that championship season?

You actually designed a set with him, for him.

- Yes, I did, I designed lots of sets and I was watching you the introduction before, in the beginning of the show of Santo Loquasto.

Santo Loquasto, I had met very briefly once at Montage Mountain when they were doing this Pennsylvania summer theater festival.

'Cause many of Jason Miller's old cronies and friends would come to visit him, including Santo at one point.

And the irony of this situation is that Santo was from Wilkesboro, graduated from Kings, went to Yale.

Jason Miller I think also went to Yale as well.

And he's from Scrantonm Santo Loquasto was from Wilkesboro.

But they get together in their first ventures to collaborate on that championship season in New York in 1972, I think it was one of Loquasto's first set designs and of course a great pool of surprise, and Tony Award-winning play that Jason Miller wrote that championship season.

- Now we have the image of what you designed, what were some of, now we don't have lots of times, but what were some of the considerations that you, knowing this area and knowing that the play is set in Scranton, what are some of the things that you had to take into consideration for your design?

- Well, in reading the play, of course there are very specific areas that dictate where the steps are, where the entrances are, where this very famous table of this golden trophy cup has to be placed.

And well, there it is.

And there there was a rack of rifles as I remember that he wanted to have placed on there.

And he did mention to me that he had remembered glass windows, stained glass windows that in both in the front door and a window that he'd liked to integrate into the set.

And it was a bit in intimidating for me to do this set, knowing that there was this man, Santo Loquasto, who had designed it for him and won a Tony Award nomination himself.

I said, "I don't know if I can can do anything like this."

It was quite different than the experience that, and I did see that production in New York.

It was wonderful.

It was a great play, great set.

Fortunately, the difference was that we were doing this in a thrust stage on a tent.

We could only go so high because at the top of the set should scratch the tent.

You could rip the tent wide open.

Everything had to be padded at the top.

But it worked.

And I do know that at one point when I met very briefly, Santo Loquasto, Jason did mention I had designed this shelf and he said, and Santo Loquasto said, "And I understand from Jason, you did a very nice job."

I thanked him so much for that compliment.

He is from everybody, I've known people who have worked with him, early teachers, and they've all said he was a wonderful man.

- Wow, well, we are so pleased to have those stories because we wouldn't know otherwise, Michael.

And again, people do respect you so much.

- Oh, thank you.

- For what you're able to do.

Not just in the small space of Music Box, but under a tent, for example.

A little theater.

Megan, we come back to you and just say, do you have a story, kind of a neat shoe story that you can tell and share with us about the Met?

- I think what comes to me was, most recently, when we were doing "The Magic Flute" in December, a chorus man come to me, and his feet have been changing a little bit this year.

And it happens, you know, as we age and sometimes our chorus ladies get pregnant and like, your feet get wider and that's normal and it's okay, but he was very self-conscious about it.

And I worked with our designer and I worked with the chorister through multiple like conversations and some shoe fittings with him.

And I was able to get him into two new pairs of shoes for this show.

And he came to me one day and said, "I have to tell you, I always feel like I'm going to stage missing something.

I always feel like I'm missing something.

And what I realized that what I'm missing is that my feet were in so much pain and now they're not, because you fixed that for me.

And I'm grateful that you've made me more comfortable performing, so."

- Thank you.

- It's not a fun story but it's a very touching one.

I love that I can do that for my performers.

- It is wonderful.

And you know, we thank you, Michael.

We thank you, Megan.

And this at every episode of "Keystone Edition" is available on demand and on our YouTube channel, and now as a special audio podcast.

So we're grateful that you watch.

We're grateful that you subscribe.

And I'm Erika Funke, and we're going to close with just a little bit more of Stephen Hendrickson's sets at the Dietrich Theater in Tunkhannock.

(upbeat music)