(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.