Tag Archives: piano

How-to

Piano for Wild Party

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Every musical needs a piano, right? Of course, if you have a piano on stage and people are dancing, you’re going to want the people to dance on the piano as well. Such is the prop master’s life. I had to build a dance-able piano for Elon University’s production of The Wild Party, which closed a few weeks ago.

Appropriated Piano Parts
Appropriated Piano Parts

As it turns out, my father has taken apart a piano or two and kept the pieces in his barn. When I was visiting over Christmas, I picked up some of these parts, including the keyboard lid and a partial keyboard. While I probably could have faked the keys, the lid was a real find; it’s two pieces of solid oak cupped along the entire length. This shape would be hard to fake on my own, and it would be nowhere near as sturdy as the piece I found, which could support a person’s weight in the center without bending.

Shape and Structure
Shape and Structure

It needed to be strong and sturdy, but lightweight enough that it could be quickly turned and moved throughout the musical by the actors. The photograph above shows the beginning stages. I had to make the shape also serve as the structure, because there was not a lot of room to hide cross bracing or reinforcements.

Unpainted Piano
Unpainted Piano

The two-by-four in the center of the piano hides a pipe that leads down into the platform itself. This gave a pivot point to the piano so when the actors spun it around on the wagon, it would rotate on a fixed point.

Painted Piano
Painted Piano

The piano received a coat of black paint followed by a few coats of Sculptural Arts’ Plastic Varnish Gloss (one of my wife’s favorite products). You can see in the photo above that I added more facing to the front legs to make them appear like more traditional piano legs. On a real piano, these would be cut from solid wood, but on my prop piano, they are pieces of quarter-inch plywood and wiggle wood over top a leg made from two two-by-fours.

Wild, Wild Party
Wild, Wild Party

There are six people dancing on the piano in the photograph above. It featured throughout the musical, with people dancing on top, jumping up and off of it, and generally subjecting it to all sorts of abuse. I’m happy to say it sat there like a rock, never sagging or shaking no matter how hard they tapped or how much shimmy was in their shake.

 

 

 

How-to

Player Piano for Crazy for You

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Another project I worked on for Crazy for You at Elon University was a player piano. The piano sits against the wall of the saloon for a number of scenes. It has a couple of gags; when we first see it, a cowboy is playing a song on it, then gets up and walks away as the piano continues to play. Later, another cowboy fires a gun which hits the piano and causes it to start playing on its own again until it is kicked.

We began by looking for a real piano which we could take apart and modify. After a few weeks of unsuccessful searching, I decided I would just build one. After all, it needed to be a custom size to fit into the set, so transporting and modifying a real piano might be just as labor-intensive. The exterior of a piano is not really that complicated; it’s mostly a giant box with various levels of molding and details. The tricky part was getting it to play on its own.

Detail of the piano keyboard
Detail of the piano keyboard

One of the perks of working at a university is that you have a lot of crew members backstage who can operate tricks by hand. I knew the player piano could be worked manually from behind, so I just needed to figure out how to make that work. I cut out a set of piano keys from 3/4″ MDF and drilled a hole through each one. I ran a piece of metal rod through all the holes; I added a washer between each piece of MDF as a spacer. You can just make out the washers in the photograph above, catching a glint of light. This method allowed the MDF “keys” to pivot around the rod. I set the “keyboard” in the piano and added  blocks underneath to limit their movement to that which a piano has. You will notice the holes were drilled offset from the center. The extra length in the back gave the back extra weight; when you let go of a key in the front, gravity would pull the back down, returning the key to its natural position. This simple mechanism would allow someone in front to play the keyboard normally, and someone in the back could make the piano appear to play on its own by pushing the keys up.

A view from the back
A view from the back

In the view from the back, you can hopefully get a better sense of what is going on. The keys can be accessed from behind; pushing them up causes the keys in front to move down, as if the piano is playing itself. When you let go of the keys in behind, they return to their normal position. The piano was pushed up against the wall, and a hole was cut in the flat, allowing a crew member to reach in and “play” the piano without being seen by the audience. The music itself was played live by the orchestra.

The finished, unpainted piano
The finished, unpainted piano

The photograph above shows the piano immediately before it is painted. I managed to build the entire thing with scrap material, amazingly enough. The scene shop at Elon has a CNC machine, and it produces some wacky off-cuts. The scene shop usually doesn’t have time to trim the edges to make them square and usable again, but I do, so it gives me some nice large pieces of quality plywood and lauan.

The saloon in Crazy for You
The saloon in Crazy for You

The piano was painted to match a lot of the other woodwork used in the saloon scene. I cut some black keys out of black foam core and hot glued them on top of the white keys; they basically moved along with the white keys as they were played, but were not playable on their own. With the keys painted white and the piano painted with dark wood tones, it gave enough contrast that even the balcony seats could witness that the piano was playing on its own. All in all, it was a pretty fun prop for having been built in little over a day.