I did Chaperone last year and ended up buying the skates from online as well. It was a decent price, and I was able to use them this year for Footloose.
As far as the Murphy Bed, we punted and ended up using a fainting couch.
The plane was a larger undertaking. I wanted something impressive that would actually be stable enough for the 4 couples could actually ride on. We have no fly space, so we needed to wheel the plane on and off the stage from the wings. I collaborated with two of my dads, and we built a rolling biplane with a 16 foot wing span. The base platform was 4' x 12', with heavy duty casters placed every two feet. For the fuselage, we re-purposed the giant hair spray can from Hairspray, which housed a platform for Trix to sit on and the electrical controls. For the nose of the plane, we used an old dog igloo, to which we attached a ceiling fan (which rotated). The two lower wing sections (one on each side of the fuselage) were 4' x 6' platforms. We used 4"x4"s to attach them to the rolling base platform.
A local company donated 1/2" iron bars, and the local Home Depot was nice enough to cut and thread them for us free of charge. We had them cut in 4' lengths and used them to support the upper wing. We also used PVC pipe to make the cross braces in the mid wing section. The upper wing was one 4' x 16' piece, and was quite light. We made a frame of 2"x4", with a piece of thin plywood on the bottom, The rest we built up using foam insulation sheets. We then wrapped the upper wing in tyvek and painted it. One of the dads wired the wings with running lights. We painted a sky scene on tyvek and attached it as a skirt to hang from the lower wing to hide the bottom platform. It was stable enough to sit two couples on each lower wing section. The stage crew members who rolled it out ended up having to sit on the back end of the rolling platform as counter-weight for the actors on the lower wing. The crew members were hidden by the skirt. All told, we had 13 cast and crew members on the plane. I also had 10 girls from the ensemble with clouds cut out of foam core singing back up vocals on "I Do I Do In The Sky".
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Robert Ellis
North Richmond VA
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-04-2015 13:06
From: Phillip Goodchild
Subject: Drowsy Chaperone Skates
Can't wait to do this musical myself! It plays like a riot.
Wondering what you are figuring for the airplane? Remembering that we have the old adage, 'it's theatre...cheap can also be highly functional and basic and still be called 'directorial vision'....
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Phillip Goodchild
Valrico FL
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Original Message:
Sent: 01-30-2015 21:24
From: Nicole Pedroche
Subject: Drowsy Chaperone Skates
Yeah. We have a great scenic designer who's working on those issues for us. Do you mind sharing the link for the skates on Amazon?
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Nicole Pedroche
Drama Teacher
Covina CA
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