In The Business of

This was a super fun project -- I had the opportunity to direct, design, and build the set and props for CMU Music Composition student Chris Renaud's Junior recital, an original musical called "In The Business of". It's a beautiful, 1-hour musical about "discovery, generational wisdom, and how being a kind person can be all it takes to make someone's day." It takes place in an ice cream and waffle shop based on one of our favorite local shops.

We produced the show in WQED's Studio A, across the street from CMU. The design constraints were pretty tight -- we didn't have any budget for this show, so I tried to pull as much as I could from items that already existed and sourced a lot of set dec from our families and friends. This was also a passion project that I fit in to my full Electrical and Computer Engineering schedule of courses, so I tried to keep the labor to a minimum to ensure I could get it all done. We also needed to be able to load the show in and out within about one hour. I focused on keeping the design simple yet impactful; I chose three items to build and sourced the rest. I built an ice cream counter from wood leftover from a previous small-scale musical I built, a double-sided chalkboard that flipped during intermission to have a different message, and a "neon" sign that is revealed at the end of the show in an emotional renaming of the shop.

From a directing standpoint, we were incredibly fortunate to get two amazing actors for the two roles in the show (Matty Palmer, Liam P. Mulligan). However, one of the actors was only in town the day before the show and the day of the show, so most of the process was over Zoom. I sent a fully annotated script with blocking to our out-of-town actor, who learned most of the blocking before arriving in Pittsburgh. We worked in-person with our other actor.

We set out ~90 chairs for the production, and we were thrilled to experience the problem of running out of seats and needing to bring in more chairs. A video of the production is linked under the main project info!