Sarasota Hobbit - Day 5

We're back in the theatre and had our second last dress rehearsal, now with the full orchestra, last night. There are many little details falling into place. You'd be amazed at how many notes come out of these run throughs. When you consider all the elements: lighting, costume, sets, orchestra, performers(80 of them at that), there's a lot of room for small things to go wrong.
We are working on using a microphone for the person singing Smaug, the dragon, to give a more "dragony" booming sound - even with a bit of echo. Sounded really good, though ther are still some things to work out. Evryday the dragon puppet has more splendour and last night it even spewed smoke from its mouth. COOL!
The dragon puppet was made many years ago by the set designer, Jeff, but the props manager Marlene (from Quebec!) is the one who is jazzing it up. She also made many great swords, spears, clubs and countless other props. You can see some of them above.
Barney is the head costume designer and you can see a rack of his spider costumes and the ornate shield of Thorin the Dwarf. This is a picture of Barney working on a new Gollum mask. Our Gollum is doing a great job, but there isn't enough time to do a big make-up job on her, so we're going to help the situation with a Gollum mask (her nose and mouth will be visible when completed) an a bald cap with string hair....ooooh, creepy...