I'm a senior in the theatre program at the University of Utah and a long time fan of Jeff Wayne's WOTW. I once had this crazy idea to stage a production of Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of: The War of the Worlds. After a few years of college and no further ideas, I've jumped headlong into the production. I started emailing the Jeff Wayne music group in London in October 2010 and managed to negotiate all the necessary royalties and agreements.
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| From WOTW |
I want to stage Jeff Wayne's WOTW as a multimedia performance, including Music, Dance, Theatre, Film and Visual Art. The performance has two goals; to allow University of Utah Department of Fine Arts students to collaborate with one another and to raise awareness of Jeff Wayne's WOTW in Utah and in the US using the recent trend of multimedia performance.
I have secured the rights to perform the show through Jeff Wayne's company and I have secured Studio 115 in the University of Utah's Performing Arts Building on May 5th 2011. I have also adapted a script from the album, keeping the lyrics and dialogue verbatim, but adding directions for staging. Now the fun work begins...
I need a total of 4 fighting machine puppets to be handled by three puppeteers (one for each leg). I have an idea that one leg will be used to hold the puppet up (that is to say it won't bend) and the other two will articulate in order to make the machine "walk." If anyone has built large-scale fighting machine replicas, I would love to know how you did it.
I need one martian puppet to emerge from a crashed cylinder. Really I just need some disk-like eyes and a lot of tentacles. A children's theatre recently produced "The Little Mermaid" perhaps I can steal some tentacles from them. Once again if anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.
Finally, I need lots and lots of multimedia to be projected on screen behind the performance. I'm doing some video work of my own in order to establish locations or showcase the beauty of the Earth but I would love to feature some fan art. If anyone has any still images, animations, drawings or videos that you would like to be showcased, I would love to display your work on the screen during the show.
This project is all about collaboration and the idea that Jeff Wayne's WOTW needs to be showcased to the world. Any help or advice you can offer would be great and I'll try to keep everyone updated on the production process as well.
Thank you so much!
Connor
