Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, 1989

As I had noted in a post back in August there was a lot of staff changes in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s.

In the fall of 1988 we had gotten a new costume design teacher who would stay only two years before moving on.

In the fall of 1989 we got a new scene designer who was very much different from the previous designer.

Drew Francis was a very good designer and very skilled draftsman.

He had gone to Brockport as an undergrad back in the 1970’s and went on to Grad school for his MFA at Brandeis University. Before returning to Brockport he assisted Broadway Designer Howard Bay who had taught at Brandeis University.

For me it was a bit of a shock when I saw the plans for the first production when I got a complete set of designs and working drawings.

The previous designer often did not do drawings but just made models of what he wanted.

One time when I asked for a drawing he just busted up the model and photo copied it.

Needless to see it was not to scale nor was the pieces even and I still had to make a best guess what he wanted or what would work.

With Drew there was no guessing.

For me the biggest challenge was trying to figure out if we could afford to build it or if we had enough time or students skilled enough to build what he wanted.

We talked it over made some changes and the students worked hard to build some very nice sets that year.

The first play of the 1989-90 season was Come Back to the 5& Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

The play was set both in 1955 and 1975 with two overlap casts.

The set was big and fun to build.

Like many productions we were able to use a few pieces from pieces sets and made new walls and set pieces. 

We had floor tiles that had been made for Miss Julie about four years before but needed to make about 1/3 more.

Yes, we still have the tiles and they have been used many times over the years and I just saw the 5'-0” stack of them about two weeks ago when I was in the basement storage.

We rented a working jukebox for the show and after it was put onto the set it was decided that it was too big, too prominent.

To fix it we cut out the platform area under the jukebox and dropped it down about 8 inches or so to the floor.

It looked good, worked well as I remember it the glass on it got broken when it was being returned and we had to pay to replace it.

I enjoyed the play and liked all the small details added to the set.

This set and many of the ones that followed while Drew was here were much bigger and highly detailed, often more work, but in the end they looked great and were fun to work on.

***