Spin the Beast:
NIU technical theater whiz helps bring Disney cartoon to life

by Mark McGowan

For those whose experience with the tale of “Beauty and the Beast” starts and ends with Disney’s 1991 animated classic, the scene is unforgettable.

Beast, who has finally found true love despite his appearance and his temper, is swept up in a tornado of light, twirling toward an ominous sky as his fur, claws and fangs melt away to reveal the handsome prince within.

While the “turn” of events in the story might startle Belle, the actual on-screen transformation from animal to man is just another part of a cartoon where candlesticks, clocks and china tea pots talk, sing and dance. Anything is possible with animation.

Accomplishing the same feat with a human actor on the stage of a regional theater is another matter, though, and producers in Florida and Tennessee have turned to NIU’s Tracy Nunnally to simulate the magic.

Nunnally, technical director and assistant professor in the NIU School of Theatre and Dance, and four of his students designed and built a spinning mechanism perfect for changing furry beasts into charming princes – all done in front of an audience in less than 30 seconds.

“My Automation and Stage Machinery class worked on the mathematics behind it, and we tested it during the NAAFED (North American Association of Flying Effects Directors) workshop on campus the week after final exams,” Nunnally said. “It worked like a charm.”

The first unit was installed by Delbert Hall of Hall Associates, Inc., at the Cumberland County Playhouse in Crossville, Tenn., where the play opened June 18. Nunnally is at work building the second, which he will install next week at the Seaside Music Theater in Daytona Beach, Fla.

Cumberland County and Seaside are two of only five regional theaters with licenses to produce Disney’s Broadway version of its film (Cumberland received the nation’s first). The seventh longest-running show in Broadway history, “Beauty and the Beast” accrued nine Tony nominations in 1994, including one for Best Musical.

Nunnally’s original task was to come as close as possible to the effect created for Broadway, so he made a phone call to New York City. Their answer sent him and his students to the drawing board.

“It looks amazing to the audience,” he said of the Broadway spinning mechanism, “but how it works is not efficient.”

The solution from within the Stevens Building is relatively simple, although it’s an intense half-minute of work for the actor and crew members involved.

Beast is supported from above with aircraft cables that hook to a harness around his waist and are attached to a spinning shaft, known as a spreader bar, located near the ceiling.

He lies flat on the stage before he begins to rise – one or more members of the stage crew are tugging on the pulley-system cables – and rotates during his ascent thanks to the motor-driven spreader bar. Midway to the top, he must lift his body to a standing position by displacing his weight while also discreetly shedding his mask and fur and tossing them behind a curtain so the audience cannot see the costume fall.

When he reaches the stage floor again, he is the prince.

“Cumberland County loves it,” Nunnally said. “They think it’s just the greatest thing.”

Nunnally, who balances an incredibly busy schedule in the professional theater world along with his academic responsibilities to NIU, said his external commitments through Hall Associates endow students with knowledge and sometimes with material tools of the trade.

He and a graduate student recently returned from Atlanta, where they installed and operated special effects riggings for two circus performers at the Georgia World Congress Center.

This fall, he and some of his students will make a return trip to Knoxville, Tenn., to design, install, choreograph and operate flying effects for “The Living Christmas Tree,” an enormous event viewed live by 40,000 people and on television by thousands more.

“I always try to bring real projects into the classroom,” he said. “Theory’s great, but will it work? Will it work?”

7-12-04