James W. Johnson

In the summer of 2024, I built the set for Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George at Santa Fe Playhouse. Most of the set looked like it was made from thousands of small 3″x3″ blocks. We made that texture with a CNC router instead of by hand.

I was the technical director and lead fabricator on the build. I made the build drawings, programmed and ran the CNC, built the walls, and led the install. The only thing I didn’t do was paint.

The idea came from the show itself. The first act is about Georges Seurat painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Seurat built his images out of thousands of small dots of color. The block walls were our version of those dots.

The Challenge

Scenic designer D. Craig M. Napoliello sent full design drawings and paint elevations. My job was to turn those into build drawings and figure out how to execute the design on budget.

Three things made this hard:

• The texture. Hundreds of blocks at different depths had to read as one surface from the audience.
• Budget and time. Both were tight. The build crew was three people, including me and the painter.
• The building. Santa Fe Playhouse is an old adobe theater. The walls aren’t square, the stage floor isn’t level, and there is almost no wing space.

Testing the Idea

The designer’s first plan was to cut real 3″x3″ blocks and glue them onto theatrical flats. We advised against it. Dimensional lumber is never exactly the same size. A 1/32″ difference on one block doesn’t matter, but across hundreds of blocks, it adds up, and the grid would have drifted out of line.

So we cut a small test panel on the CNC to show the designer what the router could do. We carved the blocks into a solid panel instead of gluing them on, so every edge lined up and the grid stayed perfectly consistent.

We still used real cut blocks where they mattered. We built the exposed side returns from stacked, pre-cut blocks. That sold the illusion that the whole wall was made of solid pieces.

Carving the Blocks

We cut the panels on a ShopBot CNC router with a 1/4″ end mill. We built toolpaths in Fusion 360 and VCarve.

We made the panels from 3/4″ lumber-core plywood glued into thick blanks. The deepest blocks sat 2.25″ deep. That meant panels 2.5″ thick: three sheets of 3/4″ lumber core plus a 1/2″ backing. We made about a dozen of these blanks in different shapes and sizes.

The process change

Our first approach was to carve each block as its own pocket. It worked, but it had two problems:

• Every block got rounded inside corners from the round bit. That made the blocks look soft.
• It was slow. Each 4’x8′ panel took 4 to 5 hours on the machine. Across the whole set, that was weeks of CNC time we didn’t have.

So we flipped it. Instead of cutting block by block, we grouped the pattern by depth. Every block at one depth became a single set of pockets, cut in one pass. Then the next depth, and so on.

That change fixed both problems. The edges looked crisper, and each 4’x8′ panel dropped to about 60 minutes. That is roughly a 75% to 80% cut in machine time.

Finishes

We ran two main sets of tests with the designer and the Playhouse.

The wall gradient. The block walls shift in color from bottom to top. The gradient had to be subtle, so we tested it before committing to the full set. We used regular latex paint, mixed on site and in the shop.

The painted carpet. A large center platform sat inside the block wall. Behind it, the block texture gave way to a wall covered in painted high-pile carpet. The designer wanted a thick, organic texture there. We tested many types of carpet. The winner was a thrift store find that already had a random, organic pattern and a deep pile. In the shop the painted carpet read blue and white. On stage, Zac Goin’s lighting and Taylor Edelle Stuart’s projections turned it into deep green foliage. It made a strong upstage moment where actors could enter and exit.

The turf. The stage floor and the platform were covered in artificial turf. The hard part was finding enough turf in one matching color to cover both.

Load-In

Every piece of the set had to fit through a 6′ wide by 6’8″ tall door. The tallest walls stood 12′. That meant breaking a large set into many small pieces, then joining them back into seamless walls on stage.

Load-in took three days: two for install and one for notes. A different crew of three handled it. We shared the stage with lighting, props, and stage management the whole time.

The building fought us. The adobe walls aren’t square, and the stage floor is far from level, so lining up the many seams and getting the walls to stand on their own was hard. The theater also has almost no wing space. The block walls doubled as legs to block sight lines, which left very little room behind them for stage jacks and bracing. A fair amount of the install was on-the-spot problem-solving.

What I Learned

• Test the process, not just the look. The test panel sold the idea to the designer. Changing how we toolpathed it is what made the schedule work.
• Lamination is its own job. Gluing up about a dozen 3-sheet panels was slow and hard to clamp. Some panels ended up with voids from uneven glue-up. Next time I’d plan a better clamping or press setup from the start.
• Budget for the season, not the show. Tight time and money drove a lot of choices here. Working with the theater on a full-season build budget would give each show more room.
• Plan for the building. In an old theater with no wings and an uneven floor, the install plan matters as much as the build.

Credits and Press

Sunday in the Park with George ran at Santa Fe Playhouse June 27 to August 4, 2024. Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine.

BroadwayWorld called the result a production where “we feel like we are drawn into the painting itself,” crediting the director, scenic designer, and costume designer. The review also noted that the lighting and projection effects “give the staging a dream-like feel and truly help to transport the audience into this world.” In Talkin’ Broadway, Dean Yannias wrote, “This production has an exceptional set design, terrific projections, and an amazing laser show.”

• Santa Fe Playhouse show page
• BroadwayWorld review, Jackie Camborde, July 2, 2024
• Pasatiempo preview, Spencer Fordin, June 21, 2024
• Talkin’ Broadway review, Dean Yannias