The Making of THE TOOTH FAIRY

Saturday we closed our sold out, world premiere of THE TOOTH FAIRY. This show was the result of a collaboration between our Director of Children’s Theatre, Tina Jo Wallace, our Musical Director for the main stage, Scott Bradley (who composed the music), and the director and musical director of THE TOOTH FAIRY, Bekki Jo Schneider and Ron Breedlove.

Some notes from Tina Jo:
About a year ago, while reading stacks of plays to choose our new season, I decided I wanted to write a show about the tooth fairy. Both of my daughters are young and losing teeth left and right, and the tooth fairy has been the subject of much discussion in my home. Through further conversations in the lunch room at their school, I learned that there was a huge variety of theories about this magical fairy among kids from 5-10 years of age. I thought these would be great material for a musical.

At the same time, our producer, Bekki Jo, was trying to find a show that would be a good fit for the city wide YES! Fest happening in 2015. The Yes! Fest is a year-long celebration including various arts and cultural organizations around the area to promote a “year of environmental sustainability”. An idea was born. I already knew that a big part of the show would be centered around the kids meeting up in school to compare notes about the fairy. Since they were already going to be having school scenes, why not have those scenes focused on science lessons on the environment? In writing these school scenes, I even consulted my daughters’ textbooks to see what exactly they were expected to learn.

In addition to this, I really wanted to include some of these amazing kids and their theories in the actual show. My first draft of the script had voiceover lines written in the beginning, middle and end. I thought that I would have some of the “Derby Dinner kids” (children of our staff like mine) give me their thoughts and I would record them for these parts of the show. Later in the process, I found out that we would be having video screens on the stage for our evening production of BONNIE & CLYDE. We then decided to have a Facebook contest where kids could submit a video on our page with their ideas. I then edited those videos to create those portions of the production.

Below are the three videos that we used. For those of you who saw the show, you will notice that the first video is longer than it was in the actual production. This was the first draft of the video. Through rehearsal, we found it to be a bit long, so it was further edited.

I want to thank all the children (and their parents) who took the time to submit their videos! You were seen by over 6500 kids and families. I also want to thank Scott Bradley, Bekki Jo Schneider, Ron Breedlove, and the cast, crew and designers of THE TOOTH FAIRY for all their work on this new production!

Categorised in: Uncategorized

This post was written by JUMP Agency