*

An explosion of spectacle dazzled Broadway this season. Special effects seemed to proliferate everywhere, ranging from simple old standbys (smoke billowing across the stage in La Bête and Wonderland, actors in the air in Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Brief Encounter, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) to puppetry (The Pee-wee Herman Show, Brief Encounter, War Horse) to stagecraft that combined set and lighting (Priscilla, Elf). The effects weren't necessarily unfamiliar — after all, Mary Poppins has flying actors; The Lion King has puppetry; and Billy Elliot has both. But directors and designers infused their productions with unusual levels of stage magic during this season.

Desert Queen

"I figured it should start out looking 'real' and be able to reveal its interior and change color in front of the audience," says the designer. "At various meetings with our production manager and tech people, we looked at how the bus might change color once it had graffiti sprayed on one side at its first scheduled stop."

On stage, the vehicle turns completely around and undergoes a paint job to erase the graffiti. "I wanted Priscilla — as the leading lady — to be able to have costume changes and get to have fun in the outback herself," says Thomson, "like the bubble bath she has during 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.'" He considered panels that could be added or taken away, but hit on the solution while on a bus in Sydney — "just watching the lights flick by," he says. "It suddenly dawned on me that we just had to do the color change with lights — not from outside sources but from within."

Buy the 2011 Tony Awards Playbill

Still, the effect needed refining from the original Sydney production to the final Broadway incarnation. In Sydney, "we came up with a series of LED clusters placed about eight inches apart that would give us bright Benday dots — I always remembered those dots from Roy Lichtenstein paintings," says Thomson. Eventually, he says, he used "much tighter LEDs that could display a reasonable image — giving us the opportunity to actually see the brushstrokes being applied."

The lighting effects occupied a good deal of his attention — and still do, though the production has opened. "With all of the set electrics, I wanted to use as much as I could from different eras — simple ropelite and Christmas bud lights right through to the most sophisticated LEDs available, that we could afford," he says. "I still want to add three colored fluoro tubes to the Coober Pedy Drive-In piece and some odds and ends, red bulbs, to the Hotel Woop Woop sign — we couldn't fit them in in New York, as the stage is so shallow."

The bus's most startling feature was, of course, the giant Swarovski-crystal-bedecked shoe. "The shoe moment was a very iconic sequence in the film," says Thomson, "and we somehow had to make it happen. Garry McQuinn, our producer, wanted the shoe to fly out into and over the audience, but we did compromise and just had it pop out a few rows." But with Nick Adams as Felicia, lip-synching an Italian aria on the shoe, the moment became a highlight of the show as well.