Yeomen of the Guard Publicity

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Publicity for "Yeomen of the Guard"

I knew I wanted a tower. As the director says, "the Tower itself is a pretty important symbol of both control and imprisonment; in some ways it's almost like another character in the story at times, and people sing about it a fair bit."

Incidentally, the lighting designer needed someone to design a tower shadow gobo. The shadow would spill across the stage, from DSL to USR, and that requires the tower to be DSL (Fig. 1) and the moon to be floating high over the Z-Center. People suggested using ray-tracing software to figure this out. After many failed attempts to make a respectable looking shadow by hand, I gave in and learned how to use POV-Ray.

I learned how to use POV-Ray on a Tuesday night, and by early Wednesday morning, I had a tower and shadow, as requested. The more I looked at the scene, however, the more I liked it for the graphic. It was bold, simple, and embodied the show. I added the "clown eyes" that Wednesday night, and a graphic was born.

The plane is blood red because it *is* the Tower of London we're talking about after all, and because it reminded me of a scene I helped read at auditions:

. . . this wicked Tower, like a cruel giant in a fairy-tale, must
be fed with blood, and that blood must be the best and
bravest in England, or it's not good enough for the
old Blunderbore. Ugh!

Nominally reproduced in color, it also works in grayscale. For personal printers, I suggest using the toner-friendly version of the grayscale graphic.

Color graphic