Museum’s Visual Artist Creates ‘Fleet Street’ Set For Westfield Playhouse

By: Betsy Reason

By day, Jay Ganz is a visual artist and member of the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis’ Exhibit Design Team creating design visualizations and production drawings.

When he’s not creating for the museum, he is highly sought after for his design talents to create sets for local community theaters.

Ganz’ most recent set design work can be seen during Main Street Productions’ “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” which opened Thursday and continues through Oct. 1 at Basile Westfield Playhouse.

I attended a dress rehearsal, and the set was amazing.

Playhouse patrons will be delighted, and horrified, by this awesome and eerie show that is set on Fleet Street in 19th century London, where this musical features nearly two dozen cast members singing 30 numbers in the two-and-one-half-hour show with one intermission.

Many months ago, Ganz began the thought process of creating the show’s set with scenes that included a Dock and London Street, Mrs. Lovett’s Pie Shop, Judge Turpin’s House, St. Dunstan’s Marketplace, a Basement Bakehouse and Fogg’s Aslyum.

Ganz read the script a couple of times, noting place and physicality of the production. Then he met with the show director, Noblesville’s Andrea Odle, to get a feel for her concept of the show, followed by getting to know the space at the theater. “You need to know the space intimately to work with its capabilities and limitations,” he said.

“Once I have these steps behind me, I will research the period and location and begin 3D sketching. I work digitally, so I tend to go straight to 3D modeling the set with pieces I have in mind, fitting them together in the space I created in 3D software. Then working out color, texture and final form.”

Ganz’ spent about 60 to 80 hours spread over two months on the design project.

“Once I have a completed set, I break it down again to individual units ready for creating detailed pages for size and paint specifications,” Ganz said.

He handed off the 32 pages of design drawings to Andrea Odle’s husband, Mason Odle, also a volunteer who headed up set construction for “Sweeney Todd.”

Being that scenery should support the narrative of the production and not overshadow it, he contemplated simplicity and as much open space as possible for the large cast, “at the same time conveying the time period and location,” Ganz said.

“I wanted the feel of a place where the lower classes live and work and where the middle class pass through,” he said. “That part of London, that was along the river and looked down from the rest of the city in the distance. That place is known as Fleet Street.”

It’s Ganz’ first time designing a “Sweeney Todd” set. He said, “I had always wanted to attempt the show. So when Andrea (Odle) asked me to design for this production, I was more than happy to.”

It’s also Ganz’ first time designing a set for Basile Westfield Playhouse. “I was happy to get the chance to design for their relatively new space.” (The Playhouse opened in 2020 moving from a former church-turned-theater on Indiana 32 in Eagletown.)

“If I had to choose something as a favorite, I guess it would be the ground-row silhouette of London towering over and looking down on the location and people of Fleet Street and the walkway that circles the space essentially trapping these people in their existence,” Ganz said.

He didn’t base his design from any other “Sweeney Todd” production. “I wanted it to be my own,” Ganz said. “That being said, it is harder these days to research for a production without being influenced by images of other productions. Probably the only thing I may have borrowed as an idea for was the slide for the (barber’s) chair). But even that, I had to adapt to fit this design and space.”

Ganz is referring to scenes where Todd, a barber, kills his unsuspecting customers by slitting their throats, then sending them through a trap door behind the barber’s chair to the basement. “The slide was born out of utility,” Ganz said. “The chair had to be elevated as per the script, being that the barbership was over Mrs. Lovett’s pie shoppe. This adds to the drama of disposing of Todd’s victims. In addition, we needed a safe way to transition the actors from the chair to backstage safely and effectively.”

Ganz designs three to four sets a year for theaters. Currently, he’s been working with Anderson University at Byrum Hall designing a set for “Side by Side by Sondheim” musical, directed by Kenny Shepard; and “Nunsense,” directed by Cynthia Collins. He will also be designing a spring production of “The Larime Project” for Anderson University.

Ganz has designed many set for local community theaters. He designed the set of The Belfry Apprentice Players’ “Frozen Jr.” in 2022 and “Honk: The Musical” in 2019; “Savannah Sipping Society” in 2019, “Brighton Beach Memoirs” in 2018 and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” musical in 2017.

Ganz’ love for theater design came many years ago, growing up in Alma, Wis., a small river town on the Mississippi River. “I guess you could say I have had the theater bug since I was in junior high. My mother was into theater at the university she was attending, so after school we were always doing something at the university theater when she was involved in a production,” he has said. His first theater experience was on stage as a character in “A Christmas Carol” produced at the university. Ganz graduated in 1978 from Blair High School in Blair, Wis.

Loving theater, he went on and studied scenic design and technical direction at Rochester Community College in Rochester, Minn., and St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minn. In 1983, he moved to St. Paul, Minn., and spent 11 years working freelance in many of the theaters around St. Paul and Minneapolis.

“I did everything from construction to sound design, but my first love was scenic design,” Ganz has said. “It was something I did that I could truly step back and see the results as they progressed to opening night. And that is the process I love. Especially when it can be realized well.”

In between school and moving to the Twin Cities, he went back to Rochester and worked for two years for his old professor at college as a designer and technical director for the college theater. His first design was for “Of Mice and Men.”

Ganz came to the Children’s Museum in 1995 as lead technician and scenic designer for the museum’s Lilly Theater. In 2003, he was asked to become part of the museum’s Exhibit design and production team as a design draftsman.

In his 28th year at the Children’s Museum, Ganz is involved in the design process for all exhibits at the museum, the most recent being “Sacred Places,” a multi-faith exhibit highlighting several religions and their community location from around the world. The museum is currently in the middle of producing a new holiday experience, “Winter Faire,” slated to open mid-November. “If I had to highlight an exhibit that I had the most influence on, it would be “Beyond Spaceship Earth,” a mockup of the interior and exterior of the international Space Station and provides visitors a glimpse of what it is like for people to live and work in space.”

He also freelance designs for the Phipps Center for The Arts in Hudson, Wis., a theater for which he worked before moving to Indianapolis. He’s currently working on a set for “Tuck Everlasting” and “Arsenic and Old Lace” for the Wisconsin theater.

Ganz said of Basile Westfield Playhouse’s “Sweeney Todd” set-design project that he doesn’t like to take all of the credit for the beautiful sets that are constructed by volunteers from his designs.

He attended opening night of “Sweeney Todd” on Thursday at the Playhouse and saw the finished set for the first time. “I was pleased with the way the production turned out. Andrea did a phenomenal job in the direction of the show, and Mason executed the build beautifully.”

He said, “It has been great working with Andrea and Mason and the Westfield Playhouse on this production, and I hope to get the chance to do it again sometime.”

-Betsy Reason writes about people, places and things in Hamilton County. Contact The Times Editor Betsy Reason at [email protected]