Creating the World of Cinderella

For the past six months, I have been busy creating a world where pumpkins become carriages, ordinary houses give way to enchanted forests, and a young woman can step into a completely different life before the clock strikes midnight.

I have been designing Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella for MainStage Irving-Las Colinas, and this has become one of the most exciting—and certainly one of the most ambitious—design projects I have taken on.
From the beginning, I knew I didn’t want this Cinderella to feel overly modern. I kept coming back to the wonderful theatricality of productions from the 1950s and 1960s, when enormous hand-painted drops could transport an audience somewhere completely different simply by flying into view. But as I developed the design, I found myself reaching even further back into theatrical history.

Old-Fashioned Stage Magic
Some of the theatrical effects we are using have their roots in the late 1800s, when designers relied on scenery, lighting, scrims, gauze, shadows, and carefully orchestrated reveals to create seemingly impossible transformations in front of a live audience. That became an important part of my concept for Cinderella. Rather than relying entirely on modern technology to create the magic, I wanted to explore how theater artists might have accomplished these moments more than a century ago. There is something wonderfully appropriate about using these old theatrical tricks to tell Cinderella. The story itself feels as though it belongs to another time, so why shouldn't some of the magic?

Making Something New Look Old
One of the things that makes this production particularly special is that we are using actual vintage theatrical drops alongside new scenery that I have designed specifically for the production. That presented an interesting challenge: The new scenery couldn't look new. The vintage drops have their own visual language—the painted highlights and shadows, exaggerated perspective, brushwork, and romantic quality of an era when scenery was created to be viewed from across a large auditorium.

Instead of trying to modernize the vintage scenery, I decided to go in the opposite direction. I designed the new scenic elements to belong in the same world. Trees, architectural pieces, Cinderella's home, palace elements, and other scenic details have been developed with that traditional painted-scenery aesthetic in mind. My goal is that when an original vintage drop appears alongside something we have created in 2026, the audience shouldn't immediately recognize where the old scenery ends and the new scenery begins. It has become a wonderful marriage between theatrical history and new design.

Solving the Pumpkin ProblemAnd then, of course, there was the pumpkin.
You can't design Cinderella without eventually confronting one very important question:
How are we going to turn a pumpkin into a carriage—in front of the audience? It is one of those moments everyone knows is coming, which actually makes it more difficult. The audience is waiting for it. Simply having Cinderella walk offstage and return with a carriage never felt satisfying to me. I wanted them to see the magic happen. My solution was to approach the transformation the same way theatrical designers have approached stage illusions for generations: through a combination of scenery, lighting, misdirection, timing, and a little theatrical trickery.

Instead of treating the pumpkin and carriage as two unrelated pieces of scenery, I began thinking of the entire sequence as one illusion. The audience's attention has to be carefully controlled. At exactly the right moment, lighting and stage effects disguise what is physically happening while the scenic transformation takes place.
And suddenly, where there was a pumpkin, there is an ornate golden carriage ready to take Cinderella to the ball.
That moment represents much of what I love about designing for the theater. The audience gets to experience magic, while backstage it is actually the result of months of drawings, measurements, engineering, rehearsals, conversations, experiments—and probably someone whispering "GO!" into a headset.

Six Months of Building a Fairy TaleIt is strange to think that I have already been living with Cinderella for roughly half a year.
There have been countless drawings, revisions, models, research images, conversations, and those inevitable moments when an idea that looked wonderful on paper had to be reconsidered once I started figuring out how it would actually work onstage.

But slowly, all those individual pieces have begun turning into a world. And perhaps that is what has made this particular project so special to me. We aren't simply recreating an old production of Cinderella, and we aren't trying to make the story look contemporary. We are taking pieces of theatrical history—some of them painted decades ago—and surrounding them with newly designed scenery while borrowing stagecraft techniques that go back more than a century. In a production being created in 2026, we are using ideas that theater artists were experimenting with in the late 1800s.

The technology may change, but the goal hasn't: make an audience believe, even if only for a moment, that they have just witnessed something impossible.

Pre show artist rendering