2/5/15

We toured Krannert on Thursday, and learned a lot of really interesting things that I would never have known otherwise. We started out our tour in the main lobby (which is approximately nine tennis courts long), where we learned about the floor. It's a very interesting design that was apparently designed by Eleanora Krannert. The floor also contained an entire shipment of an endangered tree (not remembering the name), so people that work at Krannert are very protective of it apparently! I believe the tour guide said there was no gum chewing allowed. It was kind of cool to look at the floor and see how it has worn over time. You were able to see hundreds of little pocket marks from women's heels.

We then ventured to the scene shop which was really cool to see (I did set design for theater in high school). The scene shop apparently has a different foundation than that of the stages so that if people are working in the shop, the vibrations wouldn't be felt on stage.

We went into the playhouse later, and we found that it had 92 feet of fly space above the stage box. This is kind of unusual because most stages have their fly space in the wings. We also found out that each of the theaters were built with a specific purpose. The Great Hall was built for concerts, the playhouse was built for plays, and another was built for operas.

This tour was particularly interesting to me because I did tech in high school and came down to Krannert for Theaterfest one year.