In November 2016 - February 2017 I served as the technical director for DaVinci Academy of Science and the Arts' production of the musical Fly by Night. The show, while fantastically written, is little known, which liberated us from any preconceptions we may have had about how it "should" be done. This left us free to imagine the production design from scratch. This isn't the first show we've done this way, as DaVinci has a number of regional, national, or even world premieres under its belt, but it was a particularly rewarding process with this show because of the quality of the source material. The story is about the intertwined lives of several people in the year leading up to the east coast blackout of 1965, and has themes of love, loss, memory, and living under the shadow of fate. Also there are a lot of sandwiches. Production highlights included creating a deceptively simple set that transforms into roughly fifteen different locations, an equally complex deli cart (seriously, there are a lot of sandwiches), and a couple of very versatile rolling staircases. But the crown jewel was a star field of over 100 Edison style light bulbs, built by the students, which was controlled through nearly 60 dedicated DMX channels to create a sky that was so much a part of the show's storytelling that it might as well have been a character. Check out the gallery below.