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PROBLEM Old cars may manufacture headaches, and so may new theatres, exceptionally when floor plans turn out to be inexact. To aid repair the first, radio listeners ofttimes turn to the Magliozzi Brothers, a.k.a. Click and Clack, on National Public Radio?s Car Talk. And to initiate the Modern Theatre, a 185-seat venue at Suffolk University that was lately renovated from a 1914 movie theatre, the school decisive on a musical based on the radio show. Car Talk: The Musical!!! sends up bestloved musicals with lyrics that include, ?I actually need this car. Please, God, I need this car,? and ?How do you solve a problem like his Kia?? Written and directed by SU professor Wesley Savick, this is the story of Rusty Fenders (owner of a terminally ill ?93 Kia), Miata C. LaChassi, and the Wizard of Cahs (that?s ?cars? ? la Boston), an 8′x6′ puppet made completely of car constituents that speaks in the recorded voices of the Magliozzis. The show likewise features exploding toy cars. ?It has a Forbidden Broadway feel,? says Kat Kingsley, president of the Unorthodox Arts Foundation, which developed the trick cars. There?s even a (toy) helicopter and a falling chandelier, and it all unravels in a garage that does tricks.  ?Not to strength a conception too much, the beat-up car that is falling apart, but is nonetheless beloved, is the metaphor for Rusty and his messy midlife crisis, so the garage serves as both the repository of discarded dysfunctional car elements and the potential, even though with a price, of repair and rebirth,? says scenic architect Richard W. Chambers.  This would have been difficult on any timeline, or in any venue, but it didn?t aid that the brand new script reached Chambers late?too late to build a model before building would begin. ?I had when it comes to two weeks before the shop had to have the drawings,? he recalls. As-built drawings had not been produced when the design team began, and Chambers says the architect?s drawings had a heap of discrepancies from the actual building. ?It?s also a tight little space on a tiny footprint, without much for wings, with winched line-sets but no fly tower, uttermost sightlines due to courtyard seating, and not much depth,? says Chambers. ?I try to compensate attention to how the set ?scales? with the theatre space, and I genuinely had to wing it on this one.? Lighting architect Steven McIntosh also was struggling with the tight space. ?Because of the way the theatre is designed, we weren?t competent to use humane followspot operators,? he says, explaining there is no ceiling access to the catwalk, which means not anyone may be up there for the duration of a show. The temporary ladder used when hanging lights blocks an exit aisle. ?I?m not too fond of attempting to track persons with moving lights in a live show because you have to expect things happening in the moment,? McIntosh adds.  Sometimes the cast of 25 took the stage, while at other times, just one or two people were on. The transition from a lot of to just a few and back happened quickly, necessitating huge moves from isolation to full stage lighting. ?Moving from moment to moment and person to person around the stage was one of the biggest challenges,? says McIntosh of the show?s lighting.  McIntosh, who is likewise the theatre?s technical director, says doing the original production in the space developed difficulties all the way around. The space also doubles as a smart classroom, so it required a modification to the sound system to work for sound design. Adds Chambers, ?There are a heap of gremlins in the computerized sound system. They?re attempting to figure out why the two com channels are still linked even altho they shouldn?t be, and the sensor on the door to the fly loft, from where the fog machine needs to be operated, won?t unlock the door, so it needs to be propped open, which the security system doesn?t like.?  David Fichter had designed huge Bread & Puppet-style puppets, but he had never before made them from car parts. ?It?s not a sculpture,? he notes. ?It?s primary that puppets be expressive. They have to be competent to move and animate, and with something this big, it?s tricky, in particular if it?s made from car parts.? In addition, the puppet would speak in two voices, in a literal sense from ?both sides of it is mouth.? And what regarding the eyes? They necessitated to be expressive, too, and light up on cue.  Each toy car also had to self-destruct in a distinctive way. One car might go up in smoke, the originative team in the first place thought, and Kingsley tried peroxide and potassium permanganate, and even nitrogen, which they decisive was too dangerous. Because smoke detectors in the space proved sensitive, anything having to do with fire was eliminated. And if wheels popped off for the duration of the self-destruct, how would they be held from falling into the orchestra pit?     SOLUTION Chambers says the team considered setting the play in a theatrical space that would conjure other musicals but in the end opted for something that looked like a real garage. ?The set is a realistic grungy car garage, and then the show goes Broadway,? says Kingsley. ?It looks drab, like somebody?s garage, but then showgirls come out in bright colors in car-shaped dresses. It departs from reality abruptly and becomes a absurd romp.?  With no time to finish a model?he finished one after the set was half-built?Chambers drafted as quickly as he could. ?I started with a ground plan that I worked up over a weekend,? he says. ?Wes is one of the few managing directors that I may give a ground plan to and have him lift it up into three dimensions in his mind. He looked at it while I described what I thought it would look like and decisive it would work. So I started drafting. ?Most of the action takes place in dream sequences that combine musical comedy with Rusty?s anxiety when it comes to the state of his car, the ?93 Kia,? adds Chambers. ?So I started with a big garage that may have ridiculous things occur in it: The rolling tool chest on one wall pulls out like a big drawer to disclose Rusty lying in his bed, the stage left wall flips around on a center pivot to disclose Sheila sitting at her desk, and the huge garage doors upstage open to disclose the Wizard of Cahs. There are likewise huge exhaust hoses hanging from the girders that spew arid ice fog for the big dream sequence.?  To deal with a tight stage right wing, Chambers designed a staircase up and over the sliding bed unit, so actors could cross up and downstage in the wing. ?The platform lid hinges up, so Rusty may get into the bed, and then it closes over him,? Chambers explains. ?Luckily, we caught most of the architectural discrepancies with a quick sight survey and a few phone calls. The shop caught most of my math ?whoopsies? in the drawings and had a good deal of good suggestions for materials and techniques.? Production manager Jim Bernhardt and prop master Jonathan Maganzini helped solve problems, too.  McIntosh relied on four moving lights, two ETC Source Fours with Rosco I-Cue intellectual mirrors and DMX Irises, and Martin Professional MAC 700 Profiles to wash the stage. The new space was set up well for installation. ?The set was built in such a way that we could work from the ground. For the most part, everything was motorized on stage,? he says. Twelve circuits devoted to the Wizard puppet were concealed discreetly inside the grill and controlled from the board. McIntosh worked with Savick to carve out specific moments when actors would hit marks and conservatively timed the spots for these.  To manufacture the Wizard puppet, Fichter expended time online, searching and studying photographs of cars until he was capable to come up with a suitably anthropomorphic image. Then he headed for one of various junk yards in Somerville, MA. A car front would serve as a face, but much of what he found was too contemporary. ?Finally, I looked up on top of a big rack and found a Camaro from the late ?70s that looked like a rounded face with a nose.? To Fichter?s delight, much of it was made out of rubber, and by removing a good deal of heavy metal parts, it was light sufficient to work with and move. Fichter then searched for an old hood for the puppet?s head. Out of thousands, the one he found came from the same Camaro. ?It had a lot of character,? he says. By making the mouth opening from flexible foam, the puppet could ?talk.? Operators could move it up and down like a regular mouth and move one side up independently, then the other, so that each ?voice? came from a dissimilar place.  In the end, the puppet was somewhat heavy because of the hood but not too heavy?roughly 150lbs, in all. Two-and-a-half feet deep, it stood on a central pivot that permitted three operators who stood on the platform behind it to turn it from side to side. Blinking eyes were in the first place going to be 12V batteries that look like car lights, but the lighting architect opted for PAR units that looked a lot like the car lights. These were hooked up to a dimmer system and operated from the lighting console, supplying the option of altering light levels in the puppet?s eyes to reflect emotions. A little patch over the headlight could move back and forth, so even even though the headlight itself didn?t turn, it developed the illusion of turning. Interior mouth lights were made from pieces of taillights. Once the foam opened, teeth were lit from behind. In the end, Kingsley found tricks for each car. She picked toys with big interiors so that she could refit them internally and control them with batteries. ?We purchased one that was designed to drive into the wall and fall apart, and I re-painted it to look more like a Honda civic and less like a race-car,? says Kingsley. ?For the second car, we unscrewed the wheels and let them fly off as the car drove and rolled all over the stage. There was a little wooden lip on the front of the stage next to the orchestra, which for the most part kept the wheels from rolling into the pit. For the third car, we ended up using arid ice.?  Unorthodox Arts likewise purchased an old, ?60s-style remote control VW bus and cut the power to the controllable headlights. ?I wired the headlights to a little water pump that sat in a little container of hot water, and when the switch on the remote was flicked, it would pump the hot water into a container of arid ice, creating ?smoke? that poured out of the bottom of the car as it rolled along on stage,? says Kingsley. ?The effect with the arid ice came out genuinely well. Naturally, I had painted the car to look like an old hippie bus.? Three puppeteers, one for each car, were at the controls.  Sometimes, very low-tech solutions were employed. The falling chandelier? Originally rigged into the ceiling, at the end of the show, it was thrown at the ceiling and permitted to fall.   Davi Napoleon hates to drive but loves listening to Car Talk for counsel on how to fix her life, whenever it breaks down. A longtime contributor to Live Design, she also writes Theatre Talk, a column for The Faster Times. Her book is Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theatre.