For our production of Sweeney Todd, we wanted the set to be a giant birdcage because we wanted to tell the story more through Johanna’s eyes. She was essentially a caged bird being trapped in the judge’s house and would sing about all the birds she loved who were also caged by the bid salseman.

With this in mind, I engineered the giant birdcage. I knew it was going to be made out of pvc pipes, arranged in a circle. However, for structure, I planned out 4 pipes in the circle to be steel because the pipes below would be holding up a top ring and a dome structure. For the ring, I drew plans and did math to determine how many small arc sections I would need to connect together to make the 22ft diameter ring. I then made a mold that I used to heat-bend the straight sections of pvc into those small arcs. They were connected with 4-way pipe fittings, so they connect to each other, but also the straight pipes below and the curved pipes above.

In order to build the dome, I used the same heatbending technique that I used on the small pipe pieces on 10ft pieces of pipe. And with all of them arranged in a circle, they made a dome shape. They were connected with a circular panel at the top, which was rigged to the grid to keep the curved pieces from drooping. The pipes were then painted grey and installed altogether into the final bird cage shape.