In this seven‑minute round‑table, playwright/composer Paul Gordon, director John Caird, actor Kevin Surace, and other cast and crew members discuss the creation of the pandemic‑era musical Estella Scrooge. The conversation traces the project’s origin as a Dickens‑inspired mash‑up, its initial workshop at the Rubicon Theatre, and the forced shift to a fully green‑screen production. Participants describe how remote direction across London, Hawaii, and California was coordinated via Zoom, the practical techniques used to make solo actors appear to converse with invisible partners (eyeline tape, hidden readers, iPad‑held cue cards), and the challenges of rehearsing and filming one performer at a time. They also explore the creative freedoms afforded by virtual sets—allowing impossible entrances, dynamic environments, and high‑budget visual effects without the cost of traditional stage construction. The discussion highlights the rapid shooting schedule (10 pages in a day), the collaborative rapport among long‑time colleagues, and the emotional hurdles actors faced when lacking physical scene partners. Overall, the talk showcases how pandemic constraints sparked innovative production methods and expanded the visual language of musical theatre.
Chapters
Well, the whole thing started with Paul Gordon sketching out an idea for a show, which was to have a sort of Dickens mashup.
So he asked me to come up with an idea, and then I came back to him with a completed script and 5 songs. And this is our first foray into the green screen world, you know, because of the pandemic and how we were forced to do it. But anytime you're forced to do something, there's always something that you learn, and there's always something that, that gives you information that you didn't have before. So maybe you can take it creatively further.
We did a workshop production at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura, California, Carolyn Burns's company, and we had a marvelous little group of actors sort of working on it in its raw state. And, but it was, you know, we had 10 days rehearsal or something, so we were just chucking it on to see if it could work. And we were very, very encouraged by that.
One of the things I want to tell you about the acting of this world in terms of green screen is that they make it look like you're actually talking to somebody, but in point of fact, of course, you're the only person on the set, only actor during our COVID times that It was part of the prerequisite from the union that we could do this. So any case, the cool thing is that you aren't talking to somebody, you are actually talking to a piece of tape.
Hmm.
The tape is placed around the room so that when you're speaking to one character, you're looking at the tape, and then they tell you where to look elsewhere so that it does indeed look like you're talking to somebody.
See, it's funny when I think about it. The director was in London, John Caird, the brilliant John Caird. And then some of the producers are in Hawaii. And so there's, you know, you see 8 different faces on the screen in front of you giving directions. And the reality is you kind of forget that we're all in these different locations, and it becomes, uh, very normal actually to just kind of be talking to the screen of all these people. And John has such an incredible way of Being such an actor's director and understanding what it's like to be in our shoes and looking at these dots and trying to make sense of the fact that we're trying to see real people.
And I felt really lucky that I already knew John Caird, our director, and Paul Gordon, um, who wrote it with John. And, uh, I hadn't worked with them before, but I'd known them for many years. And so I already had a relationship, I had a rapport, um, even though we hadn't worked on a project before and been super Close. They weren't strangers, so it felt easier creating this project together and figuring out this character together over Zoom because we didn't have the normal getting-to-know-you process of being in a rehearsal room live together day after day, week after week. We rehearsed Some days on Zoom, and then we were always one actor at a time in the actual studio. And we had our DP and we had our assistant, and then everybody else was over Zoom the entire shoot.
The adaptation to the screen was very tricky at first because, of course, the show was written to be a stage show with, you know, a 3-dimensional set, but with a 4th wall, with the audience sitting on the other side of the 4th wall. And in this case, we don't have that. We have virtual sets where the entire room surrounds the characters at all times.
I think my biggest challenge in filming Estella was trusting that the work and my reality and my truth is enough. There's so many things that we have to envision in this process, whether it's actors Any kind of a set, any kind of a prop, um, and then any kind of response from another actor, like a genuine response. So just—
The hardest thing in terms of working with the actors was having them only one at a time in the green screen studio because we had to set up eyeline for them for all of the characters that they had to imagine that they were talking to.
There was one scene where I'm obviously with a ghost, but of course the ghost isn't there. So I am sitting on a couch, and you will see this. I'm sitting on a couch and I'm speaking to a ghost, but that ghost is our brilliant editor Tyler, who was underneath a sheet, a blue sheet, so he was also hidden. Um, and he had an iPad and was reading the lines with me and then was also holding simultaneously a boom.
Everyone around me was so professional, so smart and adept at their jobs that I was able to film 10 pages in one long day, and that's unheard of in normal circumstances.
I think the most exciting thing I discovered working on this project was the way in which one could completely expand one's visual choices. You know, you have Scrooge suddenly arriving in Estella's honeymoon suite in the middle of the night. How does he arrive? Well, in, in In the theatre, you're very limited to how you enter somebody into a room. But with digital technology, you can have him coming in however you want. You can have him coming through the wall or crashing through the window or coming down the chimney or coming up through the floorboards or whatever. You can break all the normal bounds of theatrical reality. You can have him flying through the air. Estella being transmogrified into a pile of dust and arriving somewhere else. And in the theatre, that takes hours and hours and hours of laborious work.
Well, the hardest part of the green screen process for me was not having my scene partners. I mean, they're wonderful people in this show, and I had a scene that was with Betsy Wolfe, who's amazing, and I would love to have been able to look into her eyes and listen to her voice, but I couldn't do that.
It was very interesting working with the art director and designer Zach Wilson on the designs of this show because in the theatre one would be very limited how much you can put on the stage. In this particular show you need to start with a high-rise office block with Estella in the penthouse room of the office block overlooking New York. She's there for one scene and you can't spend tens of thousands of dollars on a single scene in the theatre. So you'd have to do that with some sort of projection or Or a very simple layout against a black background because you'd have to be concealing the set that you were about to go into where you are for most of the, most of the play.
So melt to a starlight, never look down, never look down, never look down.
