In this behind‑the‑scenes roundtable, the creators of the digital musical Estella Scrooge discuss how the project emerged, the artistic and technical challenges they faced, and the opportunities the new format created. Paul Gordon explains the original concept – a mash‑up of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations set in modern times – and how an early workshop at the Rubicon Theater validated the idea. John Caird and Kevin Surace describe how the COVID‑19 pandemic forced them into green‑screen production, prompting the development of a fully digital theatre experience with 3‑D virtual sets. Skepticism from the team gave way to excitement after a demo of the digital set technology, led by set designer Zach Wilson, who brings a musical‑theatre background to the creation of immersive, character‑driven virtual environments. Actors such as David Bryant and other performers share the practicalities of acting alone on a green‑screen stage – using tape markers for eyelines, imagining unseen scene partners, and coping with remote direction from multiple locations (London, Hawaii, etc.) via Zoom. The conversation highlights how digital tools expand visual storytelling possibilities beyond the constraints of a physical stage, allowing fantastical entrances, transformations, and rapid shooting schedules (e.g., filming ten pages in a day). The participants reflect on the collaborative process, the trust required to perform in isolation, and the broader potential of digital theatre to reach audiences and tell stories in new ways.
Chapters
Well, the whole thing started with Paul Gordon sketching out an idea for a show which was to have a sort of Dickens mash-up and to write a new version of Christmas Carol set in modern times. And after much discussion, he and I, in the company with my son Sam, we worked out how we could sort of collide 2 of Dickens's novels, Christmas Carol on the one hand and Great Expectations on the other.
John Caird and I were actually in the audience of a Christmas musical, and we sort of said to ourselves, why don't we write a Christmas musical? 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 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 Theater in Ventura, California. Carolyn Burns' 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.
Digital theatre, we think, is something brand new because it is musical theatre, a made-up theatrical world just like we would have on stage. It's not realistic, It's surrealistic, which makes it quite different than a movie would be. It's also digital. Digital sets, 3D worlds, again surrealistic, of course delivered via video and streaming.
Reading with the Brady Bunch boxes has outplayed and outlived its welcome. Like, I feel like it's been lovely and we've had to do it and we've had to use it and we've all become accustomed to it, but wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do a create a world where we didn't have all the boxes, but we could do it in isolation. And Kevin said, oh, there's a way. And I didn't believe him, and none of us really believed him at first. We were skeptical. But he put together a little demo for us where we could see and hear what the capabilities were. And all of us, you know, John being the most skeptical, I think, of the group initially, and we were kind of stunned with what we could create and how amazing it could look.
I met Zach Wilson, our set and scenic and 3D designer, several years ago. I was working on a production of The Wiz in Northern California, and we brought in Zach to design digital backdrops. What I love about Zach is he's actually a musical theater person. He has starred in several shows in Northern California, and he began designing digital sets.
Well, hi. My name is David Bryant, and I get to play Mr. Podsnap, and I'm one of the producers of this show. Things I want to tell you about the acting of, uh, 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 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.
Yeah, 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.
I felt really lucky that I already knew John Caird, our director, and Paul Gordon, who wrote it with John. And 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, 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.
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.
Designing these locations, they all have such character to them, and it's been fun to find ways we can imbue them with life and find different aspects of the character and the story that we can tell through their space.
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.
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.
The idea that we've been able to create some art and some entertainment as well as be an example of the tenacity and strength that the art and the artist has.
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? In the theater, 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. You can have Estella being transmogrified into a pile of dust and arriving somewhere else. And in the theater, that takes hours and hours and hours of laborious work.
Basically, it's like taking a finished picture where you know what the final product is going to look like and then breaking it up into tiny little puzzle pieces. And each puzzle piece then needs to be perfected with each actor in the right costume. costume, in the right— looking the right direction, at the right eyeline, and then the digital background's put in. And so you create each little piece of the puzzle.
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 her voice, but I couldn't do that.
It completely opens up the scope of stories we can tell and the possibility for those stories to be told and actually reach people and reach an audience and communicate ideas, because that's like the whole point, right? Like, in my opinion, that's the main thing.
Well, it was very interesting working with the art director and designer Zach Wilson on the designs of this show, because in the theater one would be very limited how much you can put on, 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. And she's there for one scene, and you can't spend tens of thousands of dollars on a single scene in the theater. So you'd have to do that with some sort of projection 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.
