Carousel Theatre for Young People presents The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island, Preview: Nov. 25, Opening: Nov. 26 at 3 p.m. Until Dec. 31. Tickets $35/$29/$18. For more information visit carouseltheatre.ca.
In the classic children’s fantasy novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy discover an old wardrobe that leads to an enchanted land. For stage crafter Shizuka Kai, when she ditched acting and decided to focus on set design she was thrilled to be the one crafting the enchanted lands on the other side.
“If the whole show and the whole story comes together in terms of the actors, the lights, the sets, the costumes – when it comes together it just feels right. Usually you can tell. And usually the audience loves the show when that happens,” Kai says of her philosophy when it comes to theatrical design that ensnares the senses and leaves people with a sense of wonder.
In the run up to Carousel Theatre for Young People’s production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, showing at Granville Island’s Waterfront Theatre from Nov. 25 to Dec. 31, Kai has been busy crafting a stage that brings the well-known source material to light in a way that’s both familiar to those who know it while striving for her own unique vision.
Since the play is based on a revered book, adapted from C.S. Lewis’s classic The Chronicles of Narnia series, and is intended for a youthful audience, she says she was inspired by the theme of tomes and storytelling.
“I tried to figure out different ways to use the books,” she says. “It looks like there’s a whole bunch of books in the very back, in what we call in theatre the ground row, it’s like a backdrop, in a sense.”
Some of the books, she says, are stacked high, others are low. It’s a simple gesture, but Kai says the intention is to evoke an imaginative backdrop that looks like castles in the distance.
“We wanted it to be something that if a child read the book maybe that’s how they imagined it, or maybe they were sitting in a library and there was piles of books and they started creating a castle.”
Carousel Theatre’s production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, much like the book it’s adapted from, follows four wartime children who discover the world of Narnia, an enchanted place full of mythical creatures, talking animals, quests and secrets.
For Kai, she had her own long road when it came to entering the world of professional set designing.
The former North Vancouver resident, who graduated from Sutherland Secondary in 2000, says she went all over the place trying to figure out what she wanted from the world of theatre, production and acting, including a stint at Japan’s Nihon University to study theatre.
She then entered Langara College’s Studio 58 program as an acting student – but it didn’t stick.
“I went in as an acting student and then I switched over halfway and went into production,” she says. “When you go into the artistic, creative side of theatre there’s so much. I’ve got the chance to do costume design, I’ve even got a chance to direct a show. You get to try all different things.”
Kai graduated from Studio 58 in 2011.
With The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, one of the things she’s most proud of is the floor design, a feature of her set that looks like a big storybook of pictures that litter different sections of the stage. When the scene or setting in the play changes, the action takes place on a new part of the floor that evokes the new locale.
It’s a way, she says, of evoking a changing of scenery without actually changing the set.
“I want the kids to be walking away just imagining to themselves how they would’ve created the whole world, or thinking about what kind of character they would have been,” she says.
A note on Carousel Theatre’s website suggests the 80-minute long play is best suited for youth that are five years of age or older.
Asked what she thinks audiences – both the kids and their parents – will walk away with after seeing the production, her answer is simple: “It gives you a kind of happy little feeling.”
