The Boys and Girls Club of Souhegan Valley provides youths in New Hampshire a place to grow together. Theatre has been proven to be an incredible avenue for building important skills including teamwork, as well as simply the opportunity for participants to create magic onstage. The Amato Center for the Performing Arts is associated with the Boys and Girls Club of Souhegan Valley, and recently put on a production of Mary Poppins.
A critical part of any production lies in its props, and maker Ben April rose to a challenge not unique to this staging of Mary Poppins: creating a prop that needs to break apart, but still be used night after night. In Mary Poppins, father George Banks breaks an urn in the family’s house.
“The simple version is in the show the urn is an heirloom in the Banks household. At a cathartic moment near the end it gets broken and we learn that as a child George had hidden something special inside,” April told me via email. “When designing the prop sugar glass was considered an option, but ends up being really messy and dangerous shattering all over the place. We decided to give 3d Printing a try. All accounts are that it worked out great!”
“This was my first time using Repetier-server,” he told me, “which was a win, you can queue up everything you need to print and just tend to the printer when it asks it.”
Once it was time to print, April used a 15% infill, and found he “needed to add a heatsink to my extruder motor.” Following the print job using his Printrbot Simple 1405, to which he had added the XL kit, the PLA piece was assembled and post-processed, with painting by S. April.
“This is the first show we’ve done using the 3d Printer and it’s a game changer,” April told me. “There were probably 100 little props that we just printed because the output was durable, easy to paint and flexible.”
When I talked to April, halfway through the run, it certainly sounded like a successful project, as he reported that the urn had “survived 3 Tech rehearsals, 3 performances, a pick-up rehearsal It’s got 3 runs left. No signs of any structural problems.”
Let’s hear your thoughts on this story in the Mary Poppins Props forum thread on 3DPB.com.