My notes indicate that we may have paid as much as $325 each and also around $200 in shipping. I was able to order two “stander” style horses from them.

That left us two horses shy.Īnother contact from the Stagecraft mailing list directed me to: Rotronics Plastic Products of 2807 Stephen F Austin Dr, Brownwood, Texas 76801-6454. Since Omaha is only a couple-hour drive from Indianola, Iowa (and Simpson College) I picked them up in my Jeep and little 6′ trailer. As it turned out, only 2 remained, but I was able to rent them for a reasonable sum. However, John Gibilisco of the Omaha Playhouse contacted me with the information that the company had done a production of the musical a few years before and still had some of the horses. Most were stylistically incompatible with our plans and most would have required prohibitively expensive shipping. We got several leads for companies that had done Carousel. So, I turned to the trusty Stagecraft Mailing List for some suggestions. We were disabused of this notion after exhausting all local leads. We were hoping to locate realistic carousel horses, naively thinking that there might be some real ones in the area that we could borrow. Although it is not optimal to construct a revolve on swivel castors, they were necessary in order to permit the units, once disconnected, to roll offstage into our small backstage storage space. Each segment carried 1/4 of the carousel including a horse, a decorative central flat that formed the central column of the carousel, and 1/4 of the canopy element. The other 4 were pie-slice segments on swivel castors that roto-locked around the pivot.

One of the parts was a 3′ square that housed the center pivot and 4 castors. The director wanted realistic scenery depicting the signature scenic element. Since the carousel only appears in the prologue to the play, it needed to be constructed in such a way as to strike easily following the first 8 minutes. In 2004 I designed a production of Carousel for the Music department at Simpson College.

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