My high school is considering cinderella, however we need to find a version with a simple set. Preferably the r and h version but with less scene changes. If your school/ community theater did this show, how did you pull of the set? We really wanna do this show but are afraid our set crew will quit on us.

Thinking about the show, it could truly be done with very little set. Cinderella's house could be a a table and a set of chairs with a stool over on the other side of the stage for her "corner." The ballroom needs no set at all, except maybe two chairs for thrones for the King and Queen. As for the coach, it could be done with just a bench on wheels - granted, the audience is expecting a little bit more, so maybe you could have a giant circle to represent the coach, or maybe since the focus would be less on the house, ballroom, etc. you could have your set crew mainly work on a coach.

Do you have stairs leading from the stage to the house in your auditorium? If you don't, consider constructing some and having Cinderella run down them and down the aisle when she's fleeing the ball. When my dad directed this at a private school years ago (I must have been 4 or 5 and I'm nearly 17 now), that's how he did it.

Really, hardly any set is actually needed for this show. If you want to go for a simplistic design, I would say focus attention on your coach, because that's what's expected. Also, even if you don't have the stairs going out into the audience, you'll probably want a staircase of some sort for Cinderella to lose her slipper on (even if it's just three or four steps going offstage).

Don't let set stop you from doing this show, because it's perfectly capable of being done without it.

Actually, Baker was on the right track with the steps. I saw a production of the show once in which the main set was a bunch of stair cases that led up to platforms and then stairs from there that led up to a higher platform. One of the platforms was Cinderella's house (with chairs and such as Baker mentioned), another was the town square, and the top was all of the palace scenes.

When a school about 20 minutes away from me did it they used a main backdrop for the town in the beginning that had two small "towers" that represented small peasant houses. for the scene change they closed the curtain in front of the backdrop and opened the two "houses" and that made cinderella's house. for the ballroom it was a set of steps and two throwns and cinderella ran down steps off the stage and through the audience. The carriage is going to be your trouble. I will talk to my choir director (she was teaching at that school when they did it and was the head of the drama department) and see if she has any pictures. If she does i will post them.

I'm not sure why everyone is so focused on the coach. It's a minor piece - used in one part of one scene that lasts less than five minutes. There is even an option in the materials that shows you the idea of using a silhouette rather than a actual coach. We had a 1-D coach painted on plywood, which never moved but looked lovely with the smoke and lighting that was used. That's all you really need if your budget is limited.

And the rest of our set was fairly minimal. The ballroom was an open stage with a flight of stairs against the cyc, which had draped windows against it. There were tall pillars upstage left and right and the rest of the stage was open.

In the palace scenes, the dressing room set pieces were placed downstage on the apron, with a curtain separating the two areas. This was drawn back during the "Your Majesties" dance to reveal the servants dancing as they prepared the palace for the ball.

The house was probably our most complicated set as it had a lot of loose pieces that had to be placed precisely and removed quickly in scene changes.

The village square was just a podium against a black curtain. We were fortunate enough to have two curtains that could be used to divide the stage vertically so that scene changes could happen behind them and we built a pasarella that allowed scenes to continue while stuff was being moved on stage. So we had a continous flow of action and ended up using very little of the scene change music, which never gave the audience a chance to get restless.

Later days
David

When I was Cinderella in a camp production, we cut the whole carriage step and I ran offstage to the "carriage." When I entered the ballroom, I came from upstage center and walked down an aisle that was created by the other dancers. We had no ballroom set. The house was a table and chairs with a crate for my corner. I think we had some curtain for me hide behind at the end when the prince came on the wood fold outs we had. It was so minimal that we had to spray a pair of heels with adhesive and sprinkle them with glitter