Backstage with Matthew: A stage within a stage
As we bring an extraordinary year of opera to a close, I thought it would be interesting to delve into our newest physical creation—the beautiful Dodson Orchestra Shell that made its inaugural appearance with our sold-out Beethoven 9 concert in October. It was designed, engineered and built right here in the Bay Area by the Opera, and it’s a wonderful celebration of the creative talents of the company.
The completed Dodson Shell in action at the Beethoven 9 concert in October this year (photo by Cory Weaver)
In 1980, the San Francisco Symphony moved across the street to the newly completed Davies Symphony Hall, leading to the creation of two orchestras —the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera Orchestra. Prior to 1980, the Symphony had been resident in the Opera House and had its own concert shell which converted the proscenium theater into an acoustically reverberant concert hall. Since the Symphony left, if the Opera has wanted to showcase our Orchestra onstage, we’ve not had the benefit of a concert shell, making for very challenging conditions for the musicians. As the sound gets sucked up into the fly tower, it is almost impossible for one side of the orchestra to hear the other, not to mention the constant white-noise whir of the fans that cool the lighting instruments in the fly tower. Something needed to be done…
The San Francisco Symphony Orchestra on stage at the War Memorial Opera House, date unknown
In 2019 we decided that it was time for San Francisco Opera to have its own concert shell, filling a 40-year void. Such a shell should accommodate a variety of concert activity, be easy to assemble, disassemble and store, and have highly reflective acoustic properties. Our production team began looking at pre-existing shells, but what they found weren’t flexible enough, or used synthetic panels which result in lower-end frequencies getting lost. Not seeing a good fit in the market, we decided to build our own, and asked our Production Manager, Ryan O’Steen, to head up the project. Five years later, the fully completed Dodson Orchestra Shell made its inaugural outing in our concert of Beethoven 9 conducted by Eun Sun Kim. The results were spectacular!
Production Manager Ryan O’Steen on the completed orchestra shell in October this year.
Ryan began researching the project in 2019. He found that many renowned concert halls in the world, Boston Symphony Hall for example, utilized oak or other hardwoods in the cladding of their stage enclosures. Oak being a readily available material in this area, it seemed a logical choice for our enclosure as well. Our system utilizes modular mobile wall towers that will support the reflective oak panels. It was important that we provide the maximum thickness of planks we could support for optimum sound reflection. Ryan determined that half-inch thickness of oak planking would give the best reflective quality while not being too heavy to be supported by our mobile tower structures.
The benefit of designing and building your own shell is that you have complete customizability. Ryan ended up utilizing a nesting system that enables the wall towers to be stored efficiently, whether backstage or in our Modesto storage facility.
Ryan O’Steen during the pandemic showing the rear of the shells and the interlocking stacking system.
Our original plan was to use lighting instruments specifically designed for concert shells, but those lights were discontinued as we went through the construction process, so Ryan ended up designing a flexible lighting rig, into which could be added a wider variety of lighting fixtures, now or in the future. This helps hugely with avoiding obsolescence and allows us flexibility to use different lights to create different effects, as we may do with the Pride Concert on June 27.
The underside of the lighting rig being manufactured in Burlingame earlier this year.
Ryan’s design is one of maximum flexibility. He designed it as a series of modules that can be easily combined in many permutations, with up to twelve wall units and a four-panel ceiling. Once the pandemic cancelled all performances, we decided that building the orchestra shell would be an important way to keep creativity alive. Ryan not only conceived the shell, but created the technical drawings that became the working documents for our scene shop in Burlingame, and oversaw the construction process, along with Scene Shop Foreman John Del Bono.
Technical drawings for the shell
We began with just six towers—enough to create a reflective wall, ideal for a chamber concert or vocal recital. You can see here the projection and lighting tests that we did on the shell during the pandemic. It’s hard to express how meaningful it was to be in the theater at this point in August 2020 testing the shell— it was one of the first glimpses of any activity in the opera house during the pandemic. We built another four wall columns after returning from the pandemic, and then two more were included with the ceiling build, which are instrumental in ensuing we can accommodate the full orchestra.
Six of the wall units erected on stage during the pandemic. Above with members of our technical staff and crew (safely distanced at the time); and below showing how well the shell takes projection.
I asked Ryan about the engineering considerations for the shell. He said that the biggest issue was ensuring that the towers didn’t keel over with the weight of the oak clad wall panels hanging from each unit. The bottom of each wall unit was counterweighted to ensure it could sustain 50% more weight than needed. It was also important to ensure that the shell could be stored backstage amidst a busy repertory season. We put our computer-aided router(a CNC machine) to work in the scene shop, creating traveling carts perfectly sized to match the curve of the stacked walls.
An eminently storable shell! Above: the wall units folded up for storage; below: the ceiling panels stored in purpose-built crates.
We then wanted the color to mirror the gold of the stage proscenium. Our Scenic Artist in Charge, Steve McNally, oversaw that part of the equation, swatching the gold in the opera house, and working to match it in a way that would connect harmoniously with the building. This was still all happening deep in the pandemic when we couldn’t be together in person so the production team would mail samples of the painted wood to my home, with different grains of wood to choose from.
The smaller shell configuration on stage showing the harmonization of gold to the proscenium.
The wall panels have been used for every concert we’ve done since the pandemic— the Homecoming Concert, Eun Sun Kim Conducts Verdi, and the Centennial Concerts. They were a game changer from what we had had before (just soft black drops), but without any overhead reflection, too much sound was getting lost in the fly tower and orchestra members couldn’t hear each other. Without funding for the the ceiling, we didn’t know if we would ever see the fully completed shell.
The orchestra shell on stage for the Centennial Concert (photo by Drew Altizer)
But, after a meeting Eun Sun Kim and I had with Company Sponsors Jerry and Thao Dodson in 2023, suddenly the ceiling became a possibility. Jerry believes deeply in having the right infrastructure for the creation of art and, after hearing about the challenges posed without a ceiling, he agreed to fund the completion of the project, bringing to life a full orchestral concert shell, absent from the War Memorial stage since 1980. It was one of those incredible moments when the stars align in a beautiful way and great things result.
Jerry Dodson with our Scene Shop Foreman John Del Bono and Scenic Artist in Charge, Steve McNally, at our Burlingame Scene Shop
With funding secured, Ryan pulled out the plans for the ceiling that he’d drawn in 2019— a set of cross beams that included a lighting rig, and that could be adjusted using the fly system to create different angles of reflection, as well as different heights. The scene shop set to work!
Blueprint of the ceiling panels
The week before the Beethoven 9 concert, we installed the full shell for the very first time. We had a whole session set up to test lighting and acoustics with the orchestra onstage but almost immediately there were big thumbs up: visibility from the new lights was good, and the sound was so crisp and clear that I could hear a musician putting a pencil on a music stand! It was a transformation and an extraordinary culmination of a five-year journey that had seen the creation of a locally-designed, locally-built orchestra shell under the expert leadership of Ryan O’Steen.
The finished shell is transported in five shipping containers: three containers for the walls and two for the ceiling. Although that may sound like a lot of shipping containers, it is about half the storage needed for some other comparable orchestral shells used in other opera houses. It’s now safely back in storage in Modesto, where it will remain until our Pride Concert on June 27 when it will make its next outing!
Ryan’s pathway to San Francisco Opera reflects his passionate devotion to the stage. He grew up as “a local kid who liked to do plays.” He was in theatre programs in high school in the East Bay, and he also spent time working in a hardware store and doing construction jobs in Lafayette. Those two strands fused building sets for community theater and school plays. At college, he pursued a degree in theater thinking he would be a performer, but the lure of the backstage was too strong, and he switched focuses when the theater department at Arizona State was looking for someone who could build scenery.
Returning home after graduating, he secured a job in the scene shop at Berkeley Rep, and spent the next twelve years there, moving from the shop to the technical department. He then took on the role of Production Manager at the Aurora Theater, before seeing the job of Assistant Technical Director listed here at the Opera. He had never considered opera, but it was a great fit and, twelve years later, he is now in the role of Production Manager with several dozen shows under his belt. After coming from theater, he says he’s still blown away by the scale of opera productions. The intense pace is also different—we work so quickly to get something up onstage, and then it can be in performance for just a few weeks with everyone giving 110% to get to the finish line, before switching in a heartbeat to another production.
Ryan has overseen a number of new productions in addition to the Dodson Shell. He’s particularly proud of the Tosca which was a monumental build, and the Mozart-Da Ponte trilogy and the chance to work with director Michael Cavanagh and designer Erhard Rom. Ryan notes that everything we do is bespoke. Everything is a prototype on a 50-ft-wide playing space. We get almost no time to R&D: it’s straight onto the stage and you have to get it right the first time!
Images from the Tosca and Figaro sets for which Ryan oversaw the build process in 2018 and 2019.
As Production Manager, Ryan is currently overseeing the construction phase of our new 2025 Monkey King and Parsifal productions. The Monkey King is a particularly intriguing production as very little is physical scenery. It will be a lot of ephemeral fabric drops that morph from one scene to the next. Ryan is working with the creative team to work out all of the scenes and transitions, as well as costing out the production from the drawings, and working to bring it to life. Ryan brings extraordinary resourcefulness, creative thinking and problem solving to everything he does and it’s a joy to have him with us.
The Dodson Shell is such a wonderful expression of the talents of the company. From Ryan’s work designing and overseeing it, to the incredible skills of our scene shop and their fabrication of the shell, to the amazing musical forces of the company under the leadership of Eun Sun Kim, whose collective expression of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was the perfect way to inaugurate the shell—a fabulous stage within a stage that will be a part of our infrastructure for decades to come.
Thao and Jerry Dodson with Ryan O’Steen on the completed Dodson Orchestra Shell in October this year.
As we bring the year to a close, all of us at the Opera send a heartfelt thank you for your incredible support over this last year. I am so proud of what we have experienced together on our stage. You play a critical role in making that possible and I hope you share my pride for the beauty and impact of what you have helped bring to life in 2024!