Johanna Miller - DIRECTOR

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Hayley E. Wallenfeldt -SCENIC DESIGN

Henry Muller - LIGHTING DESIGN

Teressa Ham - COSTUME DESIGN

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Photography: Justin Brill & H. Wallenfeldt

April 2022

The 91st Annual Waa-Mu Show

Cahn Auditorium, Northwestern University

Antiques. Socialites. Secrets. In A Peculiar Inheritance, the memorial of esteemed watchmaker Archibald Beaucourt proceeds without a hitch. That is, until the reading of a document penned by the late watchmaker declaring that he has left the controlling interest of his company to whoever solves his final puzzle by midnight. Chaos breaks out, alliances are forged and broken, and Archibald’s daughter Quinn — an outsider among the family — must put everything on the line to fight for her place. But as the mystery begins to unravel, family secrets are thrust into the spotlight.

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The Waa-Mu show is a full book musical written by Northwestern's Musical Writing Program each year. The design for the show is done based on an initial play written by the team before the final show is written and the music is fully added.

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The Waa-Mu show has a long and fantastic history at Northwestern and one of the biggest motifs of the show is the campy nature at the heart of it. I wanted to keep that joy inherent to the scenery. The show drew heavily on inspiration from classical mystery novels/films as well as the board game Clue. As a designer I challenged myself to come up with a world with the same severity and whimsy as the classic Clue board game.  The central vision to my design was the question: "What if the clue board game board was a real space?" This lead to the creation of a geometric manner that enabled the script to quickly take the audience from one set of characters in one section of the home to a second group searching in another in the blink of a light cue. One of the most beautiful lines in the show for me centers around Jamie describing his dead father's "trinkets, toys, and clocks". This odd ball collection manifested itself in the shadowbox picture frames that make up the back wall of the set, following the anthropologicaly dubious decorations found in classic mystery films.

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