Imaginary Worlds - Lifting the Curtain on Theatrical Effects

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

I’ve covered digital and practical effects in film and TV, but creating special effects for live theater is a whole other challenge. J&M Special Effects has been up to the task for 40 years. Their crew has worked on shows from Hadestown to Harry Potter and The Cursed Child to Disney musicals like Frozen and Aladdin. I get a behind-the-scenes tour of their Brooklyn warehouse, where failure is part of the process in figuring out how to make the magic work. I talk with partner and designer Jeremy Chernick, along with pyrotechnician Bohdan Bushnell, about how theatrical effects have evolved with new technology -- and why they can sometimes be too good at their jobs in making the impossible seem possible.    This episode is sponsored by Remi and ShipStation. Start your 60-day free trial at ShipStation.com and use the code IMAGINARY. Try Remi risk-free at shopremi.com/IMAGINARY and use the code IMAGINARY to get up to 50% off your nightguard at checkout Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit square.ca to get started. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend or disbelieve. I'm Eric Malinsky. I've started every episode with that tagline for over 10 years. But this episode really goes directly to the heart of those two questions. How do we create them and why do we suspend or disbelieve? Living in New York, people often recommend theater and casual conversation. And until recently, I had never heard anybody recommend a live show

solely based on the special effects. That has changed with two plays, Harry Potter and the Curse Child, and Stranger Things, the First Shadow. One of the biggest practical effects companies in New York is called J&M Special Effects. The company is 40 years old. They worked on shows from Phantom of the Opera and Cats

to Hades Town and Disney musicals like Frozen, Aladdin, and Mary Poppins. They also do effects for film, TV, and commercials. But I wanted to know about theatrical effects. What's changed lately? What hasn't? And what goes on behind the scenes?

Jeremy Chernick is a partner and designer at J&M. He actually went to London to help them develop the effects for the Harry Potter play before it came to Broadway. And he gave me a tour of their warehouse in Brooklyn, which is over 10,000 square feet. So we divide up the shopping. into different areas to the left of me is just literally just an entire shelf of different pumps.

If I ran a hardware store, I would probably look at this place with a lot of envy. They have amassed an arsenal of devices from floor to ceiling. If you want snow, rain, fog, fire on stage, they have all the raw materials. And there's a staging area to experiment with effects. And then if we walk through here,

One of the things that I really love about this particular part of the shop is we're in what we would call the yellow bin area, but essentially it's our library. We have just pieces of hardware for anything, from plumbing to pneumatics, to electronics, to electronics, to heating coils, to blood kits. And also, a lot of this stuff is old. Some of it hasn't been made in a long time, and we have it still because the company is old enough that we've held on to things that are unique and are harder to find now. It is the place where, if I don't have it already made, I could spend a few hours putting it together, and ideally most of the parts are already here and ready to go. It's funny because, like, on one hand, you have to be so creative in your thinking. And on the other hand, you have to be kind of a nerd when it comes to valves and caps and gaskets.

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I'm really good with my hands. I always have been. I've always been good at, like, figuring things out with my hands, building things. I'm not necessarily good at building a thing that is going to last for years and years. When I first started doing theater, a lot of shows, like off-Broadway shows, they run 16 weeks. and I'm always good at making us something that will last exactly 16 weeks. As long as there's been theater in the Western world, there have been theatrical effects.

The ancient Greeks used a device that was kind of like a crane for actors playing gods. I did a whole episode about a device from the 19th century called Pepper's Ghost, which creates projections on stage. These moments of wonder are often made with nuts and bolts. but the bar keeps getting raised with new technology and what audiences expect to see on stage. And since J&M has been doing theatrical effects for so long on Broadway,

in some ways, their fiercest competition is themselves. I started clenching my teeth again at night recently. When I woke up, my jaw felt like it was locked tight, I used to clench my teeth at night when I was in college. Back then, I had to go to a dentist to get a mouth guard, which was really expensive. Now, you can get a custom-fit night guard through Remy. Remy is 80% less than the dentist, and way easier. No waiting rooms, no overpriced bills.

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and he said, completely out of the blue, unprompted. By the way, that Remy Mouthguard you got me still works great. Try Remy risk-free at shopremi.com slash imaginary and use the code imaginary to get up to 50% off your night guard at checkout. That's 50% off at shop, remI.com slash imaginary with a code imaginary. Thank you, Remy, for supporting this episode. I asked Jeremy Chernick, what was the state of theatrical effects when he first joined the company 20 years ago?

When I first started, I was very craft. I could build things with my hands and I would often put things together with parts that I found in catalogs. I started working for a man named Gregory Me, who did this before I did, and he came from a farm. So a lot of his early thoughts and technology came literally from farm catalogs. He is, for me, one of the inventors of Rain on stage. And he really did it with their irrigation. Right. Like, I think I read you in an interview said, like, making it rain on stage, it's not as hard as figuring out where does the water go afterwards?

Absolutely. Bowden Bushell is a production coordinator and pyrotechnician at J&M. A great deal of what we do is bespoke. Nobody's ever done that thing before. And so we have to not speculate on how it will fail. We have to see how it will fail and to do it very publicly. I'm often in a room and I go, let's see how this works

and then something just doesn't work and then you have to go, okay, next. For instance, Boden was telling me about how Gregory Me, one of the founders of J&M, worked on a 2002 revival of Into the Woods. It's a classic Stephen Sontai musical which mixes different fairy tales together, including Jack and the Beanstalk.

There are giants in the sky. There are big, tall, terrible giants in the sky. One of the effects in the show is a giant who comes down from the beanstalk and wreaks havoc on the characters. The giant approaching the screen was an electromechanical effect that was quite literally pieces of aluminum that were cut out and were actuated by rods and screws. And so as the giant approached the light by,

stage that was shining on a drop, it was physically changing size and getting larger. And so we still have that giant and it's a mechanical object that does a thing. It sort of marches left right, left right, and the arms swing and the head gets bigger and the arms get bigger and the torso gets bigger. And now you just ask your video programmer to create that object and you put a short throw projector back there and Bob's your uncle, didn't exist. And, you know, if you wanted to change how the giant looked, you had to sit down and cut new pieces of aluminum and make new electro-mechanical things that happened.

So that level of artistry, of the mechanical artistry, is rarer because so many of the tricks can be automated into flat 2D surfaces. He says the best thing about new technology is that it gives him new workarounds to old problems. The advances in 3D printing and the advances in miniaturization of objects have made it so that you can hide things inside things. So that means that we can now take little computers and stick them places that we could never do. We just didn't have the technology. You might have tried maybe a garage door opener or something like that, but it was all going to be much, much cruder. That is crucial in theater because everybody is constrained by

physics. For instance, the musical Frozen used to be at the St. James Theater in Manhattan. That building is almost a hundred years old. Jeremy Chernick was a bit overwhelmed when you realized how much they needed it to snow on stage. One of the solutions was to cover the stage itself with a blanket of low-lying fog, which could look like a blanket of snow. That way, the actors can perform their choreography and not worry about slipping or tripping. But snow still has to come down from the ceiling. One of the things that I fight with every day in my job is real estate on a stage. But when I looked up at the drawings of what the overhead of the stage looked like, it's filled with lights and video projection.

So I started by going like, okay, there's no space for snow. The way that I would have normally done snow in the olden days are big, long. stage long, like 30 foot wide, eight inch diameter kind of tumblers or drums filled with snow and then those drums have perforation. And when they rotate, you drop snow. That's a pretty classic way of dropping snow. Here I had no space for any of that. And we figured out, okay, there are all these lights, but between every single light, there is 18 inches of space. So I started by thinking about like, well, okay, so I can have like, a tube that's vertical that's filled with snow and then I want to release a little bit of snow every few seconds or whenever I want. I want to control the release of snow in like what I called a pinch at a time. Eventually we came up with a snow delivery device that you could put like a bunch of snow and a hopper and it would with technology rotate. Every inch of that was designed with three printed parts with custom circuit boards and circuit breaker technology so that it would do exactly

what we wanted in the space that we wanted. I can program things within a hundredth of a second. Bowden says they can program things as carefully as they want, but the shows don't always go off like clockwork. One of the ways they try to control mishaps is by making sure that as few people as possible are responsible for making effects happen, especially if those effects could be dangerous. Any fool can push a button, have something to blow up. It's knowing when not to push the button that is the hard part.

Somebody's going to yell at you and say, why did you miss your cue? And you're going to say, well, that person was standing there or something was wrong. And then you have to defend yourself. So you have to be completely sure that you're capable of standing up to absolutely everybody in the room and saying, this thing wasn't. going the way I wanted to. So I didn't push the button to make the thing happen. I don't ever want to be in a situation where I go, well, I hope this works, because that is not a sentence you want to say to the judge. Typically, the person responsible for pushing those buttons is a stage

hand or stage manager, but sometimes the actor has to push the button. For instance, J&M worked on the musical Beetlejuice. All you got to do is say my name. But I don't know your name. Well, I I can't say it. How about the game of charades? Yes, let's play it. Two words. Okay. Second word.

Right. Drink. No. Beverage. No. No. Two. Yes.

Okay. First word. Okay. Bug. No. And close, but no. Beatle. Yes.

You choose. Wow. I'm impressed. And all you got to do is say my name. When I asked Jeremy, what were the hardest effects to do in that show? I thought he was going to mention the big ones. I mean, they recreated a lot of the creatures from the original film, like the giant sandworm. But Jeremy says the more subtle effects were often more difficult.

For instance, there's a character in the original film named Juno. She runs the bureaucracy in the afterlife, and she smokes. But when she speaks, the smoke comes out of her throat because, presumably, she died from having her throat slit. It's a very Tim Burton gag. Will you guys shut off? Leave me alone. I've got all this paperwork to do. You two. Come in here. Sit down. Get in here. Both of you. On a film set, they can have a lot of people outside the edge of the frame making that effect happen, and the length of a scene in a movie can be short.

But how do you pull off that effect in the midst of a live musical? That trick is done entirely by the performer herself, and the little tiny smoke machine that she's wearing in an uncomfortable place strapped to her body and has then a tube running up. the center of her throat has then a button down her sleeve and none of it works on a timing that is easy. In other words, you can't push the button and the smoke doesn't come out at the same time. You push that button and then there's like this, I would call it one second delay. So the action that the performer had to do was smoke the cigarette, but also know, understand that they might have to hit the button before they hold the cigarette to their mouth.

there's something hard about that for a performer because you're just doing something a little bit out of order and backwards. Working with those actors to really get that, that's the challenge. It's hard to be like, I'm really sorry. I know you're in the middle of acting, but you have to push the button at the wrong time or what feels like the wrong time. On my show, I've talked about how actors on film sets sometimes find it frustrating to work in totally digital environments.

Everything around them is covered in green fabric. They're shown a ball on a stick and told, this is an alien and it's your best friend. Actors often say that they like working with practical effects because they can see them and touch them. But Jeremy says that's not entirely true with theater. The choreography, singing, and emotional arcs all have to unfold continuously on stage.

And while the actors are rehearsing all of that, this team of special effects people come in and say, oh, you also have to do this potentially really dangerous, complicated, mechanical thing in the midst of your big number. At one point in the Beetlejuice musical, the character of Barbara Maitland sees that her hand is on fire. That's the ghost character that Gina Davis played in the original film. Jeremy says,

letting your hand on fire is a trick that many magicians have mastered, but it takes a long time to master it. You might have a performer who's nervous about having fire on their hand. You might have a performer who isn't as interested in the sort of subtle hand-helds, all of the action they have to do, how they have to hold their hand, how they have to hold it so the audience doesn't see, how they have to hold it so it doesn't burn, how they have to put the fire out, which they have to do themselves, how they have to get rid of the object that was on fire. There's a whole slew of things associated with that. And that one took a lot of, like, trust and communication between certainly me and the performers to do that. J&M also worked on the Adams family musical. And once again, Jeremy told me that the big effects weren't as difficult as the little ones.

There's a scene where Wednesday Adams shoots a crossbow into an apple, which is right on top of her potential boyfriend's head. In a TV show or a movie, that effect could be done with CG or cross-cutting. But it has to happen in the middle of a song. Pierce the apple, not the liver, or we're dancing on my grave. Plains it in the bow and steady. Can't you shoot that thing already? Wait. That was really fun.

We made a crossbow that you could put an arrow in. And when you pulled the trigger, the string and the bow snapped like it fired. But the arrow fell inside of the body of the crossbow. bow. The young man went against a tree. And this is one of those things where I had to, like, I went to the floral district and bought 50 types of fake apples because I had to find one that I could like kind of bore out. But essentially the performer would lean against the tree on the back of the apple. There was a little piece of red Velcro. So the apple was always in the perfect position. And then through the back of a tree, we had an incredibly fast moving piston with the feathers of the

of the bolt it's called or the arrow all of that was timed again very carefully with stage management where you know she shoots the gun he's put the apple in the right place there's a lot of people staring to make sure that everything is right because if it's wrong the apple goes flying off or if it's wrong he could hurt himself or there's a million ways in which we we put safety into into all the things i do but then this essentially back of the arrow comes out at lightning speed and the is stuck on the tree. I asked Jeremy, if he's ever gotten to a situation where they develop something that works perfectly

at the warehouse, then they transfer it to a theater and all of their meticulous planning has to be thrown out. Yeah, it happens all the time. There's no right way to solve that problem. The hardest thing for me is, okay, we work really hard and we put all this technology into a piece of scenery, and it comes out of this one place,

and it's perfect, and it is safe, and everyone is happy. And we get into rehearsal on stage with performers. And for any reason, the director is like, oh, could it be three feet to the left? So you just have to kind of figure that out. I did, this is a good, a good story. I did the Scottish play, the Macbeth, starring Daniel Craig. And that show happened right as he finished being James Bond for good. And it was a thing I think he really wanted to do to sort of shake off the bond of it

all. One of the things that was decided in that production was that it was going to be unbelievably bloody and that he wanted to die terribly covered in blood and in maybe an undignified way. In that show, he's doing the final duel where he does eventually die and he wanted to be stabbed in the groin where there's a big artery that you would bleed out of and die. And so we had a scene where they were fighting and the two of them are scrabbling up against the wall and his back is against the wall and then he would reach between his legs and he would remove a knife and then a gush of blood needed to come out we had like kind of a secret hidden spigot of blood and that spigot of blood would turn on and every night we were we were frustrated like it looks

like you turned a faucet on. It doesn't look naturalistic. It's not like blood is pouring out. It kind of just looks like we turned on a blood faucet backstage between his legs. And then in an epiphany, I was like, you know what we need to do? We need to turn the faucet upside down. So that instead of it shooting down, we're just going to turn it up. And it will then shoot up into him. And it will go everywhere. It won't, it won't gush down. It'll just fill his whole, all of his pants with blood. Can't believe that never happened in a Bond movie. I don't know why. Building a business can be like putting on a play or a musical. You might dream of being a showboat, but sometimes your growth can outpace what you can handle and it feels like anything goes. Ship station can help you hit your

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Start your 60-day free trial at shipstation.com and use the code imaginary. That shipstation.com Code Imaginary. I never used to expect special effects in theater to compete with movies or TV. But as theatrical effects have gotten better, that can raise the audience's expectations. Again, Bowden-Buschel. I think there's a real challenge that we have gotten used to the idea of jump cuts.

We've gotten used to the idea of the idea of the, being able to change POV and do those kinds of things. And so on the shows that I've worked on, very often we're helping the director point people in a direction. And yeah, we're trying to deal with the fact that we're used to being able to go into somebody's eyeball with a camera and then suddenly be in that world. When we did Tarzan on Broadway is a beautiful, beautiful scene where they open up and the pair of them are shipwrecked, but they're shipwrecked from an overhead shot, which is difficult

to do in a theater, but what they had done was they had rigged the actors onto the back wall, and you were looking at them from overhead. As they crawled up the beach, they crawled down the wall onto the floor, and then the beach scape was snatched out using a drop that just pulled out into a... little snoot. So suddenly you were able to do what cinematically would have been an overhead shot into a cut to, you know, a wide shot on a beach in a different way. And sometimes audiences want to see on stage exactly what they saw in the film.

Jeremy says on the musical of Frozen. Elsa, the magical ice princess, has to build a magical castle around herself, and she has to be able to change her dress from her normal princess wear to the ice princess that we all know Elsa is supposed to look like. It took us a long time to figure out how to spectacularly change her dress. You can watch the live musical on Disney Plus, and this moment is really quick and subtle. The actress gestures with her arms. Her dark dress zips off into oblivion and reveals a sparkling blue gown underneath. As I was trying to figure out how they did it,

my brain was still thinking like it was the movies. I was imagining that she was wearing like a motion capture suit and the dresses were digital, but no. As I mentioned before in this show, there was a low-lying blanket of fog, which doubles for a blanket of snow. There's also a trapdoor on the floor. And from below the stage, one of the stage hands

reaches into the fog, grabs the hem of the dress, and yanks it off with perfect timing. And that's not the only special effect that happens during that song. She has to pull off a glove in the beginning of the song because that's iconic from the movie

and then the glove goes flying away. It took us a good while before that glove flew out of her hand in a way that didn't feel like it was a bad stringed glove, but actually flittered away. And that's the other advantage of working for a company like Disney occasionally. They do have the resources to just keep working on something

over and over again in different ways to improve upon it. They don't give up. You just keep working at it. Bowden says sometimes they can be too good at their jobs in raising people's expectations. I was called by an advertising person who said they wanted to make an apple levitate. And I said, well, the trick of doing that is that you have to use a little wire or this thing. I'm like, no, no, we want to actually make an apple levitate.

I said, I'm not aware of a way to make a non-regular object hang in space. Well, yeah, they have to reach in and they have to grab the apple and then take a bite out of it and be able to walk around at 360 and there's no trick. and so I called a couple of people and everyone was like, well, the trick would be to use the super fine wire, et cetera. And like, no, they don't want a trick. And they're like, well, then they don't want it to be live.

Have there been some examples like the Apple where somebody asks you to do something and you're just like, like there's a line of the prestige I love where Michael Cain says, we're magicians, not wizards, where you had a moment like that, but then you actually did figure it out where you're like, oh my God, I can actually do this.

So there's a show called a holiday in. It was at Studio 54 and the roundabout was producing it and they wanted to reproduce the famous Fred Astaire tap dance sequence with firecrackers. Well, you can't do firecrackers on the stage. It's just like pieces of bits flying around and having somebody with a pocketful of explosives and throwing them into a crowd seems like a bad idea, even if it is for fun. So we came up with this, I myself and and the team at J&M came up with this idea that what if we made a fake firework and the fake firework was a combination of air, glitter, dust, an Arduino, MIDI, midi triggering, and all of these pieces that and the deep programming went into it with the sound effect.

It was so convincing that once it was tuned in, people asked me who the pirate technician on the show was. And at the beginning, it was a terrible idea. It was so complicated. There was so much machinery, and it all had to work just the way it needed to. Speaking of trying to do The Impossible, Jeremy Chernick was the main special effects designer on the London production of Harry Potter and the Curse Child before it came to New York. You're Albert Potter, and I'm Scorpius Malfoy. Our parents didn't get on. It's an incredibly ambitious show, but it's also a fantasy world that audiences have already seen with Hollywood-style special effects. The hardest thing was that one of the producers who came from film just didn't understand some basic things like you can't take a tiny stick and point it at anything and a giant red light can come flying out.

and maybe the other person has their green light comes out and then those two lights fight in the air. The team that worked on that, including myself, worked on a visual and physical language, which really originated with Stephen Hoggett, the choreographer, to do things that felt spectacular and felt within the world of, you know, Harry Potter, but didn't feel like a film. They felt like human beings and their bodies doing a thing that conveyed the story in almost like a dance. And then we layered technology on top of that to enhance it. So a good example is there's a duel in that show, a wand duel between two characters. Those characters are moving and doing really exciting, you know, sort of wand action.

But they're doing it through choreography with their bodies and the elements that we added to it were small and precise in a way that wasn't like we're not trying to do a giant movie. We're trying to surprise the audience by doing it so differently and in such a sort of dance way. In those scenes, there are staged hands covered entirely in black, moving the actors and props when they're being affected. by magic wands. The audience can't see the stage hands because of the lighting. Then you layer on top of that, the reaction of the actors, and it's totally convincing. I asked Jeremy, what was the hardest trick to get right on that show? Oh my God, the whole show. That show is very hard. We worked on that for about two. I think I worked on it for two years before an audience saw it. Some of the most challenging stuff were things that didn't make it to

the stage because they were just too fussy they meaning the effects there were certain effects that were just too fussy and they didn't make it to the stage there's the dementor effect where they pull the soul out of people's mouths we i had been trying to deliver that sort of like smoke pulling out of someone's mouth for a long time it just never was too clunky it didn't didn't work it wasn't fast enough so it's the things that sort of don't make it to the stage that are hard they added a writing moment in that show where they killed a character on stage using Avata Cadavra, which is the death spell

and it is in the writing as a green like blast and we had to add green blast of fire kind of once we were already in the production like I believe that was added when we were already in previews and we had to figure out how to do that pretty quickly I mean, there was a fast run of like, what is a green fire machine and then what is it and how does it fit? So it took a while to convince people that this is a play and we're going to do it in a theatrical way and not deliver like CGI movie in real life. And talking with Jeremy and Bowden, I kept expecting them to reveal more high-tech solutions.

I was surprised how often that wasn't the case. It's like if you look at the history of painting over the last 500 years, every generation of painters figured out how to paint more realistically until we got hyper-realism. New technology helps along the way, but it all comes down to human ingenuity, ambition, persistence, and perfectionism. Learning how J&M pulls off these tricks made the shows even more impressive to me. I feel like too many people these days take live performance for granted I get so mad

when somebody takes out their phone in the middle of a darkened theater to check their texts or scroll through Instagram it breaks my suspension of disbelief and I want to yell at them respect this moment respect the people around you, respect the performers and the work that this team is doing

to cast a spell on all of us if the folks at J&M could make those phones disappear, that would be true magic. That's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Jeremy Chernick and Bowden Bushel at J&M. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show. It's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talked with a foreign policy expert who worked in the Obama White House

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