David Gallo and Tait Towers Bring Super WHY Live: You've Got the Power! to the StageTony Award-winning scenic designer David Gallo teams with flying specialists, Tait Towers, to bring Super WHY Live: You've Got the Power! to the stage. Produced by S2BN Entertainment (Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark; Yo Gabba Gabba! Live; Rock of Ages, the Musical) Super WHY Live is inspired by the Emmy-nominated animated PBS kids series Super WHY, conceived by Angela Santomero, who also created Blue Clues. Gallo, known for his scenic and projection designs on Broadway, international stages, and family productions, called on the experts at Tait Towers to design trusses so that the actions of the actors and series' heroes, the 'WHY flyers', remained familiar and believable to the pre-school audience. Gallo recently collaborated with Tait on a large venue rock concert. The Monroe Civic Center was bustling with anticipation when the Super WHY characters appeared on stage. In this full-scale live production, the actors, including two human flyers, performed with WHY flyer puppets. "Keeping the show visually consistent with this popular series while adapting the technical design to multiple stages was challenging," said Gallo but he was fully committed to keeping the magical reality intact and providing exciting entertainment for the whole family. "For some of these kids, this is their first time seeing a live show, so we really want to wow them! We teamed with Tait because they are the best." The Monroe performance launches the Southeastern states tour in advance of a fall coast-to-coast live tour. Mike Bauder serves as the production manager on the Super WHY project. For the theatrical tour of Super WHY Live: You've Got the Power!, Tait Towers created a versatile touring automation truss that housed ten axes of motion. The 'WHY flyers' flight automation is powered by four Tait Model T winches, mounted to custom rotators lift. To suit the dynamic content to which the flyers sync, Tait configured the winches to lift the flyers as fast as 10' per second. Farther along the truss, two additional T winches are dedicated exclusively to human flight effects in the show, rocketing performers at 20' per second. This versatile array of winches allows for effects such as zero-gravity astronaut bouncing, heroic tarzan swings, silk acts, and aerial tumbling; all based on a single, highly tourable truss. 
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