The Making of a Dragon
In February of 2020, my colleague Scott Guy approached me with a beat sheet for a new one-woman musical he was writing for me – called “The Dragon Queen”. By March, we had our first reading together of the script, and by May Scott had completed the score (which meant he had taken the public domain music and written new lyrics for it).
It was already apparent that this was going to be the most difficult role he had written for me to date – both in terms of the text and music, and also in terms of the physical design for the character. In June, I spoke with a puppeteer and a prosthetic designer to start thinking about how to create this character.
In July, Scott and I did the first actual read/sing through of the entire piece, and in August I began rehearsing the music with the piano-only rehearsal tracks Scott had prepared for me. In September, Scott gave me an “accent starter kit” to help me work on the variation of the Old English accent he had in mind for the role.

In October of 2020, Scott decided he wanted to try to create the final tracks for the show himself – and that he wanted them to be synthesized and to rely heavily on electric guitar and other such sounds. After a couple of months of experimentation – he was able to deliver the first track that had the sound he wanted – the cue for the very top of the show.
While Scott was working on the score and I was continuing to memorize the dialogue and learn the songs, I also got to work on the physical elements for the character. From October 2020 through June of 2021, I worked my way through all the elements including the wings, the headdress/mask, the robe, and more.
The Wings
The Robe
The Headdress
Odds & Ends
Test Day
In September of 2021, once all the elements were ready, I did a “test day” where I tried on all of the elements to test them out. Here is a time-lapse video of all the pieces coming together. (Note that this was before the makeup, and before the chains were anchored!)
Make-Up
This is a time-lapse video of the day (in October 2021) that my amazing make-up artist, Andrea Press, first glued the headdress onto my face, and created the make-up for the Dragon Queen.
The Shoot
In November and December of 2021, we had our shoot days where we tested the lighting and sound, and finally actually shot the whole show. We had many challenges: the fact that we are on the Burbank Airport flight path and have to constantly deal with the noise of planes; along with the issue that my headdress kept starting to come away from my face. The show runs about 80 minutes – and that’s a long time to be in such a heavy costume under lighting – so I was sweating a lot! I also had the issue of the sheer weight of all the elements that made it difficult for me to keeping standing and sitting (my thighs were having real problems with all the weight; and my arm pits were sore from the weight of the wing harness). But all in all, the shoot days went well – and we are now busy doing the editing.
Once all the editing is done – the final video will be posted here. Can’t wait!

In the meantime, here is a demo of one of the songs from the show – “The Roast Pig” – when the Dragon Queen complains to her prison guard that she never gets hot food, and describes what would be her favorite meal.

