I asked her to explain her best of the 16 show-scented candles.
Samantha Sehter is the brains – or the nose? – behind “Scents of the Stage,” a brand new company that makes candles that smell like specific Broadway shows – or more precisely, create a scent that’s meant to evoke a particular musical. Her booth was my last stop on the first day of the tenth anniversary of BroadwayCon.
She held one inspired by “Little Shop of Horrors.”
I unscrewed the top and took a whiff. “It smells like ammonia.”
“It smells like a Venus Fly Trap,” she corrected me. “Like Audrey II.”
“How do you know what a Venus Fly Trap smells like?”
“Well, I don’t but I imagine Mr. Mushnik’s flower shop to smell like this.”
The next one was more straightforward: “Barber’s Blade,” inspired by Sweeney Todd, and it smelled like shaving cream.
“Hamilton Study,” did indeed smell like the eighteenth century, and Samantha got specific: “Like a mix of tobacco, aged parchment and leather.”
“Okay, this is our most popular. It’s inspired by The Outsiders on Broadway. It’s called Sunsets over Tulsa, and it’s a rich sandalwood and amber with cardamom. And the idea is that it smells like what you would imagine a warm sunset or well, the horizon.”
The people behind ParodyBill have clearly spent much time making up jokey playbills, many of which are musical mashups, one of which was bawdy, and one I thought highly sophisticated (the “In the Heights”)
Dr. Ashleigh Strange used three musicals — “Newsies,” “Urinetown” and “Hairspray” — to extract lessons for movement organizing.
The panel on immersive theater was a lively mix of anecdotes and insights about how to interact spontaneously but safely with audience members, but what exactly is immersive theater? The speakers, who have been creating or performing the genre for as long as 14 years, boiled it down to three words: Play and choice.
Two of the people in these photographs aren’t cosplay players; they’re professional performers, in the cast of “Speakeasy Die Softly.”
