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The list of folks who
By DavidJohnFarinella
can report meeting
celebrities like Lucille
Ball, Bob Hope, Johnny Carson,
David Letterman and Sandy Duncan
over the course of a lifetime has to be
a small one. The only smaller one is the
list of the people who can say that they’ve
taken those celebrities, put them into a harness
and then flown them across a stage.
Just how small is that group? One man,
Peter Foy, who got his start in the United
States while working with the U.K.-based
company Kirby’s Flying Ballets in 1950
when he came across the pond to work on
the Broadway production of Peter Pan that
starred Jean Arthur and Boris Karloff. He
“In the past, flying used to be done like a
crane working at a construction site, but Peter
made it extremely dynamic by swinging
people and getting them outside the control
zone, giving it that look of freedom,” he says.
That freedom wasn’t something that
Foy’s former boss, Joe Kirby of Kirby’s Flying
Ballets, was comfortable seeing for the first
time. “Mrs. Foy tells a story of seeing a production
of Peter Pan in New York with Mary
Martin when Mr. Kirby was over. Peter was
flying Mary on the Inter-Related Pendulum
System and Barbara said that Kirby’s fingernails
dug into her arm as he watched the
flying, because he was petrified that something
bad was going to happen,” McGeough
says. “But the audience just absolutely loved
it and that was the way Peter broke the barrier
and made flying look like flying instead
of somebody being controlled by a crane.”
That wasn’t Foy’s last flying innovation.
The Track on Track system came in 1962, it
people from five to 20 feet per second.”
Moreover, McGeough points out that
the company has used a bit of everything
to fly performers, including hydraulics, motors
and bungee cords. “So many different
things to create many different looks,” he
says. “We have a production opening on
Broadway, Tarzan, that’s being produced
by Disney, where we can fly people pretty
much all over the theatre. Its getting great
reaction and we’re excited about it.”
Above and beyond the technical aspects
of the business, the Foy team is unique in
that the personnel the company supplies
to productions is knowledgeable in music,
choreography, rigging and safety. “We call
our people flying directors and we train
them anywhere from eight months to a year
here in Las Vegas and then we send them
out with other flying directors to learn, because
there’s a lot to it,” McGeough reports.
That experience is important every day
“There are four people backstage with the music going on,
the lighting happening, sets moving and a fight happening,
It’s quite an effort to make it look like they are having a fight.”
- Joe McGeough
broke off in 1957 and opened Flying by Foy.
Over the next five decades, Foy and his
U.S. company, Flying by Foy has worked with
an amazing assortment of talent that runs the
gamut from Garth Brooks to Julie Andrews,
Sean Connery to Chris Farley, Eminem to Ellen
DeGeneres. The Flying by Foy crew has also
had a hand in Broadway, church, school and
community theatre shows across the globe.
The company opened an office in the U.K. in
1992, expanding its reach overseas and returning
to where it all began for Peter Foy.
One of the things that set Flying by Foy
apart in the company’s early days, explains
operations manager Joe McGeough, was the
invention of the Inter-Related Pendulum.
was improved upon with the Inter-Reacting
Compensator system and since then the
company’s engineers have added additional
features that heighten the effect of flying.
Also, the Foy team came up with the Multi-
Point Balance Harness, which was used for
the first time in the 1965 movie Fantastic
Voyage to better seat the talent. “The way
things have changed is that all of the manual
flying effects that Peter created we are now
doing with automation,” McGeough reports.
“You see motors that look fairly similar to the
way they looked back in the ‘50s or ‘60s, but
now you can program it to go to any position
along the line. You can make the moves very
dynamic by having motors that will move
when a flying director is working,
especially on a show like
The Lion King. The company has
staffed nine productions across
the globe. “The flying effects
have to be coordinated with the
sets that move. During the end
of the show, there is a confrontation
between grown up Simba
and Scar and there is a piece of
scenery that comes out on stage
with the two of them on it. It’s
about 12 feet high and it’s only
about the width of a step,” Mc-
Geough says. “They are up there
having a battle and the flying
34 PLSN AUGUST 2006
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