A Montezuma-Cortez High School senior is showing his talent for set design, not only for the high school’s drama department, but for other theater entities outside of school.
Cruz Hernandez has been involved in designing sets for the middle school and high school since he was in sixth grade. However, last year’s set design for “Hello, Dolly” allowed him to design the dynamic set featured in the high school’s fall musical, which opened on Thursday night.
“My first position in theater was in sixth grade as the set designer,” Hernandez told The Journal. “It’s something that I’ve been passionate about for a long time.”
This fall’s musical of “Beauty and the Beast” features a stunning, large-scale set, one that is larger than most past sets, according to drama director Nicholaus Sandner.
Hernandez will compete with his “Beauty and the Beast” set model for the program’s trip to ThesCon in December. He is also the actor playing Gaston’s yes-man, Lefou, in addition to designing the set.
Not only is Hernandez active in the high school’s drama program, he’s the president of the theater troupe and a member of the high school’s improv troupe, “Impulsive Improvisers.” He also recently started designing sets for a professional theater company in Farmington.
The MCHS theater troop visits the Four Corners Musical Theatre Company at the Farmington Civic Center to watch shows from time to time, as the company offers the drama program free tickets. Hernandez said he inquired if the company needed a set designer on one particular trip.
“I reached out and was like, ‘Can I be your set designer?’ My first show to design with them was the professional one, ‘Young Frankenstein,’” Hernandez said.
Designing for “Young Frankenstein” went so well that Hernandez will also design the “Charlie Brown Christmas” set, as well as the sets for all other shows in 2025. He will still design the sets while in college.
To design a set, Hernandez said he first goes through the entire script, highlighting specific locations and brainstorming how he can fit various locations into the design.
“In ‘Hello, Dolly,’ a train station, a feed store, New York City, downtown, all these things had to fit into one set that fits backstage too,” Hernandez said.
Once he establishes how he’s going to design the set, he does drawings to scale. The entire process takes about a month to complete.
“I do a half-inch scale, and then I start making the models out of foam core,” Hernandez said. “I make physical, little models and then we can have something tangible to use when making the sets.”
He was also recently hired as the Sunflower Theatre’s assistant manager.
Hernandez, who will graduate from MCHS in the spring, said that he’s applied to University of Colorado Boulder. He hopes to double major in technical theater and education.
“Essentially what Mr. Sandner does,” he said. “I think the cool thing about our high school theater department is that we’re a family. We all know that we have each other’s backs, and we all know we can bring a diverse community together to see something that we created. I think that was the inspiration to keep doing it … I think it’s a great way for people to unite.”
