Behind the scenes of the Charlottetown set, where tricks of the trade magically recreate 19th-century PEI.

Not to disillusion theatre-goers, but the gables in Anne of Green Gables-The Musical aren't green after all. They're actually "cyclorama blue," or so the original paint blend was coined back in 1965 when Anne was first staged. The hybrid tint has a turquoise quality to it, necessary because of the intensity and altering effects of stage lighting. Forty seasons and a multitude of performances later, cyc blue is still used to touch up the Green Gables set.

Such are the tricks of the theatre trade-the creation of illusion. Entertainment hocus pocus. In the controlled sensory elements of the theatrical setting, the mind adjusts and accommodates such pretexts.

Once the curtain rises, we overlook the fact that the Avonlea school desks roll on and off stage on dollies. We forget that the train station has no tracks and that Matthew's buggy progresses across the stage with the help of a winch cable. When Anne and the other dancers begin their masterfully choreographed egg-and-spoon race at the end of the first act, a full-stage backdrop would make you swear they're leaping and darting across a carnival-coloured horizon.

From the overture on, the most durable and widely travelled set in the history of Canadian theatre continues to take audiences on a whimsical flight of the imagination. From 1965 to the end of 2004, a total of 2,460 Anne performances have been staged in Charlottetown alone, drawing 2.2 million people from around the world. The production has also been staged at Expo '86 in Vancouver; Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan; on Broadway in 1971/72; on six Canadian tours; and in 1969, Anne was the Musical of the Year in London's West End.

Anne has a lot of baggage, and describing the set necessitates the use of technical jargon. There are 15 flying pieces, including seven solid pieces and eight drops. The memorable centrepiece is the cyclorama blue, two-storey house, described as "skeletal." The roof arch and surrounding trees (weighing 210 kilograms) rise and fall from the overhead fly floor in a single unit while, like the school desks, the rest of the structure is dollied seamlessly into position. Once this 10-second assembly is complete, the house includes a staircase, Anne's second-floor bedroom, the kitchen, furnishings and a front porch. All the details work together to create a look and feel that you're in the heart of Prince Edward Island, no matter where the performance is staged.

It's in the simple, small porch, for example, where original director and choreographer Alan Lund had Matthew scraping Pearl the horse's dung off his boots. The porch is where the story's most important entrances and exits occur, through a wooden screen door.

It's also where, in the final musical seconds, romance blossoms between Anne and Gilbert.

The production was mounted to fit into the Confederation Centre of the Arts Theatre for the inaugural season of The Charlottetown Festival. All the paraphernalia takes a small army to load in and set up when the musical is on tour. It takes a 16-metre tractor-trailer to carry everything on the road, and set-ups take from 12 to 16 hours, depending on the configuration of the theatre and the technical apparatus it houses.

Theatre work is fraught with the probability that things will go awry-and for good reasons. Most of what happens during a show occurs in the dark. There are dozens of technical cues that prompt the movement of set pieces. And when you do a tally on the crew, the cast and the orchestra, there's an awful slew of people backstage to avoid.

During a Vancouver performance years ago, the winch cable that drives Matthew's buggy across the stage snapped. Roddy Diamond, The Charlottetown Festival's veteran head of properties, crouched behind the buggy and duck-walked it from one end of the stage to the other. When Anne played Osaka, a Japanese stage crew member missed a cue and became trapped onstage during a scene. (He was persuaded to hide beneath Anne's bed.) In Hamilton, Ont, a local crew member was knocked out cold when he ran headlong, mid-performance, into the overhanging edge of the porch during a prop change.

But invariably, the show goes on, and it carries with it a certain magical quality.

"Anne is mechanically simple," Roddy says. "It's a nice little piece of magic that stretches everybody's imaginations."

Harvey Sawler is a former marketing and public relations director of The Charlottetown Festival.