Some Wicked-cool Physics

I am a theater major and one of my favorite broadway shows is Wicked. In the Broadway production, there is a super cool scene where Elphaba sends out evil flying monkeys. The monkeys swing back and forth across the stage and look really scary doing it. This requires many rigging systems in order to get a herd of flying monkeys onstage and suspended in the air at one time. The monkeys climb up flats (a wall on stage within the reality of the show), jump off and swing back and forth across the stage (soaring through the sky). Newton's first law is occurring to each actor. The actor is the object that will remain in motion unless there is another force starts acting on it. The actor and the wire act as a pendulum and (ideally) swing without changing their speed.

 In the early tech rehearsals they realized these monkeys were not able to fly with the same initial and final velocity, when only flying one length of the stage (they were decelerating). The director wanted to make the scene scary, but no matter how much force the monkeys used when pushing off the wall, the velocity decreased dramatically. They realized that this was because of a costuming issue which required a lot of trial and error. These monkeys had to have wings (how else are they going to fly) but when they would jump off the wall (Fapp from the feet on the wall and the FN acting from the wall on the feet) but the air resistance (“another force” in Newton's 3rd law) would put force on the wings in the negative x direction (direction of motion is in the positive x direction) and would slow the monkeys so much it killed the scary affect they were going for and made them look lame and slow. So the costume designers went back to the drawing board and used a mesh type of material that could let air through for the wings as well as made the body suit less baggy for both the cunning affect and also to reduce air resistance when flying.

The technical director also had a hard time with this effect. The wires that held the actors had
to be strong enough (have a large enough maximum tension) to hold the actors safely while
accelerating in both the x and y directions while also being invisible to the audience.

As I was doing research on this topic, I started to appreciate this affect more because so many people in the production crew, (technical director, engineers, choreographer, stage director and costume designs) had to be mindful of physics in the bringing to life of this production.  
(PS. I have no idea why the formatting is weird, It wont let me change it)