Siege - Day 106

Theater news?  Broadway won't open this year.

Locally, various theaters are trying video and tiny audience and outdoor shows... we'll see if any of these attempts work.  Since Actors' Equity isn't allowing members to sign contracts right now, it's all experimental.  And at least one theater person I know is at their wits end on how to make a living right now.

Especially in Texas, where the coronavirus is spreading wildly.

My studio here is more full this week - my on-again-off-again home office mate is back (thank goodness!) because now three people in his office have sick family, so have been exposed and could potentially expose everyone in the office.  Home behind the blue door again!  Let's hope it's safer at home.

But I was out briefly this morning to early-vote in the primary.  I wondered how safe that would feel, but actually it was fine: lots of room, lots of precautions.  November may be different.

A New York Minute

Back from NYC.

Fun!  I saw three shows: Churchill, a one-hander about the British Prime Minister set late in his career, which was very good; Hedwig and the Angry Inch, with the original Hedwig (also book writer), John Cameron Mitchell, which was excellent rowdy fun; and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, which was fascinating.  And the highest tech of the three...   In fact, watching as a set designer, these three shows - seen in that order - were a primer on the use of projections on stage.

In Churchill, the set was backed by a large window with traditional mullions which acted as a projection screen.  Usually these projections were further "back-grounded" by adding an intervening layer of glazing lines (as in a "leaded" or stained glass window).  So images were always mere backdrop to the actor and never pulled focus.  The set was a traditional wood paneled room that worked just fine.

In Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the setting was a joke - literally.  To explain why Hedwig, the little-heard-of rock singer, had a Broadway-worthy set (as you MUST have at Broadway ticket prices I guess), Hedwig explained that this was a one-night-only concert held on the stage of a just closed musical - just closed during its first night intermission!   The unlucky show?  Hurt Locker: the Musical.  Pretty funny.  This "borrowed" set was a faux war-torn city made of vanishing perspective cut-out side flats of buildings, an upstage groundrow of more wrecked buildings, a stage floor of, apparently, blown-up street paving with a destroyed car at center and a whole frozen-moment-of-destruction spray of car parts in the air.

Very cool.

Later in the show all these I-thought-fixed pieces moved or did something expensive and Broadway-y.  Sound.  Lights!  Projections!  Amazing.  Not overdone.  Most projections were the collage of images you'd expect, but there was a wonderful sequence where a scrim dropped and Hedwig (behind the scrim) interacted with cartoon-like animations.  Wonderful!  Occasionally later bits of these animations reappeared, but never again to such delightful degree.

There was no lack of projections in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.  The set for this story of an autistic boy's adventure was set in almost a cubic shadowbox lined with graph paper - big blank gridded surfaces.  Throughout the show laser projections were "drawn" on the walls and floor... or suddenly spattered out like exploding stars, or outlined the neighbors' houses, or...  The ingenuity and surprise and the interaction between actors, props, chalk, projections, light, sound, and the physical set were impressive and told the story well, interpreting the boy's autism-shaped view of the situations.  The scene at the London Underground station was a Wow-er.  Very impressive.

I figure they must have Tech Rehearsalled this puppy for MONTHS.

As to whether it's a good play...  The story was interesting but slight, so that the fireworks of the tech used to tell it were both the only way to tell it and the most compelling thing on stage.  I don't think there'd be much play left if you stripped away the razzmatazz.  (On the other hand, it might be a terrific book - I'll look for it.)  But the boy's after-curtain explanation of a geometry proof was Crazy Cool!  Pythagoras never looked so exciting before.

So did I come back all jazzed to do projections?

Kinda.  I actually have a couple shows coming up that will include them, though at a simpler (i.e. less expensive) level.  Obviously projections can be a great, even integral part of the theater performance, but I'm kinda a fundamentalist... for me it's The Story.  Everything else (even the set?!) must be a distant second to the text.  So, for my taste, many projections and, honestly, the whole Broadway way of doing things is often just too overblown, just like special effects in blockbuster films.  Spectacle is great fun, but not especially my cup of tea.

So the most influential things to me were probably what I saw of the City itself - more on that later.

Until then, here are photos from my own recent informal Set Tech, experimenting with sky/tree banners in the breeze for WaterTower Theater's upcoming All My Sons:

Sky/Tree Banner test for All My Sons at WaterTower Theater

Fabric an' a Fan.  That's Technical, that is.

Scenic Masterclass Speaker: Donald Holder

It was interesting to hear lighting designer Donald Holder (The Lion King) talk about collaboration (or not) between set designer and lighting designer.  I absolutely loved the title of his talk: "When Did We Add the Mirrored Floor?"

Says it all.

Mirror! - image from HERE

Communication =  Important.

He had a hilarious story about a shouting match in Tech after one very-eminent-set-designer (cough, cough) at the last minute, and without telling the lighting designer, moved scenery into fly space needed for lighting.   The equally-very-eminent director had to physically stand between the two designers before punches flew.

The lesson?  Talk first!

The take-away message was that the set designer needs to respect the lighting designer's needs.  For instance, to "pop" actors off the set with light, the lighting guys absolutely need space to fit lights between the actors and the scenery.  So don't, you know, fill that up.  (As that cough-cough designer did.)

"Give the lighting room!"

Mr.  Holder also suggested, when a set designer talks to a lighting designer, that we "focus on the positive."  (I suspect this translates as, no name calling, swearing, or finger-pointing.  I think it can get ugly.)  Talking to each other - civilly - is vital.

He spoke about his influences and inspirations, which turned out to be similar to what I've heard from lighting designer friends: the inspiration of nature and its lighting effects like sunrises and sets, clouds and shade, plus the great painters of light like Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hopper, or Sargeant.  Holder explained the importance of stage lighting as the "lens" through which the audience sees the show.  Perfectly true.  He reminded us of Joe Melzeiner's definition of a set as "a lightable object."  And he described lighting design in practice as a constant balance between a conceptual approach and the practicalities, between the "big gestures" and the nuts and bolts.

In this nuts-n-bolts spirit he recommended against curved cycs - "curved cycs tend to look wrinkled" - and especially against flying them.  Plain ol' straight, framed-in-black cycs work best.

He also discussed the present conversion of stage lighting from the standard of incandescent fixtures to LEDs.  The Lion King saved 30% on its energy bills when it switched to LED for its new UK tour, plus less maintenance.  That advantage is obvious.  The disadvantages of LEDs are more subtle.  For one thing, color mixing is not quite the full rainbow spectrum that the ads suggest - some colors are unavailable.  Skin tones tend to fade under LED light.  And the fading of those lights...  Where an incandescent source keeps its true color right up until that last moment, then gains a golden glow before dying, LED colors shift throughout the fade but miss that "warm" last moment.  He called it a subtle difference, but one with psychological importance after millenia of human association between light and flame.

Holder also talked about the recent trend (thanks largely to LEDs) of building more lighting into the sets themselves.  For Spiderman, with a set budget of (wallet spasm!) $ 8 million, $ 2.5 million of that was spent on in-set lights and electrics.  This kind of scenic installation makes collaboration between lighting and set designers even more important.

That mirror floor?  That was a set designer's surprise.



(No one had told him - but he coped.  A lot of actor-lighting was suddenly bounce light from below.)

Scenic Masterclass Speaker: Rob Howell

In the aftermath of his Tony win for Matilda this talk gets even more interesting.  I can't possibly reproduce the whole 1 1/2 hours here, so I'll just highlight a few things that struck me or that can be successfully taken home from Broadway to those humbler theaters (or at least those humbler budgets) that the rest of us designers work with.

(I hope I have my facts straight - I took notes - but I'm sure to have misunderstood something.  Apologies for any errors.)

Rob Howell first designed this award winning musical for a thrust stage in Stratford, England, then adapted his design for London's West End, then adapted it again - with help from Associate Designer Paul Weimer -  for the Shubert Theatre on Broadway.  As you can imagine, changes of venue made for changes in design or in its execution.  What surprised me was that the reverse was so true, that specifics of that first venue so flavored the eventual Broadway incarnation.

For instance, the first venue had no fly capacity so scene changes were accomplished by sliding wing pieces like legs on tracks.  Several iterations of legs stored one behind the other, with "Library" or "School Gates" scenery hidden behind neutral "Alphabet Tile" legs.  In that original theater flying scenery was impossible because the orchestra sat tucked above the stage where the fly loft should have been.  This sliding-rather-than-flying approach remained long after, in fact, flying became possible.  The tradition of cramming in the musicians also remained.  In the West End they sat upstage of the show - it had a very deep stage - while on Broadway they're in the basement - Broadway being notoriously short on upstage and wing space.

Because the first stage was a thrust, the show developed a real interaction with the audience - including using the center aisle as performance space.  When the show relocated to the West End's proscenium, big efforts were made to continue to engage the audience... the center aisle was used again and scenery, which had extended into the thrust's auditorum, was here developed into an extensive proscenium design that creeps out into the house.

Both these get-the-play-out-into-the-audience features remain in the Broadway incarnation.

"Remain?"

That's a misleading word... these were huge and expensive priorities!  The proscenium design - hundreds of alphabet tiles - extends way out into the auditorium and wraps onto the theater's existing balconies.  Because this scenic treatment intrudes into where lighting and sound needs equipment, it was carefully coordinated.  Many lights and speakers are camouflaged under "tiles" made of scrim rather than vacu-formed plastic.

(Here my poverty-trained designer-self murmured, "Vacu-formed?  All those hundreds of tiles are vacu-formed!!"  Imagine little cash-register "Ka-ching!" sound effects in my head.  Indeed someone in the production team almost sneered when he admited that all the detailed "books" of the library scenery were just cardboard and cloth and not vacu-formed.  But wait -  this is nothin'.  Wait for the wallet-spasms when we talk about Spiderman.)

But Broadway houses don't have center aisles.

This was a huge concern and much discussed and, in the end, the producers and the venue agreed to remove and re-space seats in the orchestra level - cutting over a hundred chances to sell tickets! - to create a limited center aisle.  All to ensure that close audience-cast engagement remained.

Mr. Howell talked about the process of finding this "alphabet tile" idea - a very interesting peek into the design process.  In fact, the "tiles" were slow in coming to him; earlier designs explored using school desks or blackboards in a similar way, though neither idea quite worked mostly because they discouraged using color.  (Blackboards being, um, black.)  The "tiles" act as a sort of vocabulary and grammar for the entire show, as a logic for all the scenic pieces... giving the entire show a tessellated aesthetic that ties everything together.

I must admit that when the also-tessellated school gates first appeared, I did think for a moment, "Has this design conceit been pushed just a tad too far?" But then the dance number involving that gate began and I realized happily that, Yes!, the design idea had been pushed Too Far and was now into Way Over the Top Wonderful!  If as a designer you're going to do something, then really by golly the heck do it! is the lesson here.

There was much more.  There was a MODEL.  A model maybe 3 1/2 ft. wide and tall and deep.  Handmade.  Gorgeous.  I love show-n-tell.  And Rob Howell was one of the best and most engaging speakers of the Masterclasses.

More on the other speakers later, meanwhile (while you're waiting) here's a rough sketch of the lobby where I sat to wait for the next speaker.

Sketch by Clare Floyd DeVries

The Tisch School was a gust of nostalgia for me, reminding me of architecture school - the same excitement of work-in-progress represented by spaces that work for their living...  The oak floor had clearly had scenery built on it a time or two (see where the saw sliced here, here, and here?), the everything-painted-white walls were marred by careless students carrying projects, and even the piano on its dolly was waiting for its next gig.  Ah!  Creativity.

(This is no criticism.  Other, newer areas of the school were quite classy, all were in good repair, and we were very kindly and generously hosted... it's just that working studio spaces work.  I was glad to see evidence that art was happening.)

Matilda on Broadway

I just got the online email version of Live Design magazine - with a lot of coverage of the award-winning musical Matilda, now on Broadway.  Since I'm going to get to see this fairly soon, I read the lot.

Very interesting.  Take a look:

A photo gallery HERE
About the set design HERE
Costume Sketches HERE
And a discussion with the lighting designer HERE.

Excitement!

I'm going to a seminar on set design in New York City this year.

Broadway designers talking about their work...  Should be very very interesting.  (Plus I get to see NYC again, always a plus.)  I'll be seeing the show Matilda for sure - not sure yet what else.

Public domain image from Wikimedia

Ephemera

There's something brave about the theater arts.

It's not the willingness of actors to stand up and pretend in front of strangers (though that is brave), but the knowledge that whatever you do - acting, costumes, sets, directing, lighting, props, or a hundred other aspects - is doomed.

Most artists write or paint or create in the hope of immortality.  They build their sandcastles hoping, knowing, that there's a faint chance it may last.  In a hundred years their novel may still be read or their music sung.  Playwrights share this hope.

But the rest of theater?  Nah.

Ephemera.

The actor's performance dies as the echo in the theater fades.  The set ends in the trash.

A few important shows linger, faintly, as a couple photos, a few sketches, or a cast recording.  A show or performer's reputation may last.  But mostly it's only in the theater audience's memory that the work may linger a little while... if it effected them strongly.  I think it takes a certain strength of character to throw so much energy and talent and life into a short-lived art.  (Not that I'm biased, of course.)

Usually short-lived.

I was fascinated to read an article in Live Design recently (HERE) about the recreation of the famous set for Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, by Jo Melziner, the legendary Broadway scenic designer.  Modern-day NY designer Brian Webb has admired Melziner's work for years... and he and the production team saw the recent Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman as a chance to recreate this iconic scenery.

Believed public domain image

I'm impressed on several accounts: at the lasting legend, importance, and sheer strength of Melziner's work of course... but also by the knowledge and modesty of Brian Webb, who ceded this big opportunity to Melziner - to refresh that master's fame - instead of grabbing onto it to become more famous himself.

That's rare and memorable.

A great illustrated blog post of Melziner's work HERE at Theater-Words.com.