Transylvania Meets Broadway
Look out Dorothy! Kansas is out — Transylvania is decidedly in! The team that created the mega-extravaganza The Producers is at it again, this time with the musical version of the 1974 Mel Brooks Academy Award-nominated hit film comedy Young Frankenstein.
When New York brain surgeon and professor Frederick Frankenstein inherits a castle in Transylvania from his grandfather, deranged genius Victor Von Frankenstein, he goes to Transylvania and carries on with his grandfather’s mad experiments in reanimating the dead. In the process, he falls in love with his sexy lab assistant, Inga.
Hoping for another slam-dunk success like The Producers, which took home a record 12 Tonys in 2001, Brooks has put the “dream team” back together. Led by Tony-winning Director/Choreographer Susan Stroman, it includes his Tony-winning designers: Lighting Designer Peter Kaczo-rowski, Set Designer Robin Wagner and Costume Designer William Ivey Long, in addition to Jonathan Deans as sound designer and Marc Brick-man designing special effects.
If you’re thinking of catching the show, you’d better have deep pockets. Young Frankenstein’s top ticket prices are $450 and $375 for “premier” seats, with $120 seats available in the same area. With all the hype and anticipation, it’s a privilege to get an inside look behind the scenes. Kaczorowksi took time out of his hectic schedule to “shed some light” on the phenomenon that is Young Frankenstein.
His first question about the design was, “Are we doing black-and-white?” According to Kaczorowski, “It was pretty clear that we shouldn’t. Black-and-white would have been a trap. We’re a different animal from the movie, though I think there’s a spirit in the show that’s very much like the movie. Some of the lighting is wry and hopefully funny. There’s scale…a kind of daft majesty, and it has the seriousness that a lot of those movies like to think they have, yet there’s also that nod to self-aware parody. At the Hilton, all tongues are firmly planted in cheeks.”
Though featuring some spectacular projections, Young Frankenstein does not have a formal projection designer. Projection was not in the original concept, but grew organically during the design process, and the responsibility fell to Kaczorowski.
In one instance, Stroman requested that the walls shake during Frederick’s nightmare sequence. Kaczorowski took a picture of the lit Grand Hall set, then projected it back onto the image itself, using the shake effect in a Green Hippo Hippotizer media server to create the illusion. During a lightning crash, Frederick’s grandfather melts out of a portrait, leaving a negative space, and appears “in the flesh.” The moving portrait shadow was painted on an RP screen with two concentric light boxes for positive and negative images. Parallel lines of bright strip were created one after another and controlled on eight channels over a span of about three feet, so grandfather could disappear from the head down.
Stroman also wanted the image of a dead body in silhouette swinging on the gallows. “Originally, we were going to back project the shape of an actual person, or perhaps a dummy, onto a translucency, creating a true silhouette,” Kaczorowski recalls. “But this image had to cover a set change upstage of it, so it had to be front-projected. Front projecting a shadow meant animation. That was the beginning of needing a projector. We have a Hippo run by an MA Lighting grandMA, and the images come out of two 12K projectors working completely in line and producing the same image, one on top of the other, in case one goes down. It’s a little brighter than we were experiencing in Seattle [where the show originated], where we only had one projector.”
Josh Frankel was brought in to create the video sequences, and Kaczorowski received technical support from Scharff Weisberg. Kaczorowski enjoyed his dual design capacity for this show. “It was just an extension of my department,” he says. “It was a little more efficient that way. I knew what the sequences were and booked time at Scharff for figuring them out. Josh created the work and gave it to us on a file. We encoded it onto the Hippo, played it back and manipulated it with lenses, focus, brightness and color.”
One of the highlights of the production is the hayride scene. It uses a full-screen video of trees-in-passing to create the illusion of movement, as the stationary wagon appears to travel toward the Frankenstein castle. Initially, the scene was planned with three elaborate unfolding backdrops, but space and budgetary restrictions necessitated a simpler solution. Recalls Kaczorowski, “It was left to me to create a roadway and the motion of the trees passing. So I talked to Josh about making a movie loop that we could project onto the backdrop to create the motion of the journey. We dis-cussed using a forest path and a vanishing point, silhouettes of passing trees as they headed “away” from the audience, and of having the castle ma-terialize in the distance as they neared it.”
The video is projected on a dark blue background. “It’s definitely a less vivid image on a dark surface,” says Kaczorowski. “The hanging man works so well because it’s on a creamy distressed silk, showing off more detail than the dark surface, but all of the things we were doing on the dark surface, including the fireworks later on in the show, were about revealing space via light and shadow. The moving trees were basically nega-tives. The light that was left showing the positives was a little less bright than I might have liked, but by contrast to the black trees, it actually worked pretty well.”
Kaczorowski says that once he had the projection concept worked out, the scene was fairly easy to light. “The projected movie told the story of where we were going,” he says, “and because the actors stayed in one place, I could be quite specific on them and not have anything ruin the sharp-ness of the image behind them. Also, the fog on the floor was a perfect surface on which to project supporting motion.”
To create a sense of passing trees, Moving Light Programmer Josh Weitzman, who has programmed every Kaczorowski musical, put a tree pattern in one of the wheels, running a gray-toned template underneath it, which was constantly turned. “It amplified the sense of motion,” says Kaczorowski, “and the constantly changing fog made it something that you could never really land on, so it was more random and natural. It was really kind of ideal. Then the whole image wipes away with a slow black iris (another nod to the movie) that ends up encircling the moon itself. There’s still a moon in the sky for the exterior of the castle, but the other environment we were in gets completely wiped away. It’s a nice transition.”
For the show, Kaczorowski runs some 120 automated lighting units with an ETC Eos console. “Other people already have them, but I think this is the first big show on Broadway for the Eos,” he remarks. “The ETC people were committed to responding to Josh [Weitzman]. They were con-stantly giving us new builds and working on the software; they also sent people out to Seattle to watch Josh program. He told them things that he didn’t like about the displays, what could be better and where there were bugs. It was great. They were very solicitous and really wanted it to work. I like the board. It’s rather Obsession-like and speaks like the Obsession. It’s intuitive, and it’s a syntax a lot of people already know.”
An Obsession runs the conventional rig with almost 500 fixtures, including strobes. The grandMA runs the two projectors and the Hippo and also does laboratory effects chases. “The effects package on that board is much easier to manipulate,” Kaczorowski says. “With all of the LED [Color Kinetics] i-Cove channels to be dealt with, I didn’t want it on my board, and it couldn’t really be on the Eos.”
A critical pyrotechnical aspect of this set was a machine hidden in the skylight. Kaczorowski describes it as “the ugliest machine you’ve ever seen. We called it the alien.” A large generator with a protruding antenna releases an enormous electrical charge on cue and strikes a metal ground bar on the back side of the skylight. Marc Brickman found a California special effects company for the installation. “They set the whole thing up and taught our guys how to tune it up because it has to be constantly monitored and metered. It was a little shocking to hear how noisy it was, but the effect was impressive, and it sounded like something that might be happening in a laboratory.”
The strobe sequence in “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is another highlight. Stroman choreographed the three sections of the number on an open stage where the strobe lights catch people while in the air, but the effect avoids having the audience see the characters land. Kaczorowski used “fantastic photo strobes, not theatrical strobes. This show needed some serious strobes,” he says. “They’re a Speedotron product and they’re very, very bright.”
Much of the show revolves around Robin Wagner’s elaborate laboratory scenery, with its large machines that light up and the crackling bolts of lightning. Kaczorowski acknowledges the collaborative effort of Dave Rosenfeld from Hudson Scenic, Marc Brickman (lighting designer for Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, et al.), John Viesta (associate LD) and his lighting staff in creating the spectacle for these scenes.
“I was blessed with a fantastic staff of people who were totally committed to Young Frankenstein,” Kaczorowski says, “including John Viesta, Joel Silver (assistant LD), Keri Thibodeau in New York and Chris Reay in Seattle (projections and effects). Also, Josh Weitzman was instrumental; it’s impossible to imagine the show without his contribution. Rich Mortell is my production electrician; he puts things up and they work. Head elec-trician is Brian Dawson, contract spot operator is Whitey Ford and Tommy Galinski is our moving light tech.”
“As complex as this show is,” Kaczorowski concludes, “there’s actually a lot of simplicity to it. It’s certainly more gear than I’ve ever had on a show. I had more things to take care of, look after, organize and be ready for than on any other show, but somehow, what ended up onstage is sort of logical and right. It’s not convoluted and difficult. It’s kind of fluid.”
