Derek McLane has traveled to many different places through his scenic design work for Broadway and beyond. As he takes PLSN on a tour of the Manhattan studio space that he shares with director Doug Hughes and costume designer Catherine Zuber, the charming Tony Award winner waxes enthusiastic about his work in the theater. He shows us his wall-length library of art and design books that stands in the common conference room as well as the gallery of quarter scale models lining the shelves and the perimeter of his main work space where the drafting and model crafting happens. From the gloomy, decaying theater of Follies to the bright and cheery steamship of Anything Goes, McLane knows how to fully flesh out a set and draw audiences into the world of each story he helps to tell.
Even though he has had a lot on his plate lately — the new Gigi and Living on Love on Broadway, Ever After at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, Into the Woods and The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Fiasco Theater in New York City, the national tour for the smash hit Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, and a new off-Broadway play by Jesse Eisenberg called The Spoils — McLane and his team manage to keep everything straight. He actually does not see juggling his different shows as an exercise in manic A.D.D.
Internal Logic
“It’s kind of easy in a way, because each project becomes so much of its own world that each thing has its own logic,” remarks McLane. “I feel like when I go here [Gigi], I’m going into this version of [early] 1900s Paris, but when I go here [Living on Love], I feel like I’m going to the Upper East Side in the ‘50s. After you develop the design, they each feel like they have their own rules that take over. The minute I look at that, it has its own logic that begins to answer its own questions. What’s fun is, once it’s defined strongly enough, then my associates can start answering some of those things based on the kind of logic we’ve created for a particular production.”
After we make the rounds of his studio, we sit back down in the conference room where McLane pulls out sketches and photos related to his two latest Broadway shows. His work on the Lerner and Loewe musical Gigi starring Vanessa Hudgens and the comedy Living on Love starring opera legend Renée Fleming offer a study in visual contrast.
In Gigi, womanizing playboy Gaston (Corey Cott) begins to fall for his younger friend Gigi (Hudgens) as they spend time among high society, and he must reconcile whether he wants be faithful to one woman or continue to play around. McLane certainly has created an enchanting backdrop for the tale. The central wrought-iron staircase and sweeping arches recall his striking tri-level design for Ragtime that snaked around the perimeter of the stage, except that this flows more smoothly and feels less rigid.
“The wrought-iron is similar, and it’s a similar period, but this functions very, very differently,” clarifies McLane of his Gigi design. “First of all, this doesn’t have so many levels as Ragtime had. This has as its main feature the staircase, and everything works around it in the design. There are also many more pieces that come into this. Ragtime had nothing. It really was just that space.”
The design for Gigi is more ethereal in that set pieces are flown or track in for different scenes, from Maxim’s (based on the real Paris restaurant) to Aunt Alicia’s apartment to a train station with an “incredible ceiling.” The main surround for the whole set was inspired by the Grand Palais, while the train station was inspired by the station Gare de l’Est. “It functions differently from Ragtime in that way, because it is certainly more fleshed out,” he says. “We make more locations in the set.”
Hard and Soft Elements
The Gigi set contrasts hard and soft elements. “A lot of it is about the verticality of the fabric and the softness,” explains McLane. “Maxim’s nightclub has a lot of tufted fabric in it, so it is juxtaposing the steel and the lushness of the fabric, and there’s so much color and texture in the clothes that it works nicely with the wrought iron. It’s a nice combination.”
On the flip side, the Joe DiPietro-penned Living on Love focuses on the personal feud between an opera diva and her “tempestuous” conductor husband (Douglas Sills). The set, which McLane describes as Beaux-Arts, features a lot of black and gold and is meant to be modeled after a Parisian apartment. The real-life inspiration was “mostly Hotel Le Meurice, a beautiful hotel across from the Tuileries Garden.” When one studies the pictures of shop builders constructing the giant ceiling, with “this amazing cove that goes around the outside of the set,” it all looks impressive. The set, much like those for The Heiress and Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, is meant to plunge the audience into that world.
Design Influences
McLane has always brought a classic sense of design to his Broadway work, and his sensibilities were heavily influenced by many designers, although two truly stand out: his Yale School of Drama professor (and Tony Award winner) Ming Cho Lee and the late Boris Aronson, a six-time Tony winner.
“Boris Aronson always came up with a big idea for the whole show,” says McLane. “That was very much his thing, that there was an overarching idea that tied the whole thing together. I wouldn’t say always, but [it was] usually more developed than the individual scenes. I’ve always admired that. I think that that’s part of what makes it feel like theater. If you can capture that, there’s something really exciting about it. Of course, that doesn’t apply to absolutely everything, but I would say that’s a big theme in his work. He was very painterly. He did a lot with paint, which I don’t do so much with. I never met him, but I love looking at his work and reading about him. Frank Rich wrote a fantastic book on Boris Aronson’s work.”
The designer also loves the influence of his still active professor Ming Cho Lee, whom he calls formidable and one of the most amazing teachers he has ever had. “He also was very interested in coming up with an approach to the whole show, designing the entire world of the play,” notes McLane. “But he was also very demanding about how we drew things. He’s very big on sketching and learning to draw things well. It was a three-year program at Yale with Ming, and during the whole first year we designed one project a week, which we would bring in and he would tear to shreds. It was intense. It was amazing.”
All of that discipline and attention to detail has paid off. It also helped land him a gig as production designer for the Academy Awards over the last three years. Unlike his overall theater oeuvre, the Oscar broadcast features prominent LED usage in the giant onstage screen that is often used to show movie montages and clips from nominated films. “We use the LED as a way of creating the illusion that there is more scenery onstage than there actually is, which saves money in the scenery budget,” notes McLane. “If used as one of several layers, it is very hard to tell what is LED and not dimensional scenery.”
McLane has enjoyed his Oscar experience thus far. “I’ve learned something each time I’ve done it, and I think I probably did the most complete job that I’ve ever done this year for the show,” assesses the designer. “Every show is different. They all have their own dynamics with the hosts and with the pictures that are nominated. This year not as many people watched because there were no blockbuster movies, but there was a really interesting group of movies.”
The designer concurs that his theater background and classic style has served him well with the Oscars. And while the show does have a lot of moving scenery, it is not as much as in a Broadway show, and in fact, most of the movement occurs during commercial breaks rather than during the broadcast.
Studio Library
When he is conjuring ideas for a new production, McLane dives into his studio library. He has accumulated the eclectic collection of books — which includes titles as varied as Van Gogh In Arles, LIFE Goes To The Movies, The World’s Great Religions, and The New York School: Photographs, 1936-1963 — by working on all of his different productions over the years, and as he notes, “You never know when they’re going to be useful again. Sometimes I’ll come in here and start grabbing books when I start something [new] and am looking for inspiration on things.”
A book like All-American Ads of the 1950s can come in handy. “Some of those advertising books are really great,” remarks McLane. “They’re really good for finding regular household stuff from that century. It’s hard to find pictures sometimes, but advertising has pictures of things like refrigerators, telephones and junk that is mundane, but you often need for a set.”
Beyond research and design, another challenge for McLane is taking a show that was performed on Broadway and helping ready it for the road. His current project in that regard is the national tour of Beautiful that goes out on September. The quarter scale model sitting in his studio reveals a stripped down version of the lavish, colorful production that has wowed audiences on the Great White Way while also retaining signature elements.
“It’s not finished yet, but it will definitely have to be simpler because all of it has to load in a day as opposed to two to three weeks,” explains McLane. “It’s a process of giving up a whole bunch of things. It’s difficult to do. We started thinking about it several months ago. That process takes place in several parts, but we’ve only been working on the model for a couple of weeks. We’ve certainly had conversations about what it might be on the tour.”
Broadway to Main Street
Creating a tour version requires a different approach since many regional theaters vary in stage compared to the narrower stages of Broadway. Some houses outside of New York have a much wider proscenium. But in the end, as McLane notes, “One size has to fit into all the theaters. Some of the theaters are going to seem smaller and some are going to seem bigger because we don’t vary our size. We have to keep that the same for the tour.” He adds that the budget for touring productions is skewed towards making the production being able to move quickly. “Typically we have to load in in 12 hours and fit on a certain number of trucks.”
From Broadway to national stages, McLane is always embarking on one adventure or another, and he relishes the challenges they all bring his way. He has explored many different types of terrain on stage, but he has a different type of set concept that he would like to tackle in the future. “I’ve always wanted to figure out how to make one that rotates this way [on a horizontal axis] as opposed to this way [vertical axis],” he declares. “I’ve never quite figured it out, but I think it will be an exciting thing to see someday. Thank you for reminding me. I’m going to call you in a year and say, ‘I did it!’”
