Mimi Lien’s Stage Design for Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812
It’s a complicated Russian novel and everyone’s got nine different names, but the narrative extract from Tolstoy’s War and Peace that has been transformed into the colorful musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 has become one of the most original productions to arrive on Broadway during this past year. And one of its strengths, Mimi Lien’s lavish stage design, required a lot of thoughtful engineering.
Directed by Rachel Chavkin and written and composed by Dave Malloy, Comet — in its fourth incarnation, following the previous run at Boston’s acclaimed American Repertory Theater, as well as two well-received Off-Broadway runs — charts a simple but effective story. A young and naïve Russian woman named Natasha (Denée Benton) is betrothed to a dashing soldier named Andrey who is off to war. A seductive rake named Anatole swoops in on her with the intention of seducing and using her, despite his being married without her knowledge. Natasha’s concerned friends Sonya and Pierre (her fiancé’s best friend, played by pop star Josh Groban) seek to rescue her from her foolish dalliance despite her childish protestations.
Throughout all of the incarnations of the show, Lien has sought to create an emotional rather than literal sense of early 19th century Russia while also allowing audience members the opportunity to become more closely engaged with the action. In the ART production, the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, MA was transformed into an aristocratic and decadent Russian nightclub setting featuring a multilevel, red-drenched stage with a curved, asymmetrical layout that Lien likened to the inside of a Fabergé egg.
Audience Members On Stage
Many audience members sat on the stage in rows and a few booths, dropping them within the club setting itself, with actors and musicians seated or moving around them. The strings and piano were located in a small pit at the front of the stage, where some audience members were seated adjacent in bar-like fashion, and other musicians were located within the audience onstage (and in New York, in the box seats on either side). A few walkways were built over seats in the regular audience to allow performers to act, sing and dance among them.
In transferring The Comet of 1812 to Broadway, Lien had to contend with a narrower proscenium and a shallower stage. But there was also the added element of the balcony. A staircase on each side was installed to allow actors to ascend to the balcony to make use of it. During many moments cast members performed up there, including in “Dust and Ashes,” when they line up along the cross aisle of the mezzanine. “There are almost 30 of them singing like a choir of angels,” says Lien. It was a twist by Chavkin and choreographer Sam Pinkleton that differs from the ART, which has no balcony.
The seating capacities for the Boston and NYC production differed as well: 500 at ART and 1,200 at the Imperial Theatre. There have been approximately 200 audience members onstage in both versions. The location of the double doors near the top of upstage is at the same height, and Lien says that the seats go up a little higher at the Imperial. Also, two larger circular booths installed in the ART production had to be removed for the Imperial design because of its narrower proscenium.
An important design element imported from the ART show and enhanced here are straight and curved walkways planted within the audience, and modeled after a wooden parquet that one might find in a 19th century palace, to let performers circulate within the orchestra section. “We were not allowed to remove the seats at ART, so we had to build these platforms on top of the seats,” recalls Lien. “Here, because we were allowed to take out the seats and because there’s such a huge block of audience in the center, I really wanted to be able to carve through them and create a way to deliver the actors closer to them.” Since the walkways allowed the actors to occupy the same space as the audience, they had to be up to code for public assembly. Thus, the stair height (7” required in Boston, 7½” in New York), tread width and railings had to be compliant with the building code in New York.
Given the addition of the balcony to the show this time around, audience members really do get a different perspective on the show depending upon where they sit. Those placed on the stage get a wide view of everything, whereas most of those in the orchestra section will miss the action on the mezzanine (balcony) level. In some ways, sitting in the mezzanine is the next best thing to being onstage. “After spending all this tech rehearsal in the orchestra, I started going up there [balcony] and watching the show during previews from different spots in the mezzanine,” says Lien. “I was really impressed with how much Rachel and Sam got the performers up there. “
Red Curtains and Paintings
No matter where one sits, the venue is draped in red curtains atop which era-appropriate paintings are displayed. They tie in nicely with the décor, and they required some work to mount.
“I think one of the biggest challenges [at the ART and the Imperial] was the idea of bringing everything out into the house, of making one big gesture that would envelop the entire room,” explains Lien. “Everyone in the room is going to have red curtains and paintings around them and chandeliers above them. Nobody is going to be sitting in an area where there aren’t those elements.”
There were no hanging points above the mezzanine or in the orchestra at the Imperial. “We wanted to hang chandeliers and light bulbs, both of which are a big part of the lighting design, and there was nothing to hang them from, so we had to create a whole superstructure grid that would go above the front of the orchestra all the way up into the mezzanine and also underneath the orchestra,” elaborates Lien. “And engineer it in such a way that it could be maintained and focused; so, if a light bulb burned out there was a reasonable way to maintain and fix things. That was really a tricky challenge.”
She notes that, at the ART, the house lights were positioned on lightweight grids that extended all the way out into the house, but in the 200-year-old Imperial theatre, there is a plaster ceiling. A lighting grid was created at the Imperial to hang 31 chandeliers (five of which raised and lowered, and a total of 10 more than at ART). The venue had recessed lights in the ceiling as well as giant crystal chandeliers that needed to be taken down.
“There were certain holes that existed, mostly recessed light cans, so basically we had to very strategically try to utilize those existing holes to go through the plaster ceiling up to the steel I-beam roof truss, the roof joints,” says Lien. “Hudson Scenic spent about two months up in the roof welding new points that would be able to support a truss grid that we created. We ended up creating three separate, movable, walkable trusses that could be lowered in on chain motors for maintenance, and they were mostly made out of box truss that was connected together with Schedule 40 pipe. Because the shape of the ceiling is not flat — it is higher in the center and curved down towards the sides — we had to create a kind of dome shape or arcing grid structure above that’s higher in the center and lower on the sides, and the whole thing lowers in.”
Lien faced a similar technical predicament when she wanted to attach a pipe around the perimeter of the space to hang the red curtains and paintings that have become ubiquitous with the show, but there was nothing to hang them from. “There were no drawings of that part of the theater, only blueprints and drafting of the actual stage,” says Lien. “Very little information existed about the house, so in order to get what seems like a simple gesture of putting red curtains around the entire theater, it was actually a huge task to measure and survey and engineer a hanging system.”
There were 211 paintings used for the Boston production, which was upped to a little over 300 for Broadway. All of the original paintings were brought to New York but they had to be reprinted because of different fire code standards. At ART, they were basically on foam core, but in New York they had to be reprinted, mounted on wood, flame proofed and then reframed.
Artwork also plays a role in the lobby. Propaganda posters were hung in the lobby, as well as the walls of the hall and stairway created to transport specific audience members to their seats on the stage by leading them through the double doors used in the show. A few posters were placed in the lobby of the ART production, but mainly there was a plastic lining covering the walls as the crew could not screw anything into the walls. For both productions, the purpose was to create a space the creative team called The Bunker.
“We wanted to put up post-Soviet propaganda, like an abandoned military bunker,” says Lien. “Maybe the feeling is that it’s an abandoned military bunker taken over by a Moscow nightclub in the ‘90s. The goal was still to take the audience on a journey and have this sense of heightened contrast between the outside and the inside. That’s always been the objective of The Bunker, to take you into a totally different space and feeling than what you enter inside.”
In reflecting on all four incarnations of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 and how it has evolved, Lien feels that, to a surprising degree it is very much the same. Even the Broadway version did not amp up the razzle-dazzle. She says the closest thing was having certain light bulbs placed on individual winches so they could come up and down, but that directive came from one of the original lighting design ideas, which was to have a light bulb turn on above the head of someone singing a solo.
“When we were in Ars Nova [the very first theater off-Broadway], the grid was 12 feet high, and when the actors were on a three-foot platform, the light bulb was right there above them,” she says. “Here, where the ceiling is so much higher, we wanted to maintain that. It was a really effective way to the light the show but also tell the audience where to look, so we added these winches to bring the light bulbs in and out.”
Over the course of Comet’s four-year history, its spirit and approach have remained unchanged. “We felt that a lot of the things we did in the very first incarnation worked pretty well, and we just tried to maintain that,” asserts Lien. “Sometimes maintaining it, like hanging the red curtains everywhere, is a simple idea but is a pretty big task. I would say that I think all of the creative team feels, and all of our respective departments, that in some ways we got a lot of things right the first time around. We just basically tried to hew close to those original ideas.”
