The marriage of classic stage scenery and video backdrops in the current musical Honeymoon In Vegas represents a synergy of old and new school technology that imbues the production with a fresh modern look without going into visual overdrive. Tony-nominated scenic designer Anna Louizos has worked with traditional scenery and backdrops on shows like The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Curtains, and while two previous shows she worked on implemented video, this time she wanted to tackle the video/projection design herself.
“Making the choice to do LED screens was a big decision for me, but I think because of this particular show — because it’s Las Vegas, it has a heightened sense of comedy, and because of the speed of it — it lends itself to that,” Louizos tells PLSN. In intertwining the two design disciplines, she wanted to make it all feel like it was her scenery. “I tried to tie it as much as I could to creating the illusion that it was scenery. I tried to layer it enough so that it was never just the LED screen by itself. There was something else with it, so I either had props or scenic pieces in front of it and tied to it.”
Honeymoon In Vegas is an adaptation of the Nicolas Cage film where Jack Singer (played by Rob McClure), a young man scared of commitment, thanks to the spirit of his dead mother wracking him with guilt over his choices, spontaneously goes to Vegas with his longtime girlfriend Betsy Nolan (played by Brynn O’Malley) to get married. But when he loses big at a private poker game to shifty mobster Tommy Korman (played by Tony Danza), he succumbs to the man’s request to spend the weekend with his girlfriend as payment. Things naturally go awry from there.
The story begins in Brooklyn and Manhattan before flying to Las Vegas, then jetting to Hawaii for the controversial weekend before finally returning to Sin City. The location changes come fast and furious, with moving scenery sliding on and off stage and three large video screens strategically placed to mesh LED imagery with organic scenery. Louizos says there are two mid-stage tracking LED walls that are 9 feet, 8 inches high that “track” on and off stage to reveal and conceal the orchestra. Behind the orchestra, along the back wall, hangs a 14.5-foot LED wall that is raised and lowered to fill the stage picture and function as a backdrop. Each 640×720 LED tile is approximately 28 by 25 by 3.75 inches, and the panels, linked together to form each LED wall, are covered with a gray rear projection screen material.
Quick Scene Changes
A good example of the quick scene changes occurs during the opening sequence, which starts with people coming up from subway stairs to a bunch of Brooklyn storefronts and a Manhattan skyline backdrop.
“Throughout the course of the song, we peel away scenic elements on the screens as if we’re tracking scenery off and revealing another set behind it,” explains Louizos. “We go from store fronts to Betsy’s apartment — we fly in a piece of scenery that’s her doorway and, upstage of that, the LED screens actually shift open as if we’re revealing her apartment entrance. Then when that scenic element flies out, we peel open another set of images on the LED screen to reveal a bakery. Then we peel away the whole storefront piece to reveal the subway, and as the subway is revealed, the subway poles come in so that the actors can grip onto them. Then as those things track off, the subway image opens to reveal the exterior of Tiffany, and the backdrop that was blackened out for the subway suddenly fades up to the upper part of Tiffany. I tried to make all the reveal of all the transitions I did on the LED screens behave like scenery. The only time I started to move the pieces was when we were making transitions and it was as if the scenery was tracking off.”
Moving New York to Vegas is a striking scenery switch, but Vegas to Hawaii is more fluid. “The good thing is that Vegas and Hawaii have enough common elements that I could incorporate the surfaces and textures that would work for both places, so that worked really well,” notes Louizos. “There’s a lot of nice wood surface treatments, stone, and palm trees in both places. I just had fun with the palm tree changes. When we go from Brooklyn to Vegas for the first time, the proscenium has those doorways, and the palm trees nest inside the proscenium behind the doors to look like plants, then ‘grow’ by telescoping up to their fully erect position when the scene transitions to Las Vegas.”
Another crafty scenic element that Louizos employs are revolving periaktoi units that are nested in the portal. One side has wood that matches the surface of the portal, and they revolve to show stone on the other side. “On the surface that looks like the wood, part of that wood was printed on scrim and through the scrim we have LED screens that we use for various moments in the show,” adds Louizos. “There is a schedule for the airport scene, the arrivals and departures — that is in the LED screen. Then we have various logos that appeared when Betsy is shopping. When we’re in Tiffany, we have Tiffany logos that pop through the scrim. And [lounge singer] Buddy Rocky posters when he’s performing at the Milano Hotel. We have a lot of things hiding in plain sight.”
The Orchestra, Seen and Unseen
A major omnipresent cast member often in sight is the 14-piece orchestra, which plays onstage, not in the pit, and which appears at the start of each act and during lounge scenes. But often times the orchestra also slides into the background because it does need to be seen during many more scenes.
“When we’re in the house in Hawaii, we don’t want to see the orchestra, so that’s when I thought the only way to lose the orchestra is to cover them up, and using LED screens is what I thought would be the best way to do that,” recalls Louizos. “Rather than cover them up with one-piece scenery that we would see over and over again and look the same, I thought LED screens would be the solution because you can cover them up and change what you’re looking at.”
Space limitations also dictated the use of the screens. The show did its trial run at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey before moving to the Nederlander on the Great White Way. There were fewer scenic elements in the Paper Mill, but more emerged in the Nederlander, despite having a smaller stage. “Like many Broadway theaters, the Nederlander is not that deep, and certainly not as deep as Paper Mill,” says Louizos. “Paper Mill has 14 feet more depth than the Nederlander, so I knew I had to come up with some alternative to changing all the locations, which is why I decided to go with the LED screens [on Broadway].” The LED displays themselves are made by VuePix and have a 6mm pixel pitch.
Blending Scenic Elements
To integrate the organic and video scenery, Louizos imagined the scenes as if she had designed them with three-dimensional scenery and then wondered how she could render each picture with an LED screen. She often split up real images with the LED screens as the screens in the orchestra are not full height but just tall enough to mask the orchestra from the balcony.
“What that meant was, I had to figure out how I treated the area above the LED screens,” explains Louizos. “I had two layers. All the way up stage with the band against the back wall is another LED screen, which functions as my backdrop. For the house [in Hawaii], for example, I thought I if could top the down stage LED screens with the roof of the house, then [with] the void that’s above the roof and between the scenic palm trees you could feel like you could see the sky behind it. So I made the upstage LED screen the sky, but I wanted the lower part of the house to still have some images of the sky and the sea. I had to tie the images together so that the scenic palm trees above matched with the LED palm tree trunks that continued down. I wanted to trick the eye as much as possible to make it look like it was looking at something three-dimensional. The same thing with the Brooklyn storefront scenes when he’s walking through Brooklyn — the backdrop is Manhattan, and the whole upper part of those storefronts is actual scenery. Only the part from below the second story, the ground floor, is the LED screen.”
Not every scene meshes the organic and the electronic. In the sequence where Jack confronts his mother’s ghost in the Garden of the Disappointed Mothers, the foliage is an old fashioned painted drop. Another organic display occurs when Jack has to jump out of an airplane with the Flying Elvises in order to get back to Vegas in time to prevent a marriage from taking place. While the outside view of the moving clouds and Vegas lights appear on an LED screen, when they are seen “flying” into Vegas above the wedding, little cutout figures slide down wires over the hotel to comic effect before the Elvises emerge at stage left. While they were originally animated on the LEDs for the Paper Mill run, the Flying Elvises always got a bigger laugh in the low-tech cutout version. Of course, when Jack botches his jump and comes into the lounge, he really is suspended above the stage wrapped in his parachute. (Interestingly enough, that scene is one of two with actual video animation in the show as the Elvises’ plane is seen flying across the Las Vegas skyline. The other instance occurs prior when the plane is taxiing into place in Hawaii.)
Part of the Narrative Flow
What is important to note about Louizos’ mixture of old and new school technology on Honeymoon In Vegas is that it is all in service of the story and the flow of the narrative. She does not try to needlessly dazzle the audience. “I honestly don’t want to move any piece of scenery unless it is helping to tell the story,” she stresses. “My focus is always what’s the best way to tell the story. I don’t have any control over the content of the writer’s work, but if it’s a new piece of work I can certainly talk to the director and say it will take too long to make this transition or ask if there is a simpler way we can make this work. I certainly did a lot of that over the course of Honeymoon. There were a lot of discussions about ways to simplify things or consolidate scenes collapsing into each other.”
The scene in Tiffany at the start of the first act shows how Louizos conjured an inventive way to not only stage the scene but up the comic ante. As Jack and Betsy are shopping for an engagement ring, the ghost of his mother pops out of a jewelry display case propped up in a hospital bed. It turns into a recreation of a conversation they had before her passing.
“When I first read the script, it was a flashback where the mother was wheeled on stage in a hospital bed,” recalls Louizos. “I thought that wasn’t funny. If the whole point was to tell the audience what kind of a show this is, there had to be a funnier way to do it, so I asked [director] Gary [Griffin] if there was a way that she could just pop out of the display case. He said that would be great. We discovered when we figured out a way to make that happen that it immediately told the audience what they were in for when they see the show — it’s full of surprises and it’s funny. I figured out a way to design this counter that would work for the Tiffany scene and also be a surprise. Then we wanted to find ways for her to pop out in lots of different places.” Which she did, including the statue garden, the airport, and the Vegas wedding.
A Nuanced Lighting Challenge
Naturally LED technology helped Louizos solve a lot of logistical problems with Honeymoon In Vegas. Yet while it does allow a video/projections designer to change many images rapidly during tech, the technology can also create much more work when it comes to integrating the LED images with regular scenery. Louizos admits that she backed herself into a corner by choosing to create all the images herself.
“The beauty of having scenery built at a scene shop is you just make sure you have plenty of texture and interesting surface treatment on it, then you hand it over to the lighting designer and they can sculpt it, change the color, and do all these lovely things to it,” says Louizos. “But because I opted to do flat two-dimensional images on a screen, the lighting designer couldn’t put light on it at all. We had to create all the light and the shadow, the highlights, the texture — it was a lot more work than I had bargained for.”
In the end, the most challenging aspect of working on Honeymoon In Vegas for Louizos was having everything work together. The video was not separate from the traditional scenic elements, and they all had to blend as seamlessly as possible — “tying it all together and using it judiciously when it was called for, not over using it, just finding the right balance between the three-dimensional scenery and the LED images,” she clarifies. “It was a process of discovery for me.”
