An Updated Classic
“I never look at original productions when I’m designing a revival,” Korins admits to PLSN. “I just find that clouds my thinking, but I was so familiar with Annie, both versions of the movie, and James Lapine said we should go to Lincoln Center library and look at what they did so we knew. We looked at the original, iconic design of Annie, and it was very much set in 1977 as far as the technology they were using. I knew right away we were not going to do that type of technology — although it was cutting-edge then, it has been done now a zillion times.”
Korins originally designed the lavish Warbucks house without a chandelier, columns or a staircase. He did not want to simply regurgitate the iconic moment when Annie comes down the staircase in her trademark red dress. But his then-six-year-old daughter Stella protested when she saw his design work. She insisted that the house was not as fancy as it should be; that it needed the columns, the chandelier and the staircase, and that it should be a taller double-decker set. What did Korins do? “I took the note,” he concedes. “The truth is, if Stella Korins comes to the show and is not wowed and sitting there in awe, we have not done our job. The Warbucks world needs to unfold and be magical and big, and the scale has to feel huge. So to not have an upper-level felt wrong.”
Another central feature in the Warbucks mansion is the giant Christmas tree. Korins chose an unusual approach when bringing that key prop into the set by having a large basket chandelier, which, structurally, resembles an inverted cone, and have that turn into the tree. “The idea of having something on stage all the time that then has a very large, cathartic transformation is an exciting one to me in all of my work,” he explains. “It felt like a pretty interesting idea having this big chandelier unfold and then become a Christmas tree.”
Smooth Changeovers
The transitions within Annie certainly excited Korins. He liked being able to peel away the elements of the Warbucks mansion — the columns, staircase, balcony and chandelier — to whisk the characters into a Manhattan street scene. He thinks such smooth changeovers “give a really elegant and poetic movement to the show that I think prior productions didn’t have. They didn’t have the luxury of the technology to be able to do that, and that wasn’t the conceit. The conceit was it was a full box set that tracked on and tracked off, then the next thing tracked on. We were much more interested in the space in between. I’m really proud of the transitions between the locations.”
The most dynamic part of the scenic design for Annie comes in the form of a storybook prop that slides onstage, towers over the actors and features multiple two-page layouts that represent a different room in the vast Warbucks mansion. Specifically, members of the Warbucks staff flip the tall, thin, wide pages — which have a doorway cut through each — over Annie and Warbucks’ secretary Grace as she takes her on a tour of the house. It’s a clever idea that gestated from a visit that Lapine made to an airport gift shop before flying to Martha’s Vineyard.
“He found one of these die cut greeting cards that opens up from a flat, two-dimensional object into a three-dimensional object,” recalls Korins. “It’s beautiful, elegant, sophisticated and childlike all at the same time. He sent it to me in an envelope and said, ‘This might help with the breakthrough of the Annie design.’ It was a little New York City — it had a Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building and Chrysler Building and was really beautiful. I thought it was very interesting to stack up two-dimensional objects that become three-dimensional.”
2D to 3D
This tourist item sowed the seeds for the die cut technology and visual vocabulary for the show. “When we started to design the orphanage, simultaneously to designing the Warbucks mansion, it was an interesting idea to think about Daddy Warbucks, the richest and most powerful person in the world, having this Rolodex,” says Korins. “It really came from the number ‘I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here,’ where we were trying to figure out how the Warbucks staff was going to show Annie the vastness of the mansion. How do you take her into the swimming pool and into the bedroom and the study, the dining room and the library? How do you make it move seamlessly, quickly and in a fun way on stage?”
Korins floated an idea to Lapine: Why not have Annie and Grace not move during the house tour and have everything move around them? Rather than a traditional walk-through, they would be swept through the rooms of the house, flipbook style, without the need for much individual motion or help from conveyor belts or turntables.
In contrast to the numerous pages of the Warbucks “Rolodex,” the orphanage, with two moving walls that flank and reveal a central staircase, is like a book with only one page. “So there’s a dialogue between the haves and have-nots,” states Korins. “It’s not, as Stella said to me, just the story of poor to rich, it’s the story of the poorest person in the entire world and the richest person in the entire world. There’s an interesting conversation happening where Annie has nothing in this tiny, institutionalized world filled with shadows and crags and darkness, and then you go to this wide open place which she mistakes for a train station with these huge, austere pillars. That’s how the Rolodex happened, trying to solve the number ‘I Think I’m Gonna Like It Here.’ Then we back-ended our way into the conceit that the [Warbucks] storybook and the way the orphanage was going to open felt like a nice juxtaposition.”
During the development of the show, Korins worked with lighting designer Don Holder on the look of the new Annie. “This was a particularly interesting challenge, because the orphanage world and the Lower East Side world was dark, grungy, soot-covered, very Depression-era,” says Korins. “Of course, Daddy Warbucks’ world was austere, white, marble and cool and wide open. I talked to Don a lot about the different palettes used there and the whole world in between when we go to Times Square and the Central Park West skyline. There are a lot of scenes with lights in them — the little snow globe and the whole ground row — but also because of this die cut vocabulary [there are] all these holes. We talked about the quality of light coming through these things but also hitting the surfaces of these things. Also, how would we pull out these very thin surfaces and make them feel more dimensionalized? The Daddy Warbucks flipbook has one of those lovely surprises where even though those pages are only two inches thick, there are all these LED lights embedded in the walls so that the sconces on the walls actually light up. When we go to the gallery, every single portrait has a picture light over it that lights up. I worked very closely with Don through all that stuff.”
Annie certainly has its share of dynamic set pieces — the extra-long car for “Easy Street,” the glitzy marquis props for Times Square, the dilapidated, bridge-covered shantytown for “Hooverville” and the stately pillars in the White House and Warbucks mansion, which also has a rolling staircase. “The thing I really enjoyed about the design is not that there are whole sets, but there are many different elements. We designed the White House [Cabinet Room] and then looked at the location and thought it seemed a little threadbare, so we added in the Warbucks columns to flesh the world out. They did nice double duty there, and then on top of that we were able to get halfway back to the Warbucks mansion. There are huge transitions in the show. Going from the orphanage to Washington, D.C. and then to Daddy Warbucks are major changes. So getting those columns on stage for the White House was halfway to Warbucks’ change. There was a lot of good there for us.”
New Chapters
Modern theatre audiences have become accustomed to quick transitions between scenes, but Korins makes the distinction between a quick transition and a dramaturgical transition. An example of the latter in Annie that he is really happy about and proud of occurs when Grace pulls Annie from the orphanage; originally the next scene introduces her to Warbucks mansion and his staff.
“That’s an enormous transition, and we thought about that journey from the Lower East Side, which she has never left, up to Fifth Avenue,” says Korins. “They went to Bergdorf’s to buy a coat. We decided to peel away the orphanage, develop a blue sky, then bring out Bergdorf’s. We get to see her with the first object she actually owns other than the locket. What would that be like, to get a gift, and go into a store like that? It just seemed like such a great bit of storytelling that we could take advantage of that isn’t in the script. We added it to this production, and I think the moments like that that we’ve added really do help the world of the show and help define the characters’ journeys and their arcs in a really interesting way.”
The end result of the hard work by Lapine, Korins and the entire cast and crew is a vibrant show that is breezy and lively. You might not think it is actually two and a half hours long. During the months of preparation and production, the designer certainly got to learn a lot of new lessons that he took to heart.
“This was really my first large Broadway musical, as far as scenery is concerned,” enthuses Korins. “I learned so much as far as dealing with the length and the trajectory of the project, the amount of prep work and the overseeing of the scene shop. The scenery was built in three different shops in different parts of New York and Pennsylvania. Just overseeing the team — from the graphics and the painting to the propping and scenery and all that stuff in between — was really an interesting experience for me. You have to keep learning on every show, and I definitely learned so much about relationships.”
