Big Fish is certainly one of the most eye-popping spectacles to hit Broadway in years. The stage adaptation of Daniel Wallace’s book, which was also turned into a film by director Tim Burton, is a vibrant musical that features high energy numbers, dozens of scene changes and some dazzling visuals in which scenic and projection design are integrated into a seamless blend. The story concerns Will Bloom (Bobby Steggert), a young husband and expectant father who is trying to discern the truth behind the tall tales frequently orated by his flamboyant father Edward Bloom (Norbert Leo Butz), a small town Alabama man whose health is in decline.
Panels on the Move
Scenic designer Julian Crouch was the right man to enlist for this large-scale production at the Neil Simon Theatre. He previously brought a German Expressionist sensibility to the off-Broadway production Shockheaded Peter and appropriately Gothic grandeur to the Great White Way rendition of The Addams Family.
Now, with Big Fish, he has utilized large, moving wood panels, which feature the different planks spaced apart at uneven intervals, to slide back and forth and iris in and out to help create or augment different spaces that the characters move between at a rapid-fire pace.
“The challenge for this show was very logistical,” Crouch tells PLSN. “It has an incredible number of scene changes, and that scared me.” The musical book was written by John August, who also adapted the novel for the silver screen. “It’s written very much like a film, and it has close to 50 locations, which is a lot. There are certain scenes in [the town of] Ashton where it’s flooded, and they’re going from the future to the present to the town about to be flooded. You have a lot of locations happening all the time. These [Broadway] theaters are tiny theaters. There’s very little wing space and not much space up in the fly gallery. You can’t use brand new scenery for every scene change. You have to have something that is common to the whole thing.”
With so many wide-ranging location shifts — a riverside, a circus big top, a hospital interior and a forest, among many others — Crouch needed to find a common scenic element that could tie all of those places together. He felt that using projections on screens all night would be dissatisfying for audiences to a certain extent, so he sought out a material “that could take projection but break it up a little bit and be conceivably acceptable in each of these 50 locations,” he says. “The idea of the wood came from the circus, and being down in the dock, and also the forest and nature scenes. We had to have walls and trees in there. I was trying to find something that would pretty much work anywhere.”
Some of Benjamin Pearcy’s projections are shown on large scrim walls, such as when the town of Ashton gets flooded and a large screen drops in front of the location in order to show an animated sequence where the water level rises to the top of the theatre. “There are a few scrims that are projected onto, but generally when you’re projecting onto the wood, it means that the audience is doing little bit of work,” notes Crouch. “It gives them a little bit of texture and a little bit of life in a way that projecting onto a plain wall just doesn’t. I suppose it’s a bit like Impressionist painting. When you’re up close it doesn’t make any sense, but somehow from a distance [it does]. The wood helps break up the projection a little bit.”
One scene where the wood panels fit in nicely with video projections in the onstage environment takes place in a swamp, when a young Edward goes with two friends to visit a witch and have their futures read to them. The witch and her female compatriots dance around wearing cloaks whose textures fits in with the trees. Tree roots are projected onto them while they dance.
“The trees are already on stage, and the girls are gathered with his these [cloaks], which were very heavily researched by the costume designer, William Ivey Long. [He found] a material that would take projection well. That was a collaboration between the director [Susan Stroman], the costume designer [William Ivey Long], the projection designer [Benjamin Pearcy/59 Productions] and myself, to a certain extent.”
Transforming the Space
During certain scenes, the wood panels slide on and iris in to focus us in on certain locations, such as a bedroom, cave or hospital setting. At other times, the stage is wide open — when we visit the town square of Ashton, the forest or the impressive field of daffodils, which includes dozens of fake flowers onstage along with a painted backdrop. The scenic change takes nearly a minute and occurs during “Daffodils,” the romantic closing number of the first act, in which Edward and Sandra Bloom contemplate life together before they get married. The Auburn University set has to be cleared off behind a scrim wall, then the sliding seats have to be brought out to allow a wall of daffodils to slide across them at an angle after dropping down from the ceiling, then slide back under the platform before the scrim wall is lifted to reveal the field of flowers.
Naturally, the multiple locations and scene changes in Big Fish necessitate a certain speed and efficiency that need to be maintained.
“As a designer, you don’t want to be slowing the show down, so my absolute first priority was the smoothness of going from one thing to the other,” explains Crouch. “Even in the last sequence, there are five scene shifts — he’s in this hospital bed, running through the hospital, then he’s outside, they’re in the car briefly, and down by the fantasy riverside, then back in the hospital.” Then that sequence slowly opens up into an outdoor funeral scene. “I didn’t want to be the guy slowing the show down, so really I designed this for smoothness of transition. That’s the reason for the irising. You can close down, change the scene, then open up again in the next place.”
2D Set Pieces, 3D Looks
While many of the painted set pieces in Big Fish are simply two-dimensional, they are separated out from the back wall to give the feeling that they are three-dimensional, such as the buildings in the town of Ashton or the trees in the forest placed at different spots on the stage. These old-fashioned scenic pieces are also merged with a newer technology trick that Crouch learned working on a couple of previous shows.
“I learned that, if you paint a piece of scenery and then project the artwork back at itself, the image pops forward,” he explains. “It gives it a slightly magical glow. Auburn University is a scenic piece that is painted, but the artwork that it was painted from was also projected onto it at the same time, so it was a combination of a very old theater technique and a very new theater technique that just gives it a certain kind of kick and pops it out.”
The orchestra pit, which is taken up by two painted “waves” where a mermaid occasionally frolics and where the big fish pops out of, is also projected onto at times. Turning the pit into an aquatic environment was tricky, because the illusion is harder to sustain from a balcony viewpoint.
“Sometimes in the balcony you’re in danger of seeing too much, because you can see the people between the slats throwing things up. You have to find a balance. These theaters are not designed so everybody can see that pit, so it’s a complicated adjustment of the waves and height to make sure people can see what’s going on.” Video projections lend movement to action in the pit. “We also use a fair amount of dry ice and smoke effects as well [down there].”
Crouch designed Big Fish about a year and a half before it premiered on Broadway, and he praises his associate designer Frank McCullough for his work on the show. “He did Once and Book of Mormon and is a fantastically experienced associate, and he spent all the time with the teams of model makers and drafters. He was the one that was solidly on it.”
Contingency Planning
An aspect of designing for Broadway shows that Crouch learned about through his work on The Addams Family is that “you’re going into a show that may change a lot, so in some ways you’re designing the show and also trying to design a kit for scenes that you don’t know. To be honest, the scene that I started on [for Big Fish] and the scene that the design grew from was actually cut after [the initial] Chicago [run], which was strange for me in a way.”
The Big Fish musical originally opened with Will in his bedroom as Edwards spins a yarn about a fish eating his wedding ring. The two then get swallowed up by the giant creature. “The problem was, how do you go from a boy’s bedroom and end up in the belly of the fish?” recalls Crouch. “That’s really where the irising came from and [the creation of] this platform in the back. Throughout the show, beds and steps have to appear very, very fast, and it’s raised so things can truck on very quickly from behind, because we also have no wing space. It’s always very interesting when a show goes on tour — I don’t know if this will go on tour — because in a sense that’s when you know what the show is. When you first design these things, you design for possibilities so that they can change something without spending thousands and thousands of dollars on a new piece of scenery.”
Right-Sizing the Production
Before producers can seriously contemplate a tour, they must try out a new show in a market outside of New York. For Big Fish, that testing ground was the Windy City. The Chicago production actually had a stage that was 25 feet deeper than the one in New York, but Crouch notes that the extra space was taken up by props and production management. They physically marked out the stage space there so it would be equivalent to that of a New York theatre. The wing space at the Neil Simon is very limited, so many props slide on or off or are flown in and out while many are hung.
“So really while we were in Chicago, we were trying to work out how this would work in a smaller theater,” says Crouch. “You really have to be fairly rigorous about that, because you obviously want to cut the tech time down because it is so expensive to be in the New York theatres. You pretend that the Chicago theatre is the New York theatre, even though you’ve got more space.”
There are four different points onstage where the wood panels slide on and off from each of the wings. Three sets of wooden bleacher seats approximately eight feet wide each that are used for the circus sequence double as stairs for the swing club scene in which the rear wall is raised to reveal the 14-piece orchestra playing on a three-level structure. The seats/steps slide on and off from beneath a platform a few feet deep that runs across the length of the stage and stands at about five feet high. At one point, they slide out so the audience can see the rumps of three circus elephants that play a part in one scene. The overall use of space onstage and in the narrow wings is impressive.
“It’s incredible, and I can’t really take credit for that,” stresses Crouch. “I can look at what is happening on stage and make intelligent suggestions about that, but a lot of people spend a lot of time very ingeniously working out how this could work with that and [how] some things have to fold up and collapse and get hauled up into the roof. There’s a huge team of incredibly experienced people who know that stuff better than I do.”
Quick Changes
In the same way that makeup artists have quick changes, Big Fish is full of scenic quick changes. “I think all the time they were crunch points,” recollects Crouch. “Dealing with the daffodils was always a big issue. How long could that be, how long could the song sustain it before they were revealed? I think moving the elephants on and off was a big deal, because you’re dealing with people in big costumes. That was a very tight change for people. There were various points where it was going to crunch backstage. These people are incredibly good at what they do.”
Ultimately, the entire Big Fish team came together to create a theatrical experience that moves quickly without losing the narrative thread or emotional power of the story, and that’s no small feat.
“When I first looked at the script, I didn’t think it was possible,” admits Crouch. “There seemed to be too many fast changes, and I learned that I was wrong about that. I’m not sure I would want to do it every show of my life. I supposed I learned something about perseverance. Projection is such a fast-moving technology that it really does get better year by year, so you’re always learning and [there are] always new possibilities coming with that technology. I think the hard part about technology, and I think we go right up to the line with it in a way [here], is that it is tempting to use too much. It’s hard to keep that balance correct.”
