Translating a film into a musical presents numerous challenges, and it certainly helps when you are the scenic designer who also did the production design on the original movie. Santo Loquasto has worked with Woody Allen on 27 films so far — the 28th goes into production this summer — and when the iconic director’s 1994 comedy Bullets Over Broadway was recently brought to the Great White Way, it made perfect sense for Loquasto to come aboard to help transform the 90-minute film into a two-and-a-half hour musical. In distinguishing them, Loquasto states that, visually, the two productions are different, and that he did not set out to recreate the look of the film so much as the spirit of it. And his approach paid off: he was nominated for a Tony Award for his work on the show.
A Play Within a Play
The madcap musical has proven to be a hit as it recreates the tale of struggling playwright David Shayne (Zach Braff), who gets the chance to bring one of his plays to Broadway. The catch? Gangster Nick Valenti (Vincent Pastore) is funding the production, and his talentless girlfriend Olive (Helene York) must be cast to appease her delusions of grandeur. Shayne must also convince famous actress Helen Sinclair (Marin Mazzie), who is in desperate need of a comeback, to join the cast and give it legitimacy. During the rehearsals, Olive’s bodyguard Cheech (Tony nominee Nick Cordero) secretly and increasingly helps Shayne with rewrites because he understands the characters better. While this endears the playwright to his peers, he begins to feel like a fraud, while Cheech begins to show more interest in the show than his duties. Add in comedic shenanigans and plenty of illicit romances, and it all adds up to one zany comedy.
A lot may be going on onstage during Bullets Over Broadway — it brings to mind other recent fast-paced fare like Big Fish — but it seems like modern audiences have become more sophisticated in understanding visual cues, especially younger people who are used to more stimulation. “It’s not just films and special effects but music videos and all that, the rapid fire images that people are accustomed to,” explains Loquasto. “That’s really what you’re competing with all the time. You don’t want to seem laborious. On the other hand, you can enjoy the tempo of these transitions as part of the evening. It’s not like you necessarily have to rush through them to get to the next scene. That brief journey can be rather satisfying.”
There are quite a large number scene changes in the show, ranging from clubs to train cars to apartments, that require many different set pieces from large to small. “A show with a theater that revolves, two trains, and a car — this is a daunting list of demands,” concurs Loquasto.
A Damp City Vibe
For Bullets, the veteran scenic designer balanced lavish stage presentations with more implied open spaces for the Cotton Club and outdoor cityscapes that allowed room for the performers to move. “You’re hoping that you [can] shift the focus and keep cutting through [the scenes], almost like shuffling the cards,” says Loquasto of the constantly reconfigured stage space. “It allows it to have the illusion of depth. Even if it doesn’t register specifically, the audience by then gets the vocabulary of the evening and understands how you’re dragging them through this morass of alleys and streets of the city in the ‘20s.”
An omnipresent surface that helps transport the audience into this city of the past is the brick surround. “It’s the underbelly between speakeasies and under the elevated trains and warehouses and the Gowanus Canal,” says Loquasto. “It’s what I refer to as urine-drenched urban bricks of the ‘20s, that kind of wet, damp city, and in the midst of it are these little islands of [Art] Deco madness or a kind of aesthetic grande dame apartment elements. And doing that, of course, you can take advantage of the fact that the back wall [of the theatre] can be seen and is consistent with the rest of the space.”
The real brick wall of the St. James plays into the scene where we watch from “backstage” as the actors of Shayne’s show bow during a curtain call from upstage looking into the auditorium of the Boston theater they are performing in. And while the balconies on either side of the stage are not used too much — just for an occasional phone call or a shootout — they also add to the urban vibe.
Just Drive It
There is plenty of moving scenery in Bullets, but one element that moves without automation or crew assistance is Cheech’s car. Actor Nick Cordero actually drives the vehicle onstage at least twice, and he backs it up and drives off, no tracks required. “Based on my experience with Ragtime, I said there was no reason that the car be tracked and limited that way,” recalls Loquasto. “It was better to have it actually driven, and he [Cordero] is amazing and very scary in his confidence about driving it on stage and backing it up. It’s fast enough for going into as tight a space as he’s going.”
Another type of car that makes it onstage at the end of the first act is a replica of a New Haven train car for when the characters go off to rehearse the show in Boston. During the second act, Loquasto takes us inside it with a set piece that features three compartments on a rotating platform that allows three individual scenes with different sets of characters to be played out in smooth succession.
“I was very fond of the three revolving train compartments,” says Loquasto. “It was very satisfying to work on that. It has a lot of detail in it and a lot of character. Then incorporating what the girls needed to able to sit on it and dance on and around it, and abstract it by their treating it like a little Fabergé egg in the middle of the stage — that was very much fun to work on with Susan Stroman.”
Another rotating scenic element that is quite impressive is the theater “set” for the production within this show. It features a “backstage” area with a staircase going up above the set, and it spins around on a turntable to fully capture the whirlwind action when Cheech’s gangster friends chase him down for betraying their boss. All of this transpiring, of course, while Shayne’s play is being performed. “It’s very sturdy,” says Loquasto of the compact theater set. “That was crucial in terms of fitting something on [stage]. You have to claim your space for that and work other things around it.”
Making it All Fit
Indeed, the biggest challenge for Loquasto on Bullets Over Broadway was the logistics of fitting everything onstage and storing it all in the wings. He notes how shaving even just two to three inches off of a piece of scenery could be crucial. “It’s amazing how much even that little difference can make in things working more smoothly.”
The wing space on both sides of the stage at the St. James Theatre is crammed to the gills for the show, including scenery hanging above scenery. “I think everyone who does a musical in that house has to invest in that particular way,” says Loquasto. “From Hello, Dolly! to The Producers to this, you just have to pack the stuff in there. It’s very busy for the guys backstage, that’s for sure.”
A helpful factor in the whole Bullets journey was Loquasto’s collaboration with the director. “Susan Stroman is, to say the least, an ally in finding the rhythm of the show and helping make that happen beautifully,” he declares. “That was a fun collaboration. She really invests in the back-and-forth of it. Allowing just enough room so someone doesn’t fall into a pit is crucial.” The fact that Stroman also choreographed Bullets was an asset. “It’s so much about the physical movement in space. Even how she directs, it’s that dimension that she brings to it. It’s all physicalized directions, and for the performers [singer/dancers], it’s the language that they’re used to.”
Art Deco Interiors
In contrast to the gritty urban details requisite for the production, the interiors of the buildings spotlight many Art Deco elements, such as the blue-tinted windows in Olive’s apartment and the stained glass displays behind the club dancers. Those Art Deco set pieces contain self-illuminating units that allowed lighting designer Don Holder to change their color.
“I just designed them to do that, and then he made it happen,” says Loquasto. “We worked it out with the electrician and the shop. Sets like this go through many hands. A lot of the scenery has lights in it. When you’re under the L [train in a couple of scenes], and it looks as though the light is coming through the train tracks, it’s essentially all a lightbox.”
The scenic designer is certainly not short of praise for Holder. “He’s amazing,” exclaims Loquasto. “I’ve worked with a lot of incredibly talented lighting designers, but I have to say I don’t know anybody who works harder than Don. He’s so meticulous and so exacting and never stops. He’s really something.” Loquasto also appreciates the technological advances with self-illuminating scenery and “how slim you can get the scenery and still have lights in it because of the LEDs.”
Even amidst all of this technology, there is plenty of old school scenery, including an impressive backdrop that comes in for the closing number of act one. A drop featuring alternating images of the Manhattan skyline and the railroad station interior enlivens the scene.
“We just kept layering it,” explains Loquasto. “I was very concerned with trying to create as much depth in all these scenes as possible so that you have layers to catch light. It helps certainly in the train station at the end of the first act, this fragmented image of the city and the trusses of the train yard. They’re photos on sliders that come on, and they also light up so you can see them. I use them again when they’re driving to Brooklyn. You have the images moving to give a sense of going across the bridge into Brooklyn.”
At a time when Broadway seems to be mirroring Hollywood in terms of creating a spectacle for audiences, Loquasto certainly has an advantage in crossing over between film and theater, with his work in one medium informing the other.
“It’s very funny, they say the films look theatrical and the stage work looks filmic,” observes Loquasto. In thinking of his work with Woody Allen, he says, “[With] something like Bullets or Radio Days, there is a slightly elevated sensibility in the storytelling. I always say that for Woody, these little scenes — for example, those introductory scenes of the first act of Bullets — have in the best sense the feel of a New Yorker cartoon. I designed them that way, so they’re frontal, clean, and have elements within them that you get the character information, and they smack subliminally of a kind of New York aesthetic.”
