Beowulf Boritt’s Tony Award-winning set for Act One, which ran this past spring at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre, was one of the grandest set pieces ever designed for Broadway. The 30-foot high, 60-foot diameter turntable featured three full stories of locations — apartments, hotel rooms, theater spaces, outdoor places — and created a larger-than-life presentation that added to the energy of the show, which chronicled the autobiographical story of playwright Moss Hart as he rose up from poverty to become a Broadway sensation through his association with playwright and collaborator George S. Kaufman. It was certainly an impressive sight, not to mention heavy — it weighed in around 100,000 pounds.
“Lincoln Center claims it’s the biggest turntable ever put on Broadway,” Boritt says. “I don’t know quite how you substantiate that. There are only a couple of theaters that could even hold anything that big, so it’s probably true. I’ve done a bunch of three-story sets over the years in different situations, but always a straight-on kind of proscenium thing that sat there. It wasn’t even originally how we approached Act One, but in the process, we came to it, and the turntable solved a lot of the challenges of the way James [Lapine] wrote the play, because it was so cinematic and had to move so swiftly from place to place.”
When writer-director James Lapine came to Boritt with the script about a year and a half ago, he warned him that it was going to be hard to do. The scenic designer only remembered Lapine saying he had a vision of Moss Hart running up and down stairs a lot, images of which were conjured in the book by Hart dashing up and down the stairs in the New Amsterdam building and the tenement. “That gave me a sense that he wanted a lot of movement in it, and when I first read the script, it even had more scenes in it,” Boritt says. “I think it was 150 pages long, and there were probably 20 percent more locations at that point. He cut out a lot in workshops and previews.”
A Gestalt Moment
Given that Boritt has a natural predilection for minimalism, he originally thought up a bare bones staging of the show, with basic props and uncomplicated backdrops. But just prior to his first meeting with Lapine, something nagged at the designer about the familiarity of his approach. The day before discussing his ideas, Boritt had that rare epiphany that artists dream about, and he quickly conjured and assembled a basic model of his set.
“I stayed up most of the night and built a really rough model that wasn’t exactly what the set is on stage, but damn close to it, with all the spaces individually laid out in this honeycomb thing that stuck together and rotated past us,” recalls Boritt. “My first idea was this enormous semicircle that was much bigger in diameter than the turntable ended up being, but it couldn’t go all the way around. As we worked through it, we turned it into the turntable, which ultimately was beneficial to me because you could go all the way around. There were a thousand details to work out afterwards and a lot of things to solve practically and financially, but the artistic version came in a lightning bolt. I wish I could always make that happen.”
Boritt spent most of summer 2013 going through sketches with Lapine and ultimately getting to a finished model by early August, and then Boritt’s associate drafted it up and sent it out to the shop. The scenic designer acknowledged that there was not enough of a budget to build the set, so he and Lapine came up with a smart idea. They drew the plans up really early and sent them out to ShowMotion, with whom both Boritt and Lincoln Center had a good relationship, to see if they could build the set with the money they had and to avoid overtime and other factors that drive up Broadway set costs.
“We simplified a few things that [they said] could be cheaper, but we didn’t really change the design much,” notes Boritt. “We shrunk the turntable down from about 65 feet to 60 feet [in diameter], but relatively minor changes. They said they could do it. There’s the old adage that says you can have it cheap, you can have it fast, or you can have it good, pick two. It really is true in building scenery that if you don’t need to do it fast, you can do it cheaper and still have it be good. Because we were signed off on a design in the middle of September and they got their first check, instead of having six weeks to build the set they had four months. They had plenty of time to plan things, get the drawings done, get materials ordered, and then build it.”
Coming Full Circle
The dynamic turntable perfectly fits the story of an artist struggling to make it while being totally immersed in his work. The intense collection of compact set pieces reflected how many artists tend to move through certain spaces repeatedly as they build their careers. Their minds may be expanding to new ideas and possibilities, but they are often in many of the same spaces repeatedly, be it their home, a theater, or a favorite restaurant that they haunt. The turntable design captured the feeling of being in such a world.
“That was very intentional,” confirms Boritt. “The two things I was trying to get at conceptually with the set was the way New York City and the theater itself is this constantly growing hodgepodge of things. The energy of New York, where you see some old building next to something brand-new next to some construction site, felt so appropriate to the theater, so it’s a metaphor for a life in the theater where your life is constantly changing, fluxing, and not very stable. That physical space felt correct. But also [with] the script, even though it’s a sprawling, epic story, most of the scenes are little two or three person scenes.
“The Beaumont stage is so huge,” continues Boritt, “that I thought there has to be some way to focus in the end and make the actual playing space quite small. So most of the sets within the turntable are really tiny, mostly 10 feet wide; these little spaces with low ceilings so that the human figure really pops out and is dominant within that. Because the turntable is so big, I used that to force the action way down stage, and we actually cut off most of the thrust that’s at the Beaumont. Most of the shows in there have three or four fewer rows than we did, and I added in a bunch of front rows again to compress the floor stage area so that people in that space felt large and dominant. They didn’t get too lost in the space, and the bigger scenes would light up the whole thing and show the scale of it. It was able to bring us down very tight when we needed it to be.”
Boritt admits that working out the scene transitions within the turntable was tedious. He remarks that it would be impossible to have 30-minute transitions lagging between the average two-minute scene spans, so Lapine reworked many scenes in order to accommodate more fluid transitions requiring less turntable movement. Multiple scenes in a hotel room and a diner were also reduced in number for logistical reasons.
“Originally, there were a couple of late-night hotel room scenes, and that was one of the places we just kept running into trouble, because places in the hotel were not anywhere where we they needed to be before or after them,” Boritt divulges. “James just rewrote the scene, and it worked fine in a different location. But generally it was up to me to figure out how to make it work, and there were a lot of little scene changes. That space that we used for the producer’s offices got changed out in the space under it quite a few times. There was about a 15-minute segment in the first act that had nine scene changes within three different spaces. The crew was just run ragged backstage running from place to place, literally seconds ahead of the turntable, and it took us forever to get it worked out.”
With practice, the crew got faster and were more able to make the transitions in the dark, “but the first time in tech that we tried to run that sequence in time, it was just a disaster,” recalls Boritt. “The crew would be halfway done with the change and still sitting there on stage, and we came in early the next day and did four hours of dry tech trying to get them up to speed on the show. We ran it with a stopwatch, and the following afternoon it was a disaster again, and I told James I wanted to go out in the lobby and threw up in a trashcan like Moss Hart. After a couple of days we got it, but that was one of the trickier sections in the running of the show.”
Another issue was the speed of certain changes, and small bits of masking were used to cover some of them. “It always had to be when stuff was out of the way and the scenes were dark enough and the scene going on was frankly noisy enough that it could cover whatever had to get changed,” he explains. “Some of the changes were quiet, but there were some scenes we ended up just cutting because we couldn’t make the scenery coming in quiet enough to happen when it needed to happen.” A diner counter inspired by the Edward Hopper painting Nighthawks was discarded, for example, because it rattled too much to be brought on quietly.
A Rotating Ring
The Act One turntable had a hollow center, and different spaces on the set stretched into the center more than others. Occasionally set pieces were flown in — Broadway signs in the first act, the big Once In A Lifetime marquee in the second act, and a collection of light bulbs to give some depth and something to focus on. “It is essentially a ring,” says Boritt. “Once the action got too far upstage you couldn’t see it anymore, so we were very much trying to force the action down stage into relatively shallow spaces. I think the deepest of the sets within the ring were 12 feet deep.”
Boritt recalls that set construction started just after Christmas 2013 and was ready for loading by the middle of February. The designer notes his visit to the ShowMotion shop with Lapine to check on the construction of the turntable set to see how fast it went and how it felt to move on the upper levels. The turntable could do a 360° turn in about 45 seconds, although it rarely hit such speed during the show.
“We tried it at the shop to see what it felt like, and the centrifugal force dragged you off the turntable,” says Boritt. “It was scary on the upper levels if you tried to walk while it was moving. If it was still, you were okay, but as you walked you just drifted off the thing, and on the upper levels that could get a little nerve-racking.”
Close to the time of load-in, ShowMotion had to get the turntable disassembled and sent down to the theater since it would be the first thing to be installed. As they had not finished painting the set yet, it was put on chain motors and hauled it up to the ceiling as the turntable was disassembled out from under it. “While [the set] was hanging there in the shop, there were about 35 scenics climbing through it, painting and wood-graining it all and doing all of that stuff,” explains Boritt. “We climbed up a Genie lift or a ladder to get into it, because it was floating about three feet in the air. It was like being on a ship or something, with this enormous 60-foot ring slowly swaying in the air and all these people running all around it.”
Boritt adds that even though ShowMotion has a large shop space, they did not have quite enough ceiling height to assemble everything for the 30-foot high set, so the top of the Kaufman house roof, the water tower, and various Broadway marquee signs were not attached to the set until it was in the Vivian Beaumont Theatre.
A Sturdy, Well-Lighted Place
The designer reveals that while the massive structure looked like wood, it was actually 5-inch box steel, which ended up being the sturdiest and cheapest way to build the set. He hates watching rickety sets with staircases that creak and sway as actors move along them. “Almost everything in it was steel, and I used to jokingly say that anything in it that looks like wood is steel and everything that looks like steel is wood,” says Boritt. “All the rivet plates interspersed around it were actually all wooden details that were stuck on to look like metal.” And while the flooring was all wood, the structure was all steel, including the staircases and banisters, “because it made them sturdier. They became trusses that helped support the whole thing and keep the integrity of it. All those balusters were custom fabricated steel balusters that were grained to look like wood.”
Naturally, a set this big and circular was going to create challenges for LD Ken Billington, particularly with all of the ceilings on each floor and everything underneath. Boritt appreciated Billington’s talent and tenacity, and they got the LD involved early on in the process. The set was full of electrics and dimmers, and Billington reportedly said that there were as many dimmers on the turntable alone as most musicals have.
“We ran the power up through a commutator in the center, but in the thickness of the turntable there were all these raceways that carried the power out to dimmer racks that were built into the set,” elaborates Boritt. “There were six big dimmer racks hidden around the set, and from those, they split out and ran up the legs of the set to the sconces and the lights that were within. I don’t how many actual fixtures there were. There were 120 dimmers. That was a whole big ball of wax with a lot of planning going into that and laying out exactly where everything was. Again, because the whole set was made of steel, it was hard to alter that. We did a map of where everything went in the shop, but if we changed our mind once we got into to the theater it was tricky because you were drilling into these huge steel posts, trying to get access to the cabling again.”
While they did their best to hide the lights with small wooden skirts, some were visible in sconces, but the transparency made sense, given that the show is about a life in the theater with some scenes taking place in performance spaces. “The interesting thing to me was the challenge of telling small scenes within a huge space at the Beaumont, and I feel like that the set did that successfully,” says Boritt. “[James and I] were scared that the set was going to overwhelm the play. I feel like it didn’t, and the response in general is that it supported it without overwhelming it. It was always a danger with this, but I think it works out smoothly, and Ken was able to light it so specifically that it didn’t feel like a big, overwhelming hulk. It felt like a bunch of little things popping into view.”
Room for Imagination
Large as it was, Boritt purposely kept the set very skeletal in form. “I’m not a big fan of too much realism on stage,” he notes. “I don’t think it’s what theater does well. I think movies do realism really well, and theater does theatrical minimalism really well. If you look at the actual details of the set, even in the Kaufman house, which I think comes off as lush and dressed out and people think of it as this mansion, there are no walls in there. It’s a couple of windows, a roof frame, a stairwell, and some furniture. When you can imply just enough that the audience can then fill in the blanks and imagine whatever — that’s what I feel like my job is. On different shows there are varying degrees of what you have to fill in to make things work, but my general sense is the less I can put up on stage the better, and as massive as this set was it still in some ways trying to be as little as it could be.”
The turntable set for Act One certainly dazzled, but the performances by the cast, notably co-stars Santino Fontana, Tony Shalhoub and Andrea Martin, some of them juggling multiple roles, filled the space with lively energy and impassioned dialogue. Now that the experience is over, one wonders how the talented Boritt will be able to top this design in the future.
“It’s funny, you do something like this and everything else starts to feel a little disappointing by comparison, but also easier, which isn’t so bad,” muses Boritt. “For me, it was a great confluence of things — a play that required a set like that, a director who wanted to direct on a complicated, difficult set, and a theater that was big enough to accommodate us and was also able to pay for building a set like that. You don’t get all those things coming together very often, and I will probably never do something like that in my career again. It was a lucky chance for me.”
