Scenic and projection designer David Gallo thinks that the vibrant rock musical Memphis is a relatively simple show from a visual standpoint, but that that doesn't mean that boundaries weren't pushed. The Broadway production, which includes a variety of moving scenery, including an adjustable bridge, pillars that move around the stage and a band that glides around the stage, is an energetic, exciting spectacle. "It's not the most complicated thing I've ever done," says Gallo, who did scenic design for Xanadu, Drowsy Chaperone, Company and numerous other shows, "but it did take a while to figure out how to make it all function together, and it certainly needs to flow more than your average musical."
A Play of Passion
Featuring music and lyrics by Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan, Memphis is a musical about the ascension of rock ‘n' roll during the racially segregated and socially turbulent 1950s in Tennessee, focusing on one of the first white radio DJs to play black music and the African-American singer he woos. And for Gallo, working on Memphis was not just another feather in his cap, it was a passion project.
"I think what was interesting about it for me is the music is such a big part of me, and it was a challenge to go to a place that I had been imagining for so long, and a piece of history that was so much a part of me for all these years, and actually be able to do it," he says. "It was a challenge to go there as a massive fan of this time and place and to be able to explore it. It suddenly became ‘put up or shut up' time, to see where we could go with it. The research took me to Memphis, where I'd never been to before but always wanted to go, to explore stuff that had always been intriguing to me."
Roots Rock
Memphis was originally produced in La Jolla, Calif., and then it was moved up to Seattle before making its way to New York. In discussing his inspiration for the scenic design, Gallo says he was looking for something that captured the essence of the titular town throughout the show and to explore "the back alleyways and various basements and attics and spaces that the music flows out of. We never fully leave the rawness of those Beale Street joints. They all have a very particular look to them, and we were trying to set the whole thing within that framework."
Noting that the story is about "a guy who takes things as far as he can go within his world, and then he is enabled to step out beyond that as rock ‘n roll moves past," Gallo observes that the protagonist is "a roots-oriented guy," so he looked for things to keep things focused in where those roots would take hold. "That's where the whole look came from, which was new for New York. The out-of-town version of the show was essentially the same structure, which we largely came upon to facilitate the movement of the piece, and the main design concept of the band being on stage. It was over the course of the out-of-town stuff that we narrowed in on what it is we were looking for with the show's overall aesthetic."
Moving Columns and Bridge
The two moving columns that are realigned for different venues onstage, from a record store to a run-down apartment, were brought in for the Broadway version. (It should be noted that the faux concrete in the show is chipped and cracked to give the various sets that weathered, lived in feeling.) Yet while the out-of-town incarnations were full-blown productions, according to Gallo, "we were looking to isolate it and concentrate principally on the show itself and on the music, so the scenery wasn't really the primary focus for anyone," recalls Gallo. "We had to figure out a way to make the show work, but it wasn't much more than an opportunity to sketch in the set and see where it took us; the same thing with Seattle. We weren't able to make that many changes between San Diego and Seattle."
He adds that in Seattle, the whole crew was together seeing the show every day, and that was where he was able to do the redesign for New York. "It was actually an ideal situation, because we were all right there with everybody thinking about it and everybody concentrating on it. Taking things further along was a real help."
The movable bridge, which raises and lowers in accordance with various scenes – higher to portray the street above an underground nightclub, lower for a street scene by an alleyway – also helped to create the feeling of depth and the subterranean quality that Gallo was trying to achieve in exploring a musical world that was often literally an underground phenomenon. The bridge also helped to get actors inside the columns from above.
Special Delivery
In one scene, two women are placed inside the columns for a sequence where the main character, Huey, takes over a radio station to play rock ‘n' roll to the unsuspecting masses, and people are calling in. The actors are situated well above ground level in seemingly precarious perches that were placed within the columns. But putting people in unusual places is nothing new for Gallo. He's had actors pop out of all sorts of props over the years, including a refrigerator in The Drowsy Chaperone.
"I had another play years ago that had surrealistic elements where people were coming out of closets and refrigerators and washing machines and window seats and furniture," he remarks. "We're getting pretty good at packing people into small places."
The idea behind the two sliding columns for Memphis was to create something that the company could utilize throughout the show that was not too big or bulky and allowed them to have the practical necessities for various moments. With their ability to track and rotate, "the columns solved that problem," says Gallo. "That naturally flowed into the idea of using them to deliver actors as well."
Deliberate Distortion
One area of the stage that draws little attention but offers a lot of utility is the back wall. The designer says it does more than people realize. "It's got little panels that open up so you can shoot light through it, and it's got the windows that change out, for when we go to the church or other places," Gallo explains. "Then the windows come out for ‘Memphis Lives in Me.'" Then there are "the doors opening and closing to bring on the band. There are all sorts of audio and video behind it to support the band. Plus the whole thing flies out, even though it's something you never actually see the show. The whole back wall is an extremely heavy piece of scenery that flies out, so we gain the extra depth for the second act. We can bring in the [upstage] curtain, which is actually upstage of that wall, to go to the TV studio. It's not an extravagant show scenically, but I think what we have we use fairly well."
The TV studio sequence is intriguing, because a live video feed of the show from an onstage camera – and one that is totally oversized and old school – is projected onto a curtain on the back wall. The fuzzy black-and-white quality helps to emphasize the limited technology of the day. "It's deliberately distorted," Gallo notes of the wall projection. "It was a very fine line how far we wanted to go with that distortion, but there was never a desire for it to be a crystal-clear kind of thing. It's naturally distorted because it is being projected on such an uneven surface, but the actual video signal was manipulated to make it feel like it was contemporary to the piece."
"There are projections in almost every scene," adds Gallo. "What's unique to this particular production is that even though it's all video projectors, we chose to keep images still, except for those live video parts. Almost everything in the show is done still, but what's special about this is we used Pandora's Box (media server), which had never been used on Broadway before. The idea is that the projections actually move in sync with the set, so as the automation cues and all the scenic pieces move, the projections are linked directly to them. We had flawless control between all of those images tracking simultaneously. People have tried to do this before by turning on the projector, then hitting the go button to move the projections at the same time you're hitting the go button to move the scenery, but it always sort of messed up. Now there are encoders in every single piece of scenery, so as the stuff breaks apart and comes back together and rotates, all of those illusions are all linked directly. That's unique to this show."
Images from the 1950s
In terms of the static projections, Gallo offers examples from the radio station scenes: "We have the old radios, the car radios, the signal towers and the tape and all of that stuff – imagistic stuff. There's stuff in every moment. It's not overstated. I think that one of the things we were trying hard not to do was to not overdo it too much and stick to what in theory was possible in the 1950s. It does have that photographic feel to it, and we didn't use color. We were trying to keep the projections in line with the same minimal period technology."
He stresses that whatever modern technology was utilized for Memphis was done for the sake of the show, not for the sake of technology. One of the benefits, he says, is that it gives him the ability to align the scenic elements with the projection elements. He finds it increasingly more advantageous to do both, as he did on Memphis, because they are more closely bound.
"Rather than dilute what it is that you're trying to do, I think you're better off creating it all from one place," he says. "That's my interest. I think it's best if it all springs from the same well. We've been doing a lot of that sort of thing lately."
And for a "simple" show like Memphis, the ability to marry images, both static and moving, with set pieces helps push the boundaries and blur the lines between scenic design and projection.
