It is customary for Broadway audiences to applaud for the stars of shows when they make their first entrance onstage for the night, but it is less often that a set actually earns the same response. David Rockwell’s dazzling, stage-spanning interior of Maraczek’s Perfumery in the current revival of She Loves Me — a comedic musical about two bickering retail employees (Zachary Levi and Laura Benanti) who do not realize they are anonymously amorous pen pals — is one such set piece found worthy of such adulation, and for good reason. The two-story location — complete with multiple shelves containing 150 perfume bottles, three counters, and a staircase — really makes the cast and audience alike feel as though they are visiting an upscale establishment from 1934 Budapest, the time and place of the story.
“It was just a totally joyful, really rich adventure,” Rockwell tells PLSN of the experience of working on the show. He realized during his early conversations with director Scott Ellis that “this was an opportunity for me to do what I love to do, which is to create a set that really is a part of the play and part of the storytelling. I just found such joy first of all in the period, Art Nouveau. It is really such a fascinating book design vocabulary, because it’s right where the rigid 19th century academic historical revival was moving towards 20th century modernism. I love Budapest, so it was a great way into the project.”
The show took eight to nine months to design because of the intricate detail that went into creating all the sets, which include the exterior of Maraczek’s flanked by city streets on either side, the interior of the Perfumery (both the store and its backroom), the posh Café Imperiale, a hospital room and the cozy apartment of romantic lead Amelia. The streetscape is a combination of dimensional and painted buildings, thus the crew made numerous paint elevations. “Each one of those pieces is quite individual,” notes Rockwell, “and that perspective is really based on one of the seminal Renaissance perspective pieces called The Ideal City, so you would see the entire square.”
Open for Business
The spectacular opening has definitely astonished many theatergoers. While Rockwell surmises that many audience members think that the store opens up from one piece, in actuality there are four separate pieces running along curved tracks that have a large circular gear ring built into the base that allow them to open and close along them. “It almost creates a wall where stage left and stage right open up and keep opening until they engage the proscenium, and that center unit that has the two-story stair comes down to meet it,” the designer says. “We teched every one of those moves at ShowMotion in Connecticut, so by the time we got into the theater, we had that transition down to about 16 or 17 seconds, but it really was a choreographed scene that took a lot of time to design. Once we got the beautiful shell of it, there was a massive amount of time to get the level of detail.” And beyond the four main pieces that open up, there are the three counters for the main employees, which are also important locations as “so much of the action centers around them. Those actually push out from the unit.”
Rockwell compares the self-contained unit to a Swiss watch that can all be packed up when it’s closed. “When it opens up, the walls breathe open and the counters breathe open so that it has a big spatial change,” he says. “That’s one of the things I think theater can do that no other art form does — that visceral change that happens right in front of the audience.”
An important part of the store’s transformation (which, like all of them, happens in full view of the audience) includes the center section with the stairway up to Maraczek’s unseen office. That piece is actually two units, one inside of the other. “Think of it as two concentric shells,” says Rockwell. “When we use that, we bring both units all the way down stage. When Laura and Jane are singing their first song together [in the back room], that’s about three feet away from the edge of the stage, so the two side walls breathe open and that whole piece comes down and rotates.”
He notes that Studio 54 “is a wonderful space with very little wing space,” so the two pieces of the center section rotate around to form the Café Imperiale at the end of Act I. “The perfume shop closes up and moves upstage, and those rotate around, and the drop comes in,” says Rockwell. “Having designed restaurants for 34 years, creating that café in front of the audience was just such a joy.”
Another interesting aspect of the design (not as visible to audience members in the orchestra section) is the “forced perspective pattern that reads both as the paving in the plaza and the tile floor in the store,” explains Rockwell. “And that forced perspective grid disguises most of the tracks, so when things move, it looks like they’re floating across magically. None of the automation is there for automation’s sake. It’s there to move these very tall, highly detailed pieces around as they glide around.”
Within the Perfumery, there is plenty of detail, including numerous shelves with 150 cast resin perfume bottles made for the show, each one individually labeled. There are also a few additional oversized ones. Some period props were also included to add extra flavor and help the cast become more immersed in that world. These include the light fixtures in the café, many of the objects in the counters, a period water cooler and a period cash register.
Architectural Inspiration
It has become common practice to present modern Broadway audiences with ostentatious sets and lighting, often for the sake of the production but often also to give more bang for the buck, given how pricey tickets are now. Rockwell agrees that having a set that is both functional and emotionally supportive to the story is important. As an
architect, Rockwell has worked on many restaurants, including the chic Nobu chain in Manhattan, which offers “a very rich multiple layered interior with a very strong point of view inspired by the chef’s unique approach to cooking.” That, he says, has served him well when it came to creating the Café Imperiale and other set pieces for She Loves Me.
“In a restaurant, I always say that nothing makes a design look better than good service,” remarks Rockwell. “So if the food gets to the table and it’s hot, that is part of the experience you attribute to the physical environment, because someone had the wherewithal to put the kitchen close enough that they could get the food to you so warm. In set design, there are all the invisible things that the audience wants when the curtain goes up — that they’re in a place with a very specific point of view and are seduced into and almost don’t want to leave because it creates this reality that only exists for the two half hours that the actors and the audience are there. It’s a privilege to create this amazing combination of quite old-fashioned painting with very state-of-the-art technology that tells a story.”
Another integral aspect of this production is the color palette. “From the outside, the color saturation of the surrounding buildings is much deeper than the pale lavender of Maraczek’s,” notes Rockwell. “We did a huge amount of research on the period and also did a lot of research on places we love to shop. There’s a place in Soho called Ladurée that sells pastries, macaroons, and things and has a particular lavender I’ve always loved, so we used that lavender as an idea for the outside of the store. When [the store] opens up, it’s a sort of glazed, golden, lacquered color. We worked a lot with [lighting designer] Don Holder to make sure that the color wasn’t the same color as skin so people would pull out from it, and it also gave an environment for those bottles.”
Those custom perfume bottles came in five different shapes and five different colors, and Rockwell and his associates picked the resin colors “to pop against the golden glaze of the shop and accent it with a green that is particularly connected with Art Nouveau,” he explains. “The Hector Guimard design for the Paris Métro station is that particular green. Then, when the workroom turned around, we wanted that to be a more utilitarian palette, so it’s all wood. But in tech rehearsals, as we saw it, moved it and saw Jane, Laura, and everyone in front of it, we added that
wallpaper, which is a kind of burnished green with a little bit of gold. I think it creates a surprise when you see this cool palette on the outside and it opens up to a warm palette.”
Lighting Challenges
Rockwell sings the praises of lighting designer Don Holder, who he also worked with on Scott Ellis’ revival of On The Twentieth Century last year. “Don has done such a magnificent job of lighting this, and it wasn’t an easy show to light because of the size of that center unit,” says Rockwell. “For instance, the restaurant hangar, which has that cut drop on top, [has] no almost no room between [it and] the building… When you have the hospital and the apartment, Don creates separation between all those units, which is just the work of an incredibly talented lighting designer working at the top of his game.”
For the Christmas scene, electrician John Wooding notes that they have two wreaths, which need to be portable. He used RC4 Wireless’ RC4Magic Series 2 dimmers in each for LED Christmas strings and used one transmitter to get them signal.
The material palette for She Loves Me is essentially wood and steel. “It’s made as you would a wood frame building,” says Rockwell. “It is made as light as can be. One of my favorite transitions is right after the hospital scene in the second act. When Mr. Maraczek is going off stage left, she [Amelia] comes on stage right in the apartment. We made custom wallpaper for her apartment that has ice cream sundaes on it, which makes Laura Benanti very happy. All of those forced perspective windows are laid up during that ice cream number, and as her apartment gets to center stage, the two side panels with the windows close at the same time, so you feel the street coming towards you. That was because we were able to make those light enough, and they’re tracked from above. It’s pretty much the stuff that every set is made out of, just made as light as possible.”
The scenic designer also points out an essential component that has made this production click from the start: the crew of Studio 54. “The crew in the theater is unbelievable,” says Rockwell. “That’s a very complex show — Art Nouveau influenced by Asian motifs and decorative stained glass, and they maintain all of that so beautifully. That only happens if the crew is really committed to it.”
PLSN congratulates David Rockwell on his 2016 Tony Award for “Best Scenic Design of a Musical” –ed.
