Scenic designer George Tsypin uses transparent and translucent materials to take the stage production for Disney’s The Little Mermaid under the sea.
Here, Sierra Boggess as Ariel ventures from a cool-lit underwater realm to bright sunshine.
Anyone who heard that The Little Mermaid was going to be turned into a Broadway musical might have initially been baffled by the thought of bringing an underwater animated tale into a live action arena. It wasn’t like Disney could install a giant aquarium and have everyone swim in underwater gear throughout the narrative; nor could everything and everyone be suspended on visible wires and flown around the theater. The prospects seemed giddily unrealistic, especially as the story of Ariel — the young mermaid daughter of King Triton who, despite his wishes and orders, seeks to journey to and live in the world above water — involves two different realms and numerous locations, including a moving ship.
But an unconventional concept often requires an unusual approach, and when Disney hired veteran opera scenic designer George Tsypin to tackle the sets, they found someone willing to explore unchartered waters. In recent years, he has been working and developing sets with translucent and transparent material, and his work has appeared in major European opera houses like La Scala and the Paris Opera. He has also recently designed five shows at the Metropolitan Opera, including The Ring Cycle, War And Peace, The Gambler, Mazeppa and The Magic Flute. He feels that many of the Met shows were a precursor to his work on The Little Mermaid, especially the set of The Magic Flute, which he says was akin to a “crystal temple” and was very transparent.
Sherie Renee Scott as Ursula, with a dimly lit undersea backdrop that parallels the night sky.
“I am a former architect and involved in some architectural projects as well, so my earlier work is much more angular,” says Tsypin. “I love structure and I love steel, so I’m probably the last person who should be asked to design The Little Mermaid.” But he and his design team have been getting more into sculpture lately. “We’ve done a lot of sculptural things, but more and more organic shapes and things like that. At my studio we have a sculpture shop, so in that sense it was a natural thing to move into something like The Little Mermaid.”
The show’s choreographer eventually solved actor movement on stage by having everyone wear wheelies — those shoes with roller skate wheels installed underneath them — but Tsypin had to find a way to further help the feeling of aquatic movement; in the case of two big numbers — “Under The Sea” and “Kiss The Girl” — by picking people off the floor for dramatic effect. “On some level it’s a normal show,” says Tsypin. “There are actors playing the roles, and they’re people, but you have to imagine that they’re fish or mermaids as opposed to really making them look like underwater creatures.”
While many of the translucent stage pieces look like glass, they are not. “You never use real glass on stage,” Tsypin says. “I’ve done some glass things for some other projects that I was involved with, less theatrical things, but onstage you have to use theatrical devices to create a sense that things are made of glass. On this show I even moved beyond that, and it’s not really glass either. One material that I discovered by accident towards the end of the process at a materials library was a 3M material, this iridescent film, which is more vibrant than anything I’ve seen before.”
At first he thought that the material would be too bold and might overpower everything else on stage. But his sizable design team encouraged him to go for it because the material is “very pure and very striking,” Tsypin says. “In many cases we just use that material straight. In other words, I’m not trying to obscure it or make it more subtle. Basically the fins, the sun and the waves are made of this material, and other things are made with a little more subtle holographic material. But somehow, when I saw these iridescent materials I thought, ‘This is Little Mermaid. It feels like a tail, it feels like an iridescent fish under water, this is a metaphor for this show.’ And I went with it all the way.”
Another challenge in designing for The Little Mermaid was handling two worlds; the world below and the world above. The translucent “waves” became the borders between the two realms. They could be raised and lowered to create a cinematic effect, “as if you’re going underwater or you were swimming up like the Little Mermaid.”
Tsypin was very rigorous with the color palette. The underwater set pieces were cool, blue and purple, and the above water sets were very warm and sunny. This differentiated the two worlds.
“The world above is seen through the mermaid’s eyes. That’s why it’s also kind of translucent and a little weird and a little like a fairy tale. The columns are in the palace above, and then they turn around and have more aquatic sculptures in them and are used for the palace below. There is an underwater sun, which is kind of like a big starfish, and then it turns around and becomes the above water sun.”
Later in the production, Tsypin discovered that in the original Hans Christian Andersen story, the author described an underwater palace made of glass, and the Little Mermaid’s grandmother described to her the “flying fish” (aka birds) in the world above. Tsypin continually played on this inherent dichotomy in the story — the idea that the two worlds parallel each other in many ways.
Important scenic elements that transformed from one world to the other were two movable columns that fold, unfold and collapse and utilize abstract shapes. They also open to reveal pods on outstretched tentacle arms that could fly people over the stage. “In the first act they look like fish, and in the second act they look like birds,” notes Tsypin.
The inspiration for the columns came from the Hieronymus Bosch painting entitled Garden of Earthly Delights. Tsypin admits to a long-time obsession with the surreal Renaissance work, which he feels offers a “strange mixture of fantasy and something very recognizable and it feels like another strange world.
“I felt on this show you have to take a journey to some fantastical world that you’ve never seen before. I don’t think it would work to just be realistic and try to represent all the underwater plants and fish. I just felt that we had to create our own world because if you put in a normal fish or a normal plant, how do you do people playing fish or playing mermaids or mermen? Already it’s a fantastical idea, so we have to create that fantastical world.”
The columns serve multiple purposes, from being simply what they are in Prince Eric’s palace to the wilder creations that shuttle around underwater creatures during the show stopping number “Under The Sea.”
“I felt I needed to come up with a shape for the sculpture that invokes an underwater world, or the pond for ‘Kiss The Girl,’ but it’s not this or that,” says Tsypin. “It becomes different things. On top of that there were practical considerations as well. I’ve been doing opera and other things with a lot of space and scale, and here I was given the smallest theatre on Broadway. Even though it doesn’t feel that small when you look at the stage, the reality is that there’s no offstage space, so I was desperately trying to create columns with things that fold and unfold and collapse.”
The collapsible nature of the column tentacles came from an important practical necessity: Tsypin literally had three feet of storage space at stage left and stage right. Another inspiration was Chinese lanterns and decorations, which he was fascinated by in terms of their simplicity and elegance when opened, and their ability to collapse into something flat. To him, they felt like underwater plants or underwater shapes without being literal.
While Tsypin’s outrageously colorful and abstract set pieces serve Mermaid well and are definite crowd pleasers, some critics have not been so positive in their artistic assessment of his achievement. One reviewer at the Hollywood Reporter felt that his set design was more appropriate for an avant-garde opera by Philip Glass. “I was actually pleased with that remark,” Tsypin says. “Some people said that it’s unbelievably vulgar and that the lowest common denominator was used. On the other hand, it’s too obscure and should be used for Philip Glass. Maybe that’s good. It works on many levels, but maybe it’s a little bit outside of what you would expect. I tried to be accessible, but maybe my sensibility is just a bit weird. It had to be somewhat different, and sometimes those people are jarred by it, but then it becomes more mainstream.”
Tsypin asserts that he has worked on some shows during his career where a few years had passed after a production or a show was revived and his formerly contentious aesthetic was then widely embraced. “I think you have to challenge the audience, and I think that small kids are a little more open because they don’t carry all the baggage with them,” Tsypin says, referencing Little Mermaid’s obvious family audience. “They don’t say it’s supposed to look like that or look like this.”
Technology has seeped into many modern Broadway productions, and different generations of theatergoers react differently to it. “Kids grow up with computer graphics and are much more sensitive to this wild color and more dense visual information, which is sometimes something that for older critics is way too much and way too vulgar,” observes Tsypin. “I think for younger people or kids it’s okay because they’re used to looking at their computer flashing with this wild color all the time. I think set design in general is getting bolder that way.”
Lighting the 3M material was certainly complicated. “It takes light beautifully and it transmits light, and that’s what it’s designed for,” says Tsypin. “I feel it is very important. It almost doesn’t exist without light. It’s almost like materialized light sculpture.” But the dangers of too much reflectivity and choosing the right angles were inherent in using the material. He commends veteran Disney lighting designer Natasha Katz for taking on that challenge. According to Tsypin, the duo collaborated very closely, conducting numerous tests and demos. These were necessary because of the unusual nature of the 3M material, which produces different effects when lit at different angles.
“For example, at one place in the house you’ll see one thing, and from another place in the house you’ll see maybe a completely different color,” Tsypin says. “It was a very bold move on Natasha’s part to go with that. She didn’t have total control because sometimes the material does whatever it wants to do, but it gives you enough of a controllable thing that she found quite interesting. You might light something with purple light and meanwhile it reflects orange. We both felt it was exciting and had enough of an unpredictable element that was
