With so many Broadway shows becoming glossier and more high tech, it can be difficult for smaller shows to compete with bigger production values. The solution? Bring in people who work on those larger shows, which is what The Happy Embalmer director Kelly Devine did when she mounted her catchy, off-the-wall musical at the New York Musical Theater Festival last fall. Devine had been the choreographer on both the off-Broadway and Broadway versions of Rock of Ages, so she enlisted some of her former collaborators, including RoA associate video designer Austin Switser, who tackled the video design for Embalmer.
The Steel Cage
The Happy Embalmer is a hilariously outlandish show that deserves a grander off-Broadway run. Billed as a "no-holds-barred steel cage match between Mel Brooks, Bruce Lee, Monty Python and Axl Rose," it centers on the socially awkward Edward Nando, one of five brothers who work at their father's funeral home. He's the only bright bulb among his siblings, who comes off like a bizarre boy band, and is a consummate professional. He's so good, in fact, that he is unwittingly able to bring the dead back to life, including Emily, the woman he has always pined for, although not in a box. After Edward's talents are discovered, he embarks on all sorts of wild adventures and gets pulled into the lives of a gun-totin' Texas businessman, a wacky Russian scientist who literally creates celebrities in Iceland and a self-obsessed, brand-fixated Dalai Lama. (If that doesn't intrigue you, I don't know what will.)
Naturally. a show with a large cast and substantial video needs required the capable hands of Switser, who is one of the youngest video designers on Broadway. (He graduated from Cal Arts in 2004.) And what a task he had. While the show held rehearsals for three weeks, Switser only had two hours before the very first performance to tech the show. No joke.
"A certain part of the process was them trying something in the rehearsal room and me trying something in my studio, then going into the theatre to see if it all worked together," recalls Switser. "Luckily, most of it did."
Working with Devine and Rock of Ages lighting designer Jason Lyons was good for the show because "we knew how to communicate with each other and knew how each other would work, so were we were really able to make the best use of that short time."
The Other Iceland
A crucial element for Embalmer was the video screen – partitioned into four smaller screens to avoid what Switser sees as the banality of dealing with yet another 4 x 3 screen – that was mounted upstage above the floor. "We built that screen and designed the dimensions of it," explains Switser. "It was a steel screen with muslin as the fabric. The festival had rented a projector. I'm not sure of the exact model, but it was a Sanyo 10,000 lumens LCD projector. Isadora was our playback software, which I love and use all the time."
The screen was generally used for still images, and those images were used to enhance scenes that take place around the world, from the Tibetan landscapes of the Dalai Lama's home to the abundant taxidermy cluttering the Texas businessman's office. Then there was the kitschiness that Iceland was imbued with.
"Iceland is actually a gorgeous, gorgeous country, but we wanted to make it seem like it was sort of a constant 1960s beach party happening that no one knows about," says Switser. "So we started our own reality, and said, ‘This is what we're calling Iceland now.'
"A certain part of it [the video imagery] was scenic support, and using it to show these different places where they were," he adds. "Some of it was giving the songs a little more life. Certain parts reinforce what the lyrics of the song are about, so when we go to Texas we have all these stereotypically Texan things. The whole idea was to make the show as fun as possible in the short amount of time that we had and with a limited budget."
Video on a Stick
There were a few moments of live video, including video/phone calls that are used at the end of the show to wrap everything up. One hilarious scene features the Embalmer's brothers lying dead on stage while their spirits look down upon themselves and comment upon seeing themselves and then seeing their father discover them. That was the lone scene to feature prerecorded video that had been rehearsed so the timing worked out onstage. The live shots were done with a camera clamped onto a pole in the hallway offstage near the quick change booth.
For the video designer, the biggest challenge on the show was time. "We can plan as much as we can, but what it really comes down to is, we only have a certain amount of hours to get this thing put together," states Switser. "And this show was also running in rep with a couple of other shows, so after each performance they would have to strike the screen, get all of our props out of the way and set up for the next show within 20 minutes. Everything had to be able to come down and also had to be remounted quickly and be on its mark. Just negotiating all the different changes that had to happen during the process was very challenging. I've done a couple of these NYMTF shows, and now I'm kind of prepared for it, knowing that we need to be careful with what we do because there is such a time crunch."
Switser admits that he and the other designers were shocked when they saw the first run. "We thought it turned out very well for this quick and dirty workshop we were trying to get done. The main use of that whole performance was to get funding for a future production. I was impressed with what we were able to accomplish."
New Kids on the Block
While Switser's work on Happy Embalmer benefited from the strength of his team, it was not the first serendipitous theatre experience he has had recently. He also got a chance to work on Rock of Ages as it moved to Broadway when the designer of the off-Broadway production, Zachary Borovay, was out of town.
"I went to college with the brother of the director, Kristin Hanggi," says Switser. He adds that he had "a good working relationship with Zach" and enjoys working on different shows to see the different approaches designers take with projection and video in theatre. "It's really interesting to see how other people are accomplishing things. Projections and video are still the new kids on the block."
Flying Video
For his next project, Switser is tackling a new show about Stephen Sondheim at the Roundabout that is very video-intensive. He says he has been brought on as the system designer and programmer for the production, which is mainly comprised of a group of interviews that were shot with Sondheim. The structure of the piece is that he answers questions about certain projects, and alternating between that and the performance is a number from each particular show that is discussed.
"The video element is 55 flat screen TVs that are compiled to make one big video wall," says Switser. "And then during certain parts of the show they break apart and become fragmented sections of these screens that are flying around the space. Some are on the floor. There's a ton of work as far as programming these things and making them mesh into one big image at times, then being able to break them up into separate images. Building a system that can handle that and be flexible enough for us to work quickly in the theatre has been a chore."
Switser relishes such challenges, having come up from the rough and tumble world of low-budget theatre in his first experiences, initially in Los Angeles and then in New York. "What's been really valuable for me has been able to work on a large spectrum of shows," he says. "How do you do a show in a downtown space with 60 seats, and then how do you do a show in a Broadway theatre with 2,000 seats? That's something that is really interesting for me that I try to maintain; trying to do shows across the spectrum so I get a sense of how things work on different scales. Of course, they're very, very different. But being able to know how to do things effectively that are cheap is always very valuable."
Just ask Kelly Devine.
