Imagine being the video and scenic designer for a one-man show – more specifically, a comedian's irreverent take on the history of the world – and that person is Colin Quinn. His director is Jerry Seinfeld, and the show is a special history lesson that lasts only 75 minutes. But you only have a couple of weeks of prep time before getting into a Broadway venue. Sounds a bit challenging, doesn't it? Scenic and video designer David Gallo was certainly up for the task when he jumped onboard to do Colin Quinn: Long Story Short last year. He is a man who is used to working in both video and scenic design at once, and he has extensive Broadway experience through shows like Memphis, Company and Titanic.
Getting it Right
"This isn't even a one-person show of a person portraying a character; this is Colin Quinn as Colin Quinn – so you really have to get it right," declares Gallo. "You've taken away a layer of make-believe in a way. You're dealing with an individual who's really that guy, and not only that, he's being directed and guided by Jerry Seinfeld, so they know each other very, very well. You've got to barge in on a decades-long friendship and become a collaborator who's responsible for the visual aspect. I think that's a lot of it, getting into the heads of those individuals and giving them something that they can use and something that they feel comfortable with."
The hilarious monologue delivered by Quinn in Long Story Short – currently wrapping up its extended run on Broadway and set to air on HBO in April – skewers all of the great empires of the world, documenting their individual rise and fall and poking fun at the eternal follies of the human race. Quinn stands on a coliseum-like stage with stone steps, a small throne at stage left and a pillar at stage right. At upstage center is a curved projection screen that displays still images as well as computer animation that is akin to a medieval Google Earth that zooms in on various locations around the world when the star ribs them. Along with little bits of music and some lighting changes, there are enough elements that enhance Quinn's performance without distracting from it.
Gallo explains that Quinn and Seinfeld were very involved in the collaborative process of creating the stage. "I wasn't sure what to do with it, and one of the strengths that I bring is that I don't have a lot of preconceived notions about what something should be," says Gallo. "I saw the tape of the downtown [New York] production, which was a very tight camera shot right on Colin, and I didn't really get a sense of ambience. But between that and the script, I was thinking that there were a lot of different ways we could go with it. Then in my meetings with Colin and with Jerry we came up with it all together."
Set in Motion
The set is constructed of wood, foam and steel, and it was designed to propel Quinn into motion. "What I was trying to do, and they agreed, was to give Colin a reason to keep moving a little bit, a place that he could wander around and sit on the steps, go here and go there," says Gallo. "Get a little bit of a topography without there being any furniture. There was a lot of talk early on about furniture, and I thought that was death. You don't want to see this guy sitting in a chair. That's not what we want here. We want something a little more classical, something that felt a little bit like a Coliseum or Greek amphitheater, that classical kind of a look."
Gallo adds that there is a "busker aspect" to the production. They originally contemplated putting the star in a lecture hall or a library or a museum, "but Colin's not really the kind of guy to put on a tweed jacket and lecture at Oxford. He's more of a storyteller than that, so I wanted to approach it more like a guy who's doing his spiel, like a busker standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial or the Roman Coliseum or wherever, just doing his thing and relating directly to the people. I wanted him to feel and look like he was comfortable in the space, but I didn't want to look like it was custom tailored around him."
One technological aspect that enhances Quinn's show are the as-seen-from-space images projected on the video screen. Imagine the concept of zooming in on countries back when they were far less populated. Seinfeld conjured up the map idea early on. "The original intention was just to find maps, the Google Earth thing but historical, an old-school kind of thing," recalls Gallo. "We took it to absurdity and created an entire Google map from the 14th century. You scan the ancient globe and zoom in on ancient civilizations and all that business. But all of that was made from scratch; it was a royal pain in the ass."
Lawyers and Funny Cows
The designer acknowledges that it was one of the major hurdles of the production, because it took so much time to create and render the images. He says that for a modest project in the Helen Hayes Theatre, there was a tremendous amount of computer power that went into it, and the rendering time was one of the things that made it so difficult. "You would come up with an idea and want to make a change, then it would take 24 hours or more to see what it was you were coming up with. We've gotten into a culture of immediacy with computers that people don't realize that when you're doing stuff on this massive a scale, it really takes some serious time to put into it."
On top of the animated segments are the dozens of still images – everything from modern-day photos to classical paintings that appear onscreen as well. Gallo and his collaborators went through thousands of images to find the best ones, and they also needed to collect things that were in the public domain. (With the show going to HBO, teams of lawyers are evidently poring over them again just to be safe.) They even shot a few original photos as well.
"We found what worked and what would be funny, and almost every single picture has been modified, some of them extensively and some of them very subtly," reveals Gallo. "Nothing really worked straight out of the box." He would toy with things, present them to Quinn and Seinfeld, get their comments, then "mess around with it from there."
And they did not settle on just any images. They often had to be humorous and had to work within the context of the show. "You know what the weird part is? You'll never know what they're going to respond to," Gallo says of Quinn and Seinfeld. "The one picture that was the hardest to find, believe it or not, was the cow. We went through dozens of pictures of cows until Jerry found one that he thought was a funny cow. I consider myself a fairly humorous person in my work, but when you're literally dealing with the funniest person in the world who knows comedy better than anyone, you've got to listen when he tells you that your cow is not funny."
In the Groove
In the end, Gallo says the experience of working with the comedy duo was fantastic. He was surprised at how very quickly they got into the groove. They sat in the studio and worked things out "the way we ordinarily do it. We played around with a model box and put pieces of Styrofoam and cardboard in the model box until we had something that worked for us. I think that they got a kick out of it. It wasn't different from what we ordinarily do."
When the show was largely finished, Gallo had dinner with Seinfeld, and the actor told him that when he was up in the designer's office working on the set, he got why people do Broadway. "I thought that was such an interesting thing to say because he's not coming from a theatre kind of tradition," remarks Gallo. "He's certainly the king of television and done stand-up. Even though he's performed on Broadway, this was new and different for him, and very much an alien world. I think one of the things I've been good about, and good at over the years, is working with first-time directors who have substantial careers elsewhere. My first Broadway show [Hughie] was directed by Al Pacino. He had never directed anything before."
Gallo notes that because he is a somewhat unconventional Broadway person, he is the one who gets approached about projects like Long Story Short. "I think that's one of the reasons," he says. "But you also have to kind of modify your process because you're dealing with people who don't ordinarily do this for a living. This is something that's different for them." Watching Long Story Short, you would be hard-pressed to notice that.
