Inside Theater

The amazing combination of Cirque du Soleil and The Beatles and how they came together for a permanent installation at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas is something of a magical mystery tour. As the Beatles are notoriously protective of their music, it took a personal friendship between the late George Harrison and Cirque founder Guy Laliberté to make it possible. Sir George Martin and his son Giles Martin got involved, and the two, working from Abbey Road’s master tapes, created unique collages and arrangements that have never before been heard. Add Celine Dion’s long-time lighting designer, Yves Aucoin, and more video than has ever been used in a Cirque show, and you’ve got one of Las Vegas’s most anticipated and talked about entertainment events.

Subtlety doesn’t exist in Las Vegas. Ask a local and they’ll probably tell you it’s a new Starbucks drink. But don’t tell this to the designers and crew of Phantom—The Las Vegas Spectacular at the Venetian Hotel-Resort-Casino. Despite a title that includes the word “Spectacular,” despite a budget that ballooned from $25 million to $40 million, despite recreating the interior of the Paris Opera House from 1894, LD Andy Bridge still insists the strongest design element of the show is subtlety.

As vampire musicals come and go on Broadway, they leave very little by which to remember them. This spring promises a new kind of vampire story in Lestat, based on the best selling books by novelist Anne Rice. Lighting designer Kenneth Posner, projection coordinator Howard Werner and visual concept designer Dave McKean, who have been involved with the project for the past two years, have brought a unique and powerful visual aesthetic to this dark dramatization, which has come of age on Broadway at the Palace Theatre.

The Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s classic musical that opens this month at the famous Studio 54, is not your ordinary musical. It was adapted from The Beggar’s OperaThe Threepenny Opera written by John Gay in 1728 as a comedic satire about the interaction between the classes. The Threepenny Opera was written by Brecht in 1928, who used it as a focus for his new style of theatre. This style, which would become known as Brechtian theatre, explodes onto the stage in this revival, using modern conceits to fulfill Brecht’s original vision of the play. Lighting designer Jason Lyons completely captures the style and complexity of the piece as he brings his own touch to this classic work.

All year long, as shows go up and come down, designers are continuously busy working on various projects, including current shows, future shows and completely unrelated things, like having a life. So how, you may ask, does all the work get done? This is a story about the people whose job it is to not only achieve the goals set forth by designers, but to anticipate and overcome any obstacles along the way. These are “the facilitators,” the associate and assistant designers who act as intermediaries between the heads and technicians and other departmental representatives. These are the people who get down to the nitty-gritty of the show, realize creative ideas and get the problems solved so that the show can go on.

The arrival of March will bring with it the opening of Ring of Fire, the new musical based on the songs written and performed by Johnny Cash and the evocative stories those songs tell. The show’s premise revolves around the telling of these stories and how the smaller vignettes tell a larger overarching story in and of themselves. To bring the now-immortal songs of Cash to life, projection designer Michael Clark and lighting designer Ken Billington have created a stage environment to match the versatility of the lyrics and the wide range of both emotional and physical space that the characters must go through along their journeys. I recently spoke with the creative team behind this show to find out how they ignited this Ring of Fire.