Inside Theater

During the chaos and confusion of the 9/11 attacks, American airspace was closed, and many flights were diverted back to their point of origin or to other destinations. In one specific scenario, 6,700 airline passengers on 38 flights landed in the town of Gander on Newfoundland. Gander only has 10,000 residents, and over the next few days, the resilient, resourceful Canadians showed their unexpected guests hospitality, shelter and care in a way that surprised and moved many people. The new Broadway musical Come From Away celebrates those random acts of kindness in the wake of a horrible tragedy.

Scenic Designer Mark Wendland on the Art of Subtle Transformations

Significant Other is an unusual Broadway comedy. What starts off as a lighthearted tale of an awkward young gay man named Jordan who is lonely in love while his group of close girlfriends start to slowly pair off leads to an existential crisis. As he approaches age 30, he realizes he does not know how to make romantic connections and is in danger of being left behind in the coupling game.

With Glenn Close returning to the character of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, the role that won her the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical 22 years ago, one wonders what the creative team could do to top the previous production. As Sunset’s new scenic designer James Noone notes, the last mansion set was enormous and very realistic. “It was a beautiful, stunningly executed, Gothic Hollywood movie palace that came down from the flies and moved forward,” he says.

In Transit at Circle in the Square Theatre makes use of a unique scenic design by Donyale Werle

In Transit is Broadway’s first a cappella musical, a cheerful, peppy, and sometimes bittersweet look into the lives of different couples (and couples to be) in NYC. Performing on a bi-level, T-shaped stage at the Circle In The Square Theatre in New York, the 11-person ensemble generates all of the sounds heard with few exceptions. On top of nicely replicating the feeling of the New York subway with a token booth located on the second level, the show features a 71-foot conveyer belt that moves people and scenery around and gives the thrust space a genuine thrust.

Mimi Lien’s Stage Design for Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812

It’s a complicated Russian novel and everyone’s got nine different names, but the narrative extract from Tolstoy’s War and Peace that has been transformed into the colorful musical Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 has become one of the most original productions to arrive on Broadway during this past year. And one of its strengths, Mimi Lien’s lavish stage design, required a lot of thoughtful engineering.

The latest Broadway rendition of Christopher Hampton’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses is an invigorating, lively take on the period costume drama, which is ripe with robust games of seduction and is enhanced this time by sumptuous lighting from veteran, Tony Award-winning LD Mark Henderson.

LD Natasha Katz talks about lighting the musical as it makes its way back to Broadway.

The Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, Cats, is both a beloved and satirized show. The original production lasted 18 years and ended its original run in 2000, but it has been revived in a new production directed by Trevor Nunn and co-starring pop singer Leona Lewis as the melancholy kitty Grizabella, whose signature song, “Memories,” is an iconic Broadway theme.

Scenic design is a theatrical discipline requiring a delicate balance of vision, intelligence and a willingness to serve the narrative without overwhelming it. Tony Award-winning scenic designer Beowulf Boritt zeroes in on what’s most important: the tale being told. “What it looks like is less important to me than what it means,” Boritt tells PLSN. “Obviously, what it looks like is important — that’s what I’m doing, putting visuals on stage — but trying to make those visuals meaningful and relate to the story and scenes and not get in the way of story and scene is really the most important thing.”

The glitz and glamour of Broadway often overshadows the more modest production values and strong merits of off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway productions. The annual New York Musical Festival (NYMF) features original and often innovative shows, many driven by off-the-wall concepts, that create more with less. During this past run in July, PLSN caught two entertaining shows that featured creative use of video that helped to expand their scope without overwhelming them. We tracked down their digital creators who, despite experience with much larger productions, enjoyed the challenges that their more compact NYMF shows presented them.

Scott Pask’s Scenic Design for The Waitress

The Tony Award-nominated musical Waitress, adapted from the film by the late actor/writer-director Adrienne Shelly, combines splashy sets and breezy music with serious themes of repression, enlightenment, and female empowerment. Jessie Mueller plays Jenna, a diner waitress who possesses a passion for making pies with exotic names that reflect real-life themes and ideas — such as Marshmallow Mermaid Pie, I Hate My Husband Pie, and Kick In The Pants Pie — but she is under the thumb of her controlling and verbally abusive boyfriend Earl. Once she learns of a pie-making contest with a nice monetary prize and also begins an affair with a handsome doctor, she begins to feel a sense of liberation that she has been craving.

Scenic Designer Jean Rabasse on the Cirque-Meets-Broadway Production

Cirque du Soleil is known for its high-flying and visually impressive shows. With the new show, Paramour, they have brought their exciting aesthetics into the Broadway arena at the Lyric Theatre on 42nd Street, which has previously housed the mammoth musicals On The Town and Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. Despite sizable stage depth and wing space, it was still a bit smaller than a Cirque production space in an arena or under a big top. Ultimately, the company has created a spectacle worthy of the Great White Way, with majestic set pieces and amazing acrobatics meshing within the zippy musical numbers.

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.