Inside Theater

Derek McLane has traveled to many different places through his scenic design work for Broadway and beyond. As he takes PLSN on a tour of the Manhattan studio space that he shares with director Doug Hughes and costume designer Catherine Zuber, the charming Tony Award winner waxes enthusiastic about his work in the theater. He shows us his wall-length library of art and design books that stands in the common conference room as well as the gallery of quarter scale models lining the shelves and the perimeter of his main work space where the drafting and model crafting happens. From the gloomy, decaying theater of Follies to the bright and cheery steamship of Anything Goes, McLane knows how to fully flesh out a set and draw audiences into the world of each story he helps to tell.

The marriage of classic stage scenery and video backdrops in the current musical Honeymoon In Vegas represents a synergy of old and new school technology that imbues the production with a fresh modern look without going into visual overdrive. Tony-nominated scenic designer Anna Louizos has worked with traditional scenery and backdrops on shows like The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Curtains, and while two previous shows she worked on implemented video, this time she wanted to tackle the video/projection design herself.

The recent Broadway production of Constellations, a two-person drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson, seems deceptively simple: a short 70-minute play in which the duo plays a couple that meets, falls in love, then copes with insecurities, infidelity, and illness. Above them hover a group of “balloons” of varying sizes that are omnipresent as the actors play out the scenes numerous times, reciting many of the same lines but offering multiple takes on the relationship based on a “what if” premise. What if one person had reacted to or acted differently in a certain situation?

Edmund “Ted” Sydor is an old-school analog man working in a digital world. Originally a stop-motion animator, he is now the projections supervisor for the Metropolitan Opera, and he is applying his offline, old school know-how to a brave new digital realm for both himself and his employers. “It’s the new fancy tool in the toolbox,” he acknowledges. “Half of our new productions this season have a major video component in them.” Over the years, he has played a major role in shaping the Met’s video imperative, learning and growing on the job.

Tony Award-winning lighting designer Kenneth Posner has worked on many dramatic productions with realistic, elaborate sets, including The Merchant Of Venice, Other Desert Cities and The Columnist. His most recent Broadway show, Disgraced, a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Ayad Ahktar about pride, prejudice and self-deception, has allowed him the opportunity to use lighting to set mood and tone across different seasons in the same space. The changes are often subtle, but over the course of the show, the lighting moves from a warm atmosphere to a harsher vibe as the characters’ lives fall apart.

Lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski enjoys working with naturalistic sets, as evidenced in productions like No Man’s Land, That Championship Season and Born Yesterday. Even in a more surreal show like Waiting For Godot or a big musical like Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, he prefers some restraint. In Donald Margulies’ new play The Country House, about a group of actors retreating to a Berkshires home to ponder their place in the world and with each other, Kaczorowski gets to play with light in a radiant way.

Starring Michael Cera, Kieran Culkin and Tavi Gevinson, This Is Our Youth focuses on three college age rich kids dealing with interpersonal friction, identity issues and their hard-partying ways in the early 1980s. It’s a dramatic show set in a studio apartment setting on the Upper West Side, but looming above it is a few stories of a building edifice that emphasizes the larger landscape these self-involved youngsters are a part of. Scenic designer Todd Rosenthal worked on the show staged by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company this past summer in Chicago before it made its Broadway debut in at the Cort Theater in September, and he dealt with the challenge of taking a smaller production into a bigger space while keeping the material up close and personal.

New York-based scenic and lighting designer David S. Goldstein possesses a powerful passion for theater, and for him, his disciplines are perpetually married as he feels that they help to tell and sculpt the story that actors are portraying onstage, be it a musical or a straight play. “It’s not a prevalent practice in the United State, for a single designer to do lighting and sets,” observes Goldstein. “It is very prevalent for one designer to do set and costumes. In the United Kingdom, it’s the opposite — it’s very prevalent for one designer to do sets and lights and one to do costumes. ”

The acclaimed, Tony Award-winning revival of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which originally debuted off-Broadway in 1998 and then became a cult film in 2001, has been fueled by the punk-ish charisma of its star Neil Patrick Harris. (The show now stars Book of Mormon’s Andrew Rannells.) A story that was too controversial for the Great White Way 16 years ago — a rocker flees East Berlin by becoming transgender and marrying a U.S. military officer, comes to America, and falls for future rock star Tommy Gnosis, who eventually takes their songs and abandons her for a life of fame and fortune — is very timely now.

Beowulf Boritt’s Tony Award-winning set for Act One, which ran this past spring at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre, was one of the grandest set pieces ever designed for Broadway. The 30-foot high, 60-foot diameter turntable featured three full stories of locations — apartments, hotel rooms, theater spaces, outdoor places — and created a larger-than-life presentation that added to the energy of the show, which chronicled the autobiographical story of playwright Moss Hart as he rose up from poverty to become a Broadway sensation through his association with playwright and collaborator George S. Kaufman. It was certainly an impressive sight, not to mention heavy — it weighed in around 100,000 pounds.

The vibrant new musical If/Then, created by the Next to Normal team of composer Tom Kitt and lyricist/book writer Brian Yorkey, is an ambitious production that follows two parallel storylines. They are the two different paths that newly divorced urban planner named Elizabeth (Idina Menzel) could take in her life depending upon a key choice she makes. One storyline involves her dating a politically conscious college friend named Lucas (Anthony Rapp) and the other with a newly discharged Army doctor named Josh (James Snyder). As scenes unfold in different locales, they generally shift from one storyline to the next, exploring many of the same themes in different contexts.

Translating a film into a musical presents numerous challenges, and it certainly helps when you are the scenic designer who also did the production design on the original movie. Santo Loquasto has worked with Woody Allen on 27 films so far — the 28th goes into production this summer — and when the iconic director’s 1994 comedy Bullets Over Broadway was recently brought to the Great White Way, it made perfect sense for Loquasto to come aboard to help transform the 90-minute film into a two-and-a-half hour musical. In distinguishing them, Loquasto states that, visually, the two productions are different, and that he did not set out to recreate the look of the film so much as the spirit of it. And his approach paid off: he was nominated for a Tony Award for his work on the show.