GYPSY, Broadway 2024

[scenicdesign71]

NYT:  Audra McDonald to Star in Gypsy Revival on Broadway This Fall
            The six-time Tony-winning actress will play musical theater's most famous stage mother in a production directed by George C. Wolfe.

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Previews November 21, opening December 19.   At the Majestic, former home of the Phantom.

Notwithstanding the undeniable Audra of it all, I'm just as excited to see Wolfe's take on Gypsy as I am for McDonald's Rose.  Per the article:

He said that his ideas for the production were still evolving.  "The thing that keeps on resonating with me is the idea of not enough: not enough space, not enough love, not enough money," Wolfe said.  "That's what's pulling me in."

I'm not sure what that ultimately looks like onstage — no designers have been announced — but there seems to me a discernible GCW aesthetic at work in this teaser:
           

[scenicdesign71]

I've been out of the loop this summer, but now that I've got some time to myself, I recently caught up on the Majestic Theatre renovations post-Phantom.  They were unveiled by McDonald, Wolfe and the Gypsy orchestra at a ceremony last month:

More photos here and here and here.  The contrast with PotO's enveloping Gothic atmosphere is striking, to put it mildly — newly-repainted exterior (and sign) very much included.  Covering all that black, inside and out, must have taken a buncha coats.

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I have other reasons (if, at this point, academic ones) for scouring the web for pictures of the Majestic's sign, but this would be a fun find even if I didn't:

https://www.instagram.com/broadwayupclose/reel/C6WRgBtKvMC/

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To be less cryptic: the real reason I've been researching the Majestic lately — as part of a deep dive into the architectural history of the Broadway theatre district more generally — is because it would have been visible directly across the street from David Merrick's eighth-floor office window above the St. James Theatre when he was producing the original Gypsy.

The play I've been working on for the past few months (somewhat "on spec" for the time being), Ray Rackham's Raising Havoc, is set in Merrick's office, and from my very first reading of the script, I knew I wanted that window to offer the audience an expansive view of the neighborhood as it would have looked in 1959.  (The office itself later passed to Jujamcyn, and more recently to ATG, who have just finished converting it into a lounge for patrons of the St. James).

The play is structured around a series of imagined arguments between "the abominable showman" and June Havoc over her portrayal in Gypsy — which she hated, and which may be why that show ended up with the subtitle "a musical fable," preemptively acknowledging its decidedly casual relationship to the facts of the real Hovick family's lives; Ray, in turn, has tagged Raising Havoc "a comic fantasia".  While my intent for the design has never been documentary recreation of the office or its view, for me this project has become an object lesson in the much-touted design ideal of immersing oneself in the granular reality of a given time and place (read: f**k-tons of research) in order to make the best possible decisions as to how, and how much, to depart from that reality.  I've based many of the set's details on the few photos I've been able to find of the real Merrick's famously all-red office — his taste in décor seems to me to resonate usefully with the version of him Ray has fashioned — but its overall layout remains a mystery to me, and would likely be useless for stage purposes anyway.  Instead, in much the same way that the script adopts the keen wit and snappy repartee of showbiz comedies of the period, I've tried to create a sort of valentine to 1950s Broadway box-set design, with its splayed walls, forced perspectives, and fanciful show portals.

One of the few very basic things I've been able to ascertain about the groundplan of Merrick's real office is that there are seven north-facing windows on that floor, including a pair of circular ones at each end, which I love.  But all seven are very widely-spaced along the building's façade, and they seem too small to offer an audience, sitting 20-50 feet away, much of a view if I were to depict one or more of them in even vaguely-accurate scale and proportion.  Nevertheless, my research on the neighborhood so far has me increasingly convinced that, size notwithstanding, a north-facing window from Merrick's office probably really would have afforded someone in the room, standing at the window, just about the best — and most dramatically-useful — view out onto the heart of the theatre district that one could hope for: Merrick's "factory floor," as I like to think of it.  I'll probably still have to "edit" that view in order to perfect its overall composition, to achieve the right blend of realism and stylization, and, most likely, to find a workable and effective blend of 3D sculpture and projection.  But for now, with the help of half a dozen historical city maps and hundreds of photos covering the past 120 years or so — not to mention blogs and Wikipedia entries and landmark-status designations and the rest of the internet — I've begun CAD-modelling the 1959 midtown-west skyline to scale, and researching all the nearby building cornices, rooftop signage, water towers etc., so as to begin from as accurate a reconstruction as I can muster of that specific view, from that specific building, in that specific year.  Then the editing can begin.

Our wonderful director, Kris Cusick, has helped me see the need not to get so buried in Broadway-history geekery that the play's world becomes inaccessible to 21st-century viewers.  His experience with David Zinn's all-red set for the 2018 B'way Boys in the Band revival — and my own memories of Tony Walton's red set for the original Six Degrees of Separation — led me to a somewhat sparer, more modern aesthetic which hopefully balances out my instinct for finicky historicism (and nostalgia for old-fashioned scenographic styles).  But the play and its milieu tap such a rich vein of Broadway lore that the question for me becomes not whether to include visual Easter eggs, but how many, how subtly, and which ones among hundreds of possibilities.  (If a hypothetical audience member who'd actually seen David Merrick's office in the 1960s were to look at my design and disagree with how I've used my research, so be it, but I wouldn't want them to assume that I simply hadn't done it.  And the neighborhood outside is so intimately familiar to so many regular Broadway theatergoers — including more than a few who've witnessed its evolution over decades — that I feel it's important to spend some time getting the view just right, even granting that "just right" won't, in the end, mean "perfectly accurate".  The point isn't to smother the stage in fussy, proudly-obscure look-I-did-my-research detail, but to make sure that every choice illuminates the play's world, and invites the audience into it — even in the not-unlikely event that there end up being far fewer such choices available to me in a much smaller, sparer production than the one I'm dreaming of).  Fortunately, Ray's script is so beautifully-constructed that it always pulls me back from getting completely lost in internet wormholes: I'm never uncertain about what story we're telling, and that guides all the myriad design decisions.

Currently this is all still "academic," as mentioned above, because I haven't yet heard of any producers ponying up to mount a full production of Raising Havoc.  Then again, the invited reading/backers' audition — with Charles Busch as June, Burke Moses as Merrick, and David Burtka and Maggie Wirth as their respective long-suffering assistants — was only a few weeks ago; so, while it would be nice to move fast and piggyback on some of AudraGypsy's buzz, it's still pretty early days.  In the meantime, my TV job wrapped the same day as our final reading, and after months of juggling, I finally have plenty of time on my hands — so I'm continuing to work on this design, even if only for my own amusement.

One of these days I do want to see if I can wangle a field trip to the new Ambassador Lounge — although, between renovations to the space itself and the incursion of skyscrapers into the view over the past 65 years, I don't expect to see much that Merrick would have recognized.  The top of the Majestic, and its sign (newly restored to its original firetruck-red), may be among the few visible remaining landmarks.

[scenicdesign71]

Returning to our regularly scheduled thread topic, linked below is a fancy ~2000-word bit of fluff that I happened upon just now.  Published last month from interviews conducted over the summer, it includes glamour shots of Ms. McDonald (in couture, not as Rose) giving full diva:

Vogue:   In a New Production of Gypsy, Audra McDonald Takes On a Towering Role

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Last month when I saw Sunset Boulevard, I arrived at the St. James an hour early to check out their new Ambassador Lounge in the former office space of Jordan Roth, Rocco Landesman and David Merrick.  Only it turns out that the lounge occupies only a part of that space, at the back of the building — so Merrick's view onto 44th Street was inaccessible; one of these days I'll have to call ATG and see if they'll let me take a peek during the day or something.  After a quick drink, I went back down to the street to at least check out the early-evening skyline from below, in light of all the research I'd been doing (and bearing in mind how much has changed since Merrick's day).

At that point, Gypsy was in the middle of loading-in to the Majestic across the street, with stacks of scenery and roadboxes lining the sidewalk, and the wide-open loading door offering an expansive view of the stage-left wing.  (All I could really glean about Santo's set was that it involves acres of black faux-brick masking flats, which I'm guessing will form a "bare stage" surround of some sort — although their arrangement suggested, from my limited vantage point, a series of portals rather than an architectural shell).

I was mildly disappointed, though not surprised, by the show's marquee: a video loop of the "Audra/Gypsy" logo, with bulbs flashing and neon flickering.  It's a lovely design — utterly wasted on video in an outdoor context like this, where they could've realized it in three (actual) dimensions on the newly-restored façade, at larger scale and with real bulbs and real neon, to truly spectacular effect.  They could even have programmed it to replicate the original animation's flashes, flickers and subtle twinkles.  Presumably video is much cheaper; among other practical considerations, I'm guessing the screens themselves belong to the Majestic and therefore cost Gypsy's producers nothing.  But it still seems sort of comically disappointing to have designed such dramatic old-school signage to serve as the show's entire visual brand — and then to extinguish its visual impact entirely, as we arrive at the theater, by keeping that design trapped on a screen (like every other sign in the neighborhood).  In the context of the show's website, banner ads, etc., the video looks fabulous: simple, elegant and sharply impactful.  On the marquee, predictably enough, the same video looks dully underwhelming.

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