Contemporary Set Design

[scenicdesign71]

I've nursed a mild obsession with irises ever since grad school when I saw John Arnone's gorgeously simple yet striking set for Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 several times during its too-brief Broadway run.  As recently as this spring, I tried to get an irising portal of sorts into my Top Hat design; but between the summer-stock schedule and the harrowing logistics of that particular space, the only surviving remnants of that idea are a grey traveller curtain and matching header used in tandem just once, to frame a brief two-character book scene set aboard a small private airplane.  The traveller on its own — manually dragged open and closed by two assistant stage managers without the rigidly-framed edge I had designed — otherwise plays in only two or three of my originally planned nine or ten configurations, without the header; mostly, it just gets opened and closed throughout the evening for downstage "crossover" scenes covering the show's seventeen scene changes, in what has become the summer-stockiest element (against stiff and crowded competition) in a regrettably summer-stock-y-looking set.

So this New Yorker video showcasing Dane Laffrey's spectacular use of irising portals in Maybe Happy Ending, in addition to goosing my interest in seeing the show, also makes me more than a little wistful.  Even without the added cool-factor of his niftily responsive LED-lined edges, irising portals are harder to make truly clean and elegant than their seductive simplicity-in-principle might suggest; I've attempted them in several other shows, some more successfully than others, but never as effectively as Laffrey or Arnone (or countless other designers — most of them working, it should be said, with budgets and spaces I've only ever been able to dream of).

[DiveMilw]

Oh my!  The was a brief, concise article!  

[scenicdesign71]

Oh my!  The was a brief, concise article! 

Not informationally packed, let's say.  (Granted, that makes "concise" a debatable word choice on my part.  And granted, as I said, articles like these aren't aimed at people like me.  Collins-Hughes is more than a capable wordsmith, and her writing here is concise as far as it goes — I just wish it went a bit further, and I'm not altogether sure it couldn't have done so within the allotted word count, though the article does seem to end rather abruptly).

I feel sorta the same way about this one (free link below) — the illustrations are yummy, and the text provides a decent general overview of the conventional wisdoms around the use of video in theatre.  But to anyone who's thought much about the subject before now, Paulson's potted summary only scratches the surface:

NYT:  Broadway's Season of Screens
              Videos and projections depicting an A.I.-generated actor, the digital memories
              of robots, a redwood forest and more: High-tech storytelling is having a moment.

[scenicdesign71]

NYT:  The West End's Hottest Seats: The Piles of Trash Outside Evita
              Crowds are converging outside the London Palladium to watch Rachel Zegler sing "Don't Cry for
              Me, Argentina" from a balcony — while paying theatergoers inside see it on a screen.

(Free link).

Also worth noting: the song appears to be the only time we see Zegler's Eva in period costume and wig/makeup (the iconic white Dior gown and blonde chignon, etc.); for the bulk of the show, she (and everyone else) is costumed in director Jamie Lloyd's monochrome, pointedly ahistorical house style.

[Ed.:  Zegler gives the Casa Rosada outfit another spin at the curtain call, possibly having been re-dressed in it, as a corpse, during the final sequence].

I'm reminded of John Doyle's 2007 Company, where his own signature "gimmick" (shoestring stagings driven by relatively small companies of actor-musicians) made up in thematic aptness whatever it lost in novelty after his 2005 Sweeney Todd — but nevertheless suffered by comparison, in the eyes of some theatergoers and critics.  I eventually wearied of Doyle's work a bit myself, but for the time being I'm inclined to grant Lloyd his fascination with live video; his conceptually brilliant use of it for Evita's dramatic, musical (and, not incidentally, commercial) centerpiece; and his willingness to mess intelligently with material that badly needs such messing-with (along with Sunset Blvd., he's now remixed Lloyd Webber twice ...and counting).