Category — Design

Designer Natasha Katz explains her work for “Once” and “Follies”

Natasha Katz tells stories with light. When she makes a shadow strike an actor’s face, or when she beams color across a wall, she changes our understanding of what’s happening on stage.

Katz’s colleagues clearly like her storytelling. She’s won two Tony Awards, and this year, she received two additional nominations for Best Lighting Design of a Musical—one for Follies and the other for Once.

Both shows offer meaty challenges for a lighting designer, and they pushed Katz is different ways.

Follies, the Sondheim revival that’s currently at L.A.’s Ahmanson Theatre after a Broadway run last fall, demands an elaborate, haunted world. As retired showgirls gather for a reunion, their younger selves weave around them, stepping from the past to relive old routines, fights, and love affairs.

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Coincidence shapes a Broadway design

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How’s this for a contradiction?

On stage, the musical Once, now in previews at Broadway’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, is remarkably elegant. Based on the 2008 indie movie, it tells the bittersweet tale of two musicians who meet in Dublin, make folk music, and fall in love. Just like their songs, the production ripples with emotion. In one scene, a character sings for a banker to convince him he deserves a loan. The song is so devastating that the other bankers, sitting at their desks, lift their arms in unison. The quiet gesture tells us exactly how art has united them.

Yet for all its careful beauty, Once is also the product of coincidence. Barely a year ago, the creative team had a workshop at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As they developed the show, they were inspired by what happened to be around them.

“We were all like college kids working together for four weeks,” says Bob Crowley, who designed the set and costumes. “We did this thing in a tiny little damp church hall basement, and the aesthetic evolved from the rehearsals.”

Take the set: Though scenes unfold in bedrooms, cafes, and recording studios, Crowley places the entire production in a pub. When they’re not performing, the actors sit on the side of the stage, holding instruments they frequently play. If you squint your eyes, you can almost imagine a rehearsal room.

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Nina Raine’s new play inventively stages the deaf experience

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Even when the words in Tribes are delivered via newly empowered hands or innovatively placed surtitles, they have the power to wound or to heal, to chisel out new alliances while blurring earlier ones.

At the beginning of Nina Raine’s bruising drama, now at the Barrow Street Theatre, an “inventively pessimistic” north London family has reached an indelicate but nonetheless comfortable balance. At the center of the hurricane sits Billy, the coddled deaf son who has been insulated from what his father witheringly calls “the deaf community.” But when Billy begins dating a young woman who is going deaf herself—and when he finds a place among people outside his family—familiar patterns and awkward silences start breaking.

As part of his metamorphosis, Billy learns sign language, or “sign,” as it’s referred to throughout the play. This creates dramatic tension, since none of his relatives can sign, and it also leads to the extensive and at times devastating use of surtitles. Sometimes the titles simply translate what’s being said in sign language, but sometimes they reveal what people say to each other with nothing but heartbroken silence.

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How sets and costumes support the musical’s vision

Before it even begins, the musical Carrie emanates dread. The set of MCC’s revival, now at the Lucille Lortel, suggests an empty, decrepit theatre. There are stains on the walls and floor, and climbing rungs on the back wall recall an escape path from a sewer. But there’s obviously life in the darkness: Nooks and crannies are filled with flickering candles, suggesting someone was there to light them and will return to snuff them out.

The eeriness jibes with Stephen King’s novel. Carrie follows the story of a teenage girl who’s been so sheltered by her religious fanatic mother that she doesn’t understand what’s happening when she begins her first menstrual cycle. Her naiveté invites merciless bullying at school, and she might be a classic victim if puberty hadn’t also awakened her telekinetic powers. When her classmates shame her at prom by dousing her with pig’s blood, her rage has supernatural consequences.

Set designer David Zinn wanted to embody those consequences—to evoke the emotional state of furious alienation. “We wanted [the set] to reflect a mood,” he says. “In some stories, the details of the locations are very important, but Carrie is not one of those stories. It puts the focus on the group, on the kids. It’s the kids versus Carrie, and that doesn’t need a diner counter and a ketchup holder and a school desk.”

The entire production follows this line of thought: Carefully avoiding the campiness that made the musical’s 1988 Broadway run such a notorious flop, the revival, which reunites the original writers, focuses on the social and spiritual dynamics that create Carrie’s fate. The story may not be real, but it’s intended to feel authentic.

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A theatre makes an asset of its unusual space

Actors have clambered up it. Paintings have hung on it, as have flags and bunting. It has been a fence post, a ship mast, a tiny house and (on numerous occasions) a tree. No matter what it is, though, the pillar looming in the downstage right corner of the Irish Repertory Theatre’s stage is always the elephant in the room.

“It’s an old friend by this point,” says artistic director Charlotte Moore, who has wrangled with the pillar on dozens of occasions. “When you design for this space, that’s where you have to start.”
Luckily, she and her producing director, Ciarán O’Reilly, use the same designers repeatedly, among them James Morgan, Tony Walton and Klara Zieglerova.

A pillar in the far corner would attract little notice in most theatres, but the odd configuration at Irish Rep’s cozy Chelsea venue draws attention. At stage right, where actors typically can exit into the wings, there’s a small side pocket of additional seating. These 40 seats—”the jury box,” Moore calls them— make the pillar seem to be dead center in the stage.

She and her set designer, Antje Ellermann, have gone the tried-and-true route of turning the pillar into a tree for their acclaimed revival of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, which closes Jan. 29. “We often set up ladders next to it,” Moore says, “and this time we have Gerry Evans, the ne’er-do-well in the play, climb up it at one point.”

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