Inside the new musical’s daring projection design

The Blue Flower is not just a musical—it’s a collage.

“The music and the words and the images and the stage movement are all operating at once,” says Ruth Bauer, who developed the show with her husband Jim Bauer. Now at Second Stage, the formally daring production follows a group of artists and thinkers across both World Wars, tracing the rise and fall of their romantic and intellectual lives. (The story is loosely inspired by the painters Max Beckmann and Franz Marc, the scientist Marie Curie, and the Dada artist Hannah Hoch.)

From the very first moments, it’s clear that projections will be as integral to the storytelling as actors and music. The show begins with Max, a painter, sitting on a park bench in modern day New York. He speaks in a made-up language, and translations are projected behind him. In another scene, Hannah gives a performance dressed in fairy wings and horns, and she uses a flyswatter to squash images of giant bugs. After she whacks them, we see projections of splattered bug parts.

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Designer Jill BC DuBoff creates a sonic world

A sound designer is both an artist and a technician, matching every aesthetic insight with a choice about how sound is produced. After all, a beautiful music cue won’t reach anyone if the speakers are facing the wrong way, and a cleverly hidden microphone doesn’t matter if the sound it’s projecting doesn’t suit the production.

Art and craft shape Jill BC DuBoff’s sound design for Other Desert Cities, a new play from Jon Robin Baitz that’s now playing at Broadway’s Booth Theatre. A close look at her design reveals how much it takes to create a sonic world on stage.

The play, which is presented by Lincoln Center Theater, follows the Wyeths, a staunchly conservative, politically powerful family in Palm Springs. Over Christmas, daughter Brooke (Rachel Griffiths) announces she’s going to publish a memoir about the family’s secrets, which leads to explosive revelations.

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Chunky Move changes the rules of dance

There’s a massive paper net hanging over the floor. It’s suspended in the air by dozens of strings, and when they move, the net springs to life, undulating like a wave or swinging like a pendulum.

And then there are dancers. They move beneath the sculpture and beside it, creating elegant shapes with their paper partner. It’s an eerie, beautiful effect, and it makes Connected, the latest show from the Australian dance company Chunky Move, a striking part of the Joyce Theater’s fall season.

“[The sculpture] is mesmeric and organic,” says Gideon Obarzanek, the company’s founder and artistic director. “When it first moves, the audience gasps, giggling in awe. It’s very gratifying.”

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Designer Anita Yavich gets metaphysical for Broadway’s “Venus in Fur”

Bags of tricks don’t get much deeper or kinkier than the one Vanda carries into her audition/ambush/apotheosis in Venus in Fur.

Though she seems like a desperate actress with a thick outer-borough accent, Vanda (Nina Arianda) quickly commandeers her would-be director, Thomas (Hugh Dancy), with the help of her roomy satchel. She’s carrying thigh-high boots, frock coats, froufrou dresses and everything else a girl would need to enact David Ives’s sprightly riff on the 1870 novella “Venus in Furs.” Clothes make the man and woman here, then remake and re-remake them, upending any number of power dynamics along the way.

That’s where Anita Yavich comes in. An Obie Award-winning costume designer, she earned a Henry Hewes Design Award nomination for her work on Venus in Fur’s Off-Broadway run with Classic Stage Company last year. She’s back on board for the Broadway transfer, which is currently in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

To suit the ambitions of the play, her costumes have to strike a balance between literal and metaphysical worlds. How much is happening in the dingy rehearsal room where Vanda and Thomas initially meet, and how much is happening in a more abstract realm of desire and debasement?

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How projection designers create their increasingly prominent art

Call it the revenge of the A/V club. As theatre becomes more and more expensive, freestanding sets are increasingly giving way to projections, and projection designers are becoming increasingly indispensable artists. From Rock of Ages to Wicked, their work is a constant Broadway presence, and it’s equally prominent in theatres throughout the world.

Theatrical projections—sometimes still photos, sometimes filmed footage—have helped expand the possibility of what can be depicted on stage while reducing the cost. A glimpse at the two Broadway productions of Sunday in the Park With George is instructive: Tony Straiges took components of the Georges Seurat painting at the musical’s center and converted them into an array of painted simulacra for the 1984 premiere, while Timothy Bird and the Knifedge Creative Network used elaborate computer animation to create similar pictures and more in 2008.

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