Creating a 'Beautiful' World

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Creating a 'Beautiful' World

Check out my interview in Lighting Sound America & Projection Lighting and Staging News!

Inside Theatre
Creating a 'Beautiful' world

The lively musical Beautiful captures the musical essence of Carole King while chronicling the life events and artistic evolution that led up to her landmark solo album,Tapestry. “She’s an amazing songwriter,” declares the show’s scenic designer Derek McLane. “Most of us are familiar with Tapestry and with the stuff that she wrote for other people, but we don’t associate [all of] it with her and don’t necessarily know that she wrote it. What surprised me when I first read it was that she wrote ‘The Loco-Motion.’”

Fast Transitions, 50 Scenes

Beautiful is part of the recent wave of biographical modern musicals, including Jersey Boys and Motown, that only feature songs during performances and allow the book scenes to play out without spontaneous singing distracting from the exposition. Jessie Mueller has garnered acclaim for her portrayal of King, not only matching her vocals but convincing people that she is playing any keyboard she touches. (Conductor Jason Howland is actually performing in the pit and synchs up fluidly with her through the use of video monitoring.) McLane’s striking scenic work incorporates smooth, fast-paced transitions to keep the show charging forward through approximately 50 scenes.

The musical has many quick scene changes through numerous locations, from living spaces to musical spaces, dressed with backdrops and a minimal amount of props to give just enough information to show what is there. But an important element that hangs over everything are the two omnipresent, multi-story structures with catwalks stocked with vintage-looking analog recording equipment, framed in front of a wall of the soundproofing material found at music studios everywhere. This upstage area represents the musical world in which King, her husband Gerry Goffin, and their friends and songwriting competitors Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil immersed themselves in.

“They’re staggered, so that first structure that moves and opens and closes and slides back and forth is two stories,” explains McLane, “and then behind it are some other levels that don’t line up with the downstage levels, so it creates an illusion of three or four stories back there. They’re not stacked one on top of the other, they’re stack behind each other. It’s just the downstage one that opens and closes.”

“It’s really meant as a three-dimensional cyc, as a way of creating the world in which this music was created,” continues McLane. “It’s not really meant to be a recording studio, it’s really meant to be the world of the Brill Building at 1650 Broadway, which is a combination of music studios, offices, recording studios, practice rooms and executive’s offices. They were all crammed next to each other, and all that was inspired by a line that Carole King has quite early in the show where she’s with her mom in Brooklyn and says, ‘Ma, it’s just like a factory but they make songs.’ The inspiration for the set was try to imagine and make up a version of that factory where they make songs, because it’s not a real factory, of course. That image really appealed to me.”

Brill Building Backdrop

A big challenge for the show was keeping the pace moving and not getting bogged down in the transitions, as there are many short scenes in the mix. Thus the Brill Building backdrop solved much of that problem by serving as a symbolic structure. Naturally, many set pieces and backdrops fly in and out to keep things moving — including light-up panels for some performance numbers including The Drifters, a swag curtain for the Shirelles number, a light bulb hanger for the song “On Broadway,” a fluorescent light fixture for the scene in Queens College, theater lights for the Carnegie Hall performance, windows for King’s suburban house, and a blackout drop for blocking off the upstage structure a couple of times — but also many things are tracked on and off.

“I tried to make a lot of things go sideways, because I thought it would be more interesting than watching things fly in and out,” says McLane. “I wanted as much lateral movement as possible, because I think it helps keep your eye on the actors as they’re moving from scene to scene. The sliding panels are a tapestry of fabrics that are based on [guitar] speaker grille cloth from the 1960s, so I combined a variety of those to make plaid panels. And then the upstage wall functions as a cyc behind the structure [behind which is] another tapestry or collage of sound proofing material. It’s lit orange but is actually a very light gray. It can be lit all different colors, but it’s different textures. We had all that made because [with] the real textures, the scale was too small and didn’t look like anything. All that stuff was made especially for the show, and all the textures are scaled up so that they have a little more presence.”

A Minimalistic Approach

Given the brief nature of many of the scenes — some are simultaneously occurring, while others are quick moments that melt into others — McLane maintained a sparse feeling to many of the locations. When asked about the most challenging set piece to design, he replies, “It was actually not any one particular piece, it was really how to create those offices and get from one to another very quickly. Another thing about those offices is that if you approach them realistically, they don’t look like anything. The place where Kirshner worked was very, very bland.”

The designer actually stripped things back onstage from the real life offices. “A lot of them did not have windows, and a lot of them just had sheetrock walls. So I got rid of the walls and tried to deliver just the essential things like a door, desk, and piano, whatever was essential for the scene, and just let the environment of the recording studios of the Brill Building surround it because, to me, that has more romance and more interest to it. It has more history and texture. I tried to put as much texture into this as I possibly could.”

A good example of this effective minimalism is the scene where King goes to the apartment of Marilyn Wald, a singer and amorous competitor, and finds her husband there. She simply walks up to a door at stage left that is nestled next to a small wall, which masks the actors so the audience does not know they are there until they open the door. “We never see the inside of the apartment,” notes McLane. “The important thing is that she knocks on the door and discovers Gerry there, then confronts him. That’s really all that is. It doesn’t need any more, and doesn’t want any more, because that scene is maybe 90 seconds long. Then we go right back to her in their house.”

McLane avoided the used of LED lights on Beautiful. During the song, “On Broadway,” a wall of colored light bulbs appears behind the performers. “They are actually colored light bulbs,” he stresses. “I tried to avoid LED. There are some LEDs that light things up in the set. But it doesn’t feel period when you just see an LED lamp, so you never see a raw, unadorned LED lamp in the show.”

Pianos Share the Stage

Naturally, no musical about Carole King could be complete without an ever-present piano. Two of them are used in the show, along with a Korg keyboard for one club scene. The grand piano appears at the beginning of the show as well as at the end, when King plays Carnegie Hall. The smaller spinet piano is used everywhere else, including her apartment in Brooklyn and her house in New Jersey, her office in the Brill building, Barry and Cynthia’s adjacent office, and Donny Kirshner’s office. Early on, McLane realized that if he tried to bring in different pianos for different scenes, the show would have been slowed down and the transitions would not have worked. The simplest solution was to utilize the spinet, which works very well when the scene moves between Carole’s office and Barry and Cynthia’s next door. All the piano has to do is turn 180 degrees and act as the “wall” between the offices. The spinet is set on a track and has a motorized set-up that allows it to turn to various positions throughout the show.

“There’s one track that is dedicated to that turning piano,” says McLane. “There are two tracks just for bringing furniture on upstage from that, for example, Barry and Cynthia’s sofa. We also bring that recording booth in with the glass. Then, downstage of the piano, there is a track that brings things on, like the TV for Carole’s office or her apartment. Then there are a couple of tracks upstage — tracks for those doors and also tracks for the suburban house stuff, like the door and the window. Then the big two-story structure that opens and closes has tracks in it.”

With regards to the wing space at the Sondheim Theatre in New York, McLane says, “It’s tight, but it’s not bad. It’s not as tight as some Broadway theatres, and not as big as some others. There is some wing space, but it gets full quickly. Once they get off stage, a lot of the units have to be flown in the wings to make room for other units. If you go backstage and walk around in the wings, you’ll see a lot of stuff stored hanging in the air. It requires a huge amount of coordination [from the crew].” He estimates the stage depth at between 28 and 30 feet and the wing space on either side of the proscenium at 15 feet.

Beautiful Collaborators

McLane is very happy with how Beautiful turned out, and believes it was a great collaboration with director Marc Bruni, book writer Doug McGrath, and lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski, with whom he combined forces early on to tackle a complicated story. “I really had a great time working with all of them,” he declares. “I learned a lot about the recording business from that era and about Carole King’s life and her songs which I didn’t know before. I think it’s the first time where I’ve done a show with so many complex scene changes and figured out how to make them feel seamless. I’m really happy with how that turned out because I feel like the transitions are fun to watch and don’t slow the show down.”