is another photo of west side story from the bregenz festiva, i think this one is a cooler full-picture, you can see how the dress-shop set rolls in on the track from (stage) left.
I have been doing extensive Internet searches for some of my favorite older sets to post here. I am surprised to find that as amazing as the Internet is as a resource, most of Broadway's stage designs are not included. In addition, I was surprised to find many of Broadway's most successful designers do not have web sites!
this is not a great picture, but it gives you some idea of the 1973 environmental staging of Candide. I found the photo in an eBay listing of the program. Somewhere in my Dad's basement I probably have the original cast album from that production. I think there were a number of photos from the show within the fold.
I was barely of theater-going age in 1973, but I do recall my grandparents attending and leaving once they saw that the traditional seats were replaced by backless benches.
meanwhile, I was shocked how difficult it was to find any pictures from this production on the web.
No. The mezzanine and balcony were mostly covered over. Basically, as I remembered it, the "environment" was built from where the mezzanine overhangs the orchestra, all the way back to the back wall of the stage area. The best seats were stools in the center with no backs and you had to swivel around to see the action as it traveled around you. the sides were like bleachers and did have backs, but the seating wasn't traditional. It was benches covered in canvas with the numbers pained on the canvas to distinguish the different seating locations. There were many stages (the number 10 comes to mind) that were scattered around the room with ramps connecting these playing areas. It was very clever and a lot of fun.
in the heights on AND off broadway, which is similar but both amazing. I may be alone on this but i thought that the set for Young Frankenstein was great. And rent because it was innovative at the time, it serves its purpose of creating feeling and emotion and giving off the edgy/grungy feeling that the show is going for but mostly for sentimental reasons.
<-- Gwen Stewart, SOLoist at the last show of RENT Cages or wings?
Which do you prefer?
Ask the birds.
Fear or love, baby?
Don't say the answer
Actions speak louder than words.
(Tick, Tick... BOOM!)
The Young Frankenstein set was the best part of the whole production, and was the one thing that really seemed authentic and faithful to the style of the movie.
I don't have any pictures, but the set for the upcoming 9 to 5 is simply the most stunning set I've ever seen on Broadway, especially how quickly they can change it.
i love hairsprays set. I love the lights in the back
I'm a professional. Whenever something goes wrong on stage, I know how to handle it so no one ever remembers. I flash my %#$&.
"Jayne just sat there while Gina flailed around the stage like an idiot."
Many great designs have been mentioned but two that haven't been are Adrienne Lobel's designs for the original Broadway production of Passion and Marina Draghici's designs for the NYSF production of The Skriker.
Even though the former was filmed, the film gives you very little sense of how stunning a few of the drops were. And the scene on the mountain was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. It was a mix of the drop, Fosca's costume and the lighting, all these shades of green that produced an extraordinary, hallucinatory quality. Watching the film, you don't get what was so amazing live.
Unfortunately, even though there's a bunch of photos of the scene that was especially extraordinary (again, one that created a kind of hallucinatory effect), what was special about the set doesn't come across (though the wonderful costumes can be seen).
In Foster Hirsch's fascinating book "Harold Prince and the American Musical Theatre", Prince, Eugene Lee, and Franne Lee comment on their 1974 Broadway production of CANDIDE.
"I couldn't envision how the show could work in a conventional proscenium staging," Prince says. "The play was about a journey and I felt we needed a physical metaphor through which to define Candide's adventures. I remembered a production I had seen in 1970 in Bryant Park of ORLANDO FURIOSO in which the audience followed the action as it moved from one place to another, and I realized I wanted our production in some way to involve the audience physically in the staging." Prince instructed his designers, the Lees, to think of the show as a "carnival": "Hal told us he wanted to be able to stages scenes 'here and there,' and taking off from his suggestions we worked out a traveling concept, with the action played out on ramps and booths and a runway - it was a trick presentation, like a big outdoor fair", Franne Lee recalls.
When the show moved to Broadway after its limited run at the 180-seat Chelsea Theatre in the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the design had to be scaled up in such a way that the audience could still feel involved by being in the middle of the action as they had in Brooklyn. The sedate Broadway Theatre was transformed into a stadium with bleacher seating for 800 fans. Planted amid the seats were ten separate stages connected by ramps and one larger playing area patterned after the Elizabethan inner stage. The thirteen-piece orchestra was placed on four separate stages to provide quadraphonic sound. Making their way through the audience from one "station" to another in a modern version of medieval street-theatre, the actors were in continual movement. The kind of fun the show promised was announced when the audience first entered the theatre to find the ornate lobby made over into a circus arena filled with balloons and streamers, with peanuts sold at the refreshment stand.