Scenic design is more than just creating a room onstage; it’s crafting a mood, building a world for both the characters as well as the audience, storytelling through space, and much more. This season, the 2018–2019 nominees for Best Scenic Design of a Play and Musical crafted atmospheres ranging from newsrooms to the underworld.
Ahead of the 73rd annual Tony Awards, the 2018–2019 nominees for scenic design gave Playbill an inside look at their designs from sketch to stage.
Flip through photos of the nominated scenic designs below:
Ain't Too Proud—The Life of the Temptations set rendering by scenic designers Robert Brill and Peter Nigrini
Ain't Too Proud
Matthew Murphy
Beetlejuice scenic designer David Korins: "The story demands that we change the entirety of the house 4 different times--all the walls, furniture, dressing, lighting fixtures, frames, doors, fireplace. We see it at first as owned by the Maitland’s as a kind of country-chic, Victorian home. We then get to see it bought by the Deetz’s and it’s stripped of all its antiquery. Then it goes through a 3rd transformation when Beetlejuice and Lydia haunt the house. Then finally a fourth transformation occurs once Beetlejuice decides to turn the whole place into a game show. This kind of total transformation of the set opened up so many possibilities and opportunities to use the set to help tell the story effectively, by meeting the physical demands of the narrative, dramaturgically serving the journey of each character, and creating a complete world and environment. We wanted each character to have an impact on the space, as well has have the space have an impact on each of the characters. The Maitlands, for example, are trapped inside their own home from the beginning, so we were able to help them feel trapped or jailed by the house via the design."
"The film obviously served as a leaping off place for the design, which allowed us to fill the stage references to Tim Burton’s entire filmography. We have many many easter eggs of Tim Burton’s various creations stashed in and around the set to both directly and indirectly reference the worlds of Coraline, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas and more."
"More specifically, we riffed off the corridor between the two worlds of Coraline to create the look of the Netherworld. The opening scene of the show in the graveyard was pulled from the Nightmare Before Christmas graveyard scenes and the Jack Skellington bow tie can be seen in the chandelier when Beetlejuice takes over the main house. For the Maitlands, we had a lot of fun peppering their attic with the lives they lived before the show begins -- all of their abandoned hobbies and old stuff served as a really excellent dramaturgical add for us."
"One of my favorite easter eggs however is in the painting above the Maitland’s fireplace and mantel. It’s not just any regular countryside landscape, but instead a still image of a picturesque New England town from the opening establishing montage of the film that we hand painted over in the corresponding color scheme of the Maitland’s house."
"We wanted to honor the entire oeuvre of the Burtonian landscape, especially because when people think about Tim Burton’s visual vocabulary it sort of blends together all of his different worlds and iconic uses of imagery. Lucky for us, Tim Burton is an incredibly talented illustrator so we tried to honor Tim Burton’s drawing aesthetic and his idea of a homemade, do-it-yourself energy in every single piece of scenery. All hash marks, shading, and wallpapers were hand drawn to bring that homemade sensibility to life."
Matthew Murphy
The Ferryman scenic designer Rob Howell: "I hope that the design doesn’t declare itself too loudly and that it has a plausible naturalism to it. That said, when the hidden depths of the story start to reveal themselves, there needs to be a constant and unsettling framing in the architecture that hints at an uncomfortable version of reality and memory."
"There’s so much dressing on our set! All of it is very familiar to anyone of my age who was growing up during the time of the troubles in Northern Ireland. None of it is hidden. It’s all there for everyone to see. The children in our show do provide the kids drawings that are stuck on the kitchen walls though."
The Ferryman set rendering
"The colours chose themselves. I needed a pale background tone for the colours of the dressing to pop against and the mass of dressing that we have are all real objects so they are what they are. I have exaggerated the textures in the walls and floor a little to help the lighting enhance the atmosphere."
Marc J. Franklin
The Ferryman
Joan Marcus
Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus set sketch by scenic designer Santo Loquasto
Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus
Hadestown scenic designer Rachel Hauck: "Getting Hadestown to Broadway has been a pretty remarkable journey. We had the luxury of designing three full productions before designing the show at the Walter Kerr. The set design was radically re-conceived and re-imagined between productions as we explored very different ideas, looking for the best way to tell this story. Design elements we thought were essential early on got tossed, new things became important in their place. Each of those earlier productions majorly informed the productions that followed, and there are elements of all three of the earlier designs in the final design currently on Broadway."
"It turns out that how this set feels is as important as how it looks. This set has to embrace the audience and welcome folks into our world as soon as they walk into the theater. The Kerr is kind of a magic space; it is beautiful and warm, a wonderful place to be. You can feel the years of music and storytelling that’s been there before us, we were very lucky to be starting with that. I did a couple things to break the formal barrier between the audience and the stage. Most notably, we removed a couple rows of seats so that the turntables could come right out into the house. You’d never notice it if you weren’t looking for it, but breaking that barrier creates a real intimacy between the actors and the audience in an already intimate theater."
"One of the trickiest things about finding an actual location to set this beautiful, mythic musical is that the lyrics are pure poetry. There are no real stage directions. Anaïs specifies that the story starts Above Ground and moves Below Ground (sometimes we are in both places at once), and she notes in the score when the seasons change. What that means and how that looks is completely up for interpretation. The influence of New Orleans jazz runs through a lot of the tunes in the show; we ultimately decided to embrace that great messy city and lean into its joy and darkness. We decided to set this story in a bar in NOLA, or at least let it start there, in one of those amazing old bars full of music and stories, grit and joy, beauty and darkness. And. It let us put the band front and center."
"No location in the musical is represented literally by the set. Hermes starts to tell the story to a room full of people and the story just kind of takes over. Everything you need to know is in the lyrics. Preservation Hall and The Napoleon House (two terrific NOLA establishments) were especially influential on the look and feel of the bar. Below Ground, the mines and the mills and the factories are rooted in images of decaying American Industry with its monolithic, rusting silos, labyrinthian factories and deep, dark mines. And of course, the design has always been firmly rooted in the architecture of a Greek amphitheater."
"There are a couple details on the set that I especially enjoy. I find the treads of the spiral staircase spectacularly beautiful. They were custom made for the show. They are a little hidden, only the cast really gets to enjoy those, though the audience can see the beautiful and haunting shadows they make on the walls. There are also some extraordinarily beautiful copper lights that were made for the show. They were constructed for the London production and were particularly complicated to make. I find the beauty of the final result captivating."
"All the finishes and colors on the set had to do double duty. There is no replacing the great warmth of wood, it’s one of the things that makes the bar so welcoming. There’s a lot of it on stage, all made feel like a bar room floor that’s seen the spilled beer of million of souls. The deteriorating plaster walls are beautiful in the way that decaying things can be. With Bradley King’s remarkable lighting, the walls can conjure the skies and beauty of the Above Ground. But when the story goes Under Ground, the walls are lit from below, and the rotting plaster texture becomes dominant, and suddenly they become the deteriorating walls of the underworld. The color is from one world, the texture from the other. There are a few more surfaces to talk about but no spoilers! Come find me after you see the show and we’ll talk about the rest!"
Ink set model by scenic designer Bunny Christie
Ink scenic designer Bunny Christie: "I wanted the set to convey the feeling of working in Fleet Street at that time. It’s a high pressure, competitive, dirty, smoky, late night world. The set feels like a piece of machinery that the characters are caught in. But, like the writing, it’s also playful and witty and looks like the characters are having fun in and on it. The set is a warren, the characters are like rats in a sewer. In Ink all the journalists are addicted to the game - getting the story out there first and beating the opposition."
Rana Roy and Jonny Lee Miller
Joan Marcus
King Kong scenic designer Peter England: The story of King Kong takes place in an epic range of locations with the central titular character being played by a 20’ tall one ton puppet. The set and projection designs for the production seek to augment and propel the story forward by moving clearly and seamlessly through multiple locations – at times with the velocity of a rollercoaster, at others with the poignancy of a tear drop. In addition, they are also designed to give Kong, the puppet, the illusion of a dynamic capacity for exceptional physical movement; running through city streets, leaping through tangled jungles or climbing up the Empire State Building.
King Kong and the Empire State Building both came to into existence in the early 1930’s and have been bonded together in popular culture ever since. Amazingly, the Empire State Building was built in a mere 13 months. This astonishing feat inspired us to set our version of the story over the same period of time, culminating in Kong famously climbing the finished building. And so to start the show we have scenic scaffolding and steel workers descending from the sky, downwards through a construction site of cranes and steel girders to the street below. I don’t think people realize it, but this is the beginnings of the Empire State being built.
The generally monochromatic colour palette and materials selection are partly an homage to the original 1932 King Kong movie but primarily they are referencing the photographic record of New York City itself during those extraordinary years of the Great Depression – a period that incredibly, almost defiantly, also saw the most phenomenal amount of construction activity in the city. Iconic images of men on steel I-Beams, hovering one thousand feet up in the air, building architectural wonders like the Empire State and the Rockefeller Centre. To me, the boldness and fearlessness of these images is totally inspiring and distinctively New York….and utterly King Kong.
King Kong
Joan Marcus
Network set model by scenic designer Jan Versweyveld
Network
Jan Versweyveld
Oklahoma! set model by scenic designer Laura Jellinek
Oklahoma!
Little Fang Photo
To Kill a Mockingbird set model by scenic designer Miriam Buether
To Kill A Mockingbird
Julieta Cervantes
To Kill A Mockingbird
Julieta Cervantes
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