Photo FeaturesAnna Louizos Shares the Concepts Behind Her Designs of Broadway’s Avenue Q, In The Heights, and MoreThe Tony– and Emmy-nominated scenic designer takes us behind the (usually) closed doors of her private studio space.
By
Ruthie Fierberg
December 22, 2018
Anna Louizos
Marc J. Franklin
Anna Louizos was always interested in how things got made. “My dad was a teacher, but he was very handy, he was very creative, so I helped him build things, build cabinets, fix cars,” she says. “We used to overhaul Volkswagen engines.”
But for all her childhood handiwork, it still took years for Louizos to find her path to her career in scenic design. “I didn’t know it was a profession growing up,” she says. “I just wanted to be in theatre.” So Louizos sought out the path in theatre she did know about: acting.
At Mills College in California, she pursued a degree in acting—but that also required her to work on the sets for the productions in which she appeared. “We always built the sets, I always worked in the shop and I loved to build scenery,” she says. After two years, she transferred to New York University—still on the acting track. But with exposure to the New York City theatre scene, she changed course. She assisted designers like Heidi Landesman, Andrew Jackness, and the famous Tony Walton before heading back to graduate school for scenic design. Louizos landed her first job as the assistant art director on The Cosby Show (“It was TV instead of theatre, but it was a great job” she recalls). And then in the early 2000s, she was asked to lead her first Broadway project: Avenue Q.
“I was an art director on Sex and the City, but I couldn’t pass this up,” she says. Since then, she has gone on to design sets for Golda’s Balcony, Steel Magnolias, High Fidelity, Curtains, In The Heights, To Be Or Not To Be, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, All About Me, Baby It’s You!, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, The Performers, Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella, Honeymoon in Vegas, It Shoulda Been You, Dames at Sea, School of Rock – The Musical, and Holiday Inn—and that’s just on Broadway. Most recently, audiences nationwide have witness her work in the national tour of School of Rock and with the Paper Mill Playhouse production of Holiday Inn.
But scenic design isn’t about building set pieces anymore; it’s about concept. “I’m usually the first person that meets with the director,” Louizos explains. “We’re trying to tell a story, and this [the stage] was an empty box. There was nothing in there. So how do you tell that story when you read what’s on the paper and translate all that information into a world onstage that does not exist now? There’s a lot to tell visually.” With three Tony nominations and an Emmy nomination to her name, we asked Louizos to reveal the concepts behind her creations.
Scroll through the gallery below for secrets to the sets from Avenue Q, In The Heights, Evita, Arsenic and Old Lace, Cinderella, and School of Rock.
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Inside Broadway Scenic Designer Anna Louizos’ Private Studio
Inside Broadway Scenic Designer Anna Louizos’ Private Studio
The Tony-nominated designer of Broadway’s Avenue Q, In The Heights, Cinderella, School of Rock, and more shows the sketches, models, and inspiration behind her designs.
43 PHOTOS
Anna Louizos
Marc J. Franklin
Anna Louizos' studio
Anna Louizos' studio
Tony Award certificates
“When [director] Jason Moore and I first read the script, we thought we’re just going to start off on an abandoned street,” says Louizos, “and then the fence was going to open up and we’re going to see the perspective of the street and revolve the building.”
But Avenue Q was a smaller operation—leading Louizos to re-think her entire design. “We said, ‘I guess we could do it like an advent calendar.’”
“There was an old TV show called Laugh In,” says Louizos. “There was a segment where they would open the window and say something funny and close it.” She took her inspiration from there.
“Then it became a question of: Where do these people live? There were moments in the play where they just functioned as Laugh In doors. Over time we said, ‘Let’s put Kate there and say she lives in this one. Trekkie here. Princeton here.’ This notion of opening up these little dioramas that represent the interiors and allow the actors to just stand in front of them with puppets with the actual humans at the same level established where they live and the entire stage becomes part of their apartment. That’s a convention that’s very accepted.” (Seth Rettberg as Princeton and Anika Larsen as Kate Monster, Off-Broadway, 2009)
“This is 16-year-old stuff, but I save it because I think it just reminds me of where I started,” says Louizos of the Avenue Q minis and models. “This was just playing around with pop-ups and what they do.”
“You know those free magazines they have in those plastic bins? At one point I was thinking they would talk,” Louizos shares. There were no bins in the final product, but Avenue Q did end up with singing boxes in “Purpose.”
“When I first read [In The Heights] and I heard that music, I thought, ‘Oh we need to move from the bodega to Abuela’s house and then we need to go into the nightclub,’” says Louizos. "I could see the building rotating and moving out of the way. But [the producers] said to me, ‘No automation.’” So Louizos set out to problem-solve.
She asked herself: “How do you create the sense that it’s not just three buildings—like with Avenue Q. It’s a lively neighborhood filled with people and places. That’s when I decided that you would see through the buildings and see more buildings through the buildings.”
“I made the second level practical, so you could populate the upper levels. A literal floor is ten feet tall. If you just did a literal two stories, it would pretty much fill the entire space, so I squeezed down the perspective so you could see more than two floors.”
“The only distinguishing architecture that Washington Heights has is there were all these pre-war buildings, and what makes them interesting is all of the detail that’s around the walls. It’s the window frames and the cornerstones and the capitals at the top and the cornices and the fire escapes. That’s what makes this.”
Andréa Burns, Robin de Jesús, Christopher Jackson, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Karen Olivo, and cast
Joan Marcus
“I didn’t want to make [the set] totally flat because it’s boring, so I angled it slightly, but then with the choreography we kept pushing it back [upstage].”
Framed New York Times review
“Deciding how extensively the house needed to be fleshed out was a big thing, and how we brought it onstage and had it leave the stage,” says Louizos. “We ultimately decided to break it into sections, so we had a middle section, stage right, and stage left so we could break it into the pieces and each section could go off on its own.”
Cinderella door paint elevation
An elevation of a palace tree. “We loved the idea of having nature creep into every aspect of this world. The way nature was depicted with the palace was—in a way—more refined. These were the arcs of the palace. They were grounded by a tree, but everything was silvery and opalescent and vine-y.”
“I probably [conceived] 20 versions of trees,” says Louizos, who sent her assistant out into the park to collect twigs to animate the trees. “We sprayed them white, and then we painted lavender and silver on them.”
Cinderella forest set model
Cinderella forest wild border paint elevation. “This is where you have to think like a designer,” says Louizos. “This flies out. This is a border which hangs up high, [but] when we want to be in the forest, we fly the whole thing in and this [bottom] would hit the floor, so it’s a forest floor. Those are the kinds of things you have to think about when you’re designing: ‘I only have so much space and money.’”
That theme of nature even carried over to Cinderella’s horse-drawn carriage. “The horses were made from vines and branches,” says Louizos.
“Originally, I wanted a canopy to come up like a big pumpkin and then the canopy would open like a cabbage leaf, but we had many many versions.”
Cinderella chariot sketch
A production of Arsenic and Old Lace. “It was at the Dallas Theater Center, and the theatre itself is a large turntable. I just thought the turntable would be very useful. You always have to accommodate your space. Scott Schwartz, the director, and I talked about starting on the exterior of the house. It’s a Victorian house in Brooklyn, adjacent to a graveyard.”
“We created this whole scenario where there’s a miniature model of the house that’s out in front of the house and the crazy nephew is doing things with and it and, all of a sudden, he walks away and it blows up. Then the turntable would revolve.”
Arsenic and Old Lace set model
A Dames at Sea paint elevation
Evita at Bay Street Theater 2018. “We set it in a basement tango club,” Louizos explains. The idea was “that it was a group of people who, once a year, it’s their ritual to replay the story of Evita. They’re fans of her life and her story.”
“He’s got this pre-show going where these people are hanging out at the bar and there are two people who don’t belong there,” Louizos explains. “The minute they leave, they close and lock the door and start their ritual where they have a little home movie with video footage of her that bleeds onto the walls and then they all start assuming their roles.”
“The whole band is in here, like an old kitchen that all the equipment was ripped out.”
“The bar is really solid. It’s covered with scratches and graffiti,” says the designer. “I told the actors, ‘Just scratch your names on there—as long as there’s no hearts and kittens.’”
“There’s a bathroom stall, so we put in a box toilet and there’s a false wall back there for a quick change space,” says Louizos of the functionality of her design.
“Complete with mismatched tiles,” Louizos says of her design. “Because that’s what happens, when the tile falls out you replace it with something else. The point was to create a sense this store had been occupied by many occupants, many businesses. I wanted to create a lot of history in the space.”
School of Rock show bible. “When Andrew first talked about the show and the writing of it, he said he wanted there to be a noticeable difference between Dewey’s world and the school,” says Louizos.
“[He said], ‘Oh, it has to have lots of awards and certificates. We have to really establish that it’s a high-pressure school where the children are expected to perform.’”
One of Louizos’ School of Rock design renderings
“Dewey’s bedroom in School of Rock is just filled with his detritus. It’s all of his heroes, the folks that he admires, the bands that he admires, but also his junk, and his dirty socks, and his underwear,” says Louizos. “Even his comforter is Star Wars.” (Craig Gallivan and Alan Pearson in School of Rock on Broadway)
Cast
Evan Zimmerman/MurphyMade
An autographed School of Rock sign, featuring the custom logo.
Louizos says: “All of those ideas you kick around when you’re creating something new, some of them end up in the show, and some just get thrown away, but it helps to just let them all flow.”
Next year, Carnegie Hall's house band will perform Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony, unfinished works by Schubert, and the final concert of Conductor Bernard Labadie.
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