The Art of Set Design

If you love theater, you've likely seen a set designed by Tony Award-winner Beowulf Boritt, from "Come From Away" to "Flying Over Sunset" to "Merry Wives" to "POTUS." Now he's drawn back the curtain on his process, and the importance of set design, in his new book, Transforming Space Over Time: Set Design and Visual Storytelling with Broadway's Legendary Directors. Boritt joins to reflect on his career, and his collaboration with directors like James Lapine, Kenny Leon, Hal Prince, Susan Stroman, Jerry Zaks, and Stephen Sondheim. Mecca: A Conversation with Stephen Sondheim Setting: Stephen Sondheim’s Turtle Bay town house: the holiest of holies for several generations of theater artists. We’re in a ground-floor living room, sprawling and cluttered, spreading from a small front entrance foyer through the main chamber to a back conservatory that opens into a community garden. The room’s salient visual feature is Steve’s collection of antique puzzles, displayed in frames and vitrines and arrayed on tables. Beowulf Boritt: I’m sure you hear this from a lot of people, but your shows, more than any others, are what convinced me to pursue theater. I grew up thinking musicals were frilly and silly, but when I started being exposed to your shows—first Sunday, then Into the Woods and Sweeney Todd—I thought, This is what I want to do. Stephen Sondheim: So you’re blaming me? BB: Just placing blame where it’s due, Steve! I asked various directors, “What productions made a strong impression on you when you were young?” Both James [Lapine] and Susan Stroman credited Sweeney Todd and its design as the show that made them think, This is what theater can be. Of course, Hal directed it, and the set was famously a real, and enormous, Victorian factory reassembled onstage by Eugene Lee. But that set isn’t inherent in the writing; in fact, the action is never literally in a factory. When you were developing the show with Hugh Wheeler, it wasn’t with a factory setting in mind, was it? SS: No, no. That came afterward. That was Hal’s idea. I don’t know how he came to it. For me, Sweeney Todd is not really a story of how the Industrial Revolution manufactured vengeful Sweeney Todds. That had nothing to do with what I wrote at all—though I did ultimately put one line in the lyrics about machines, to make Hal happy. I wanted to do it as a small, scary show. I told Hal that if we were going to do it at a big theater, I’d like to drape the entire place in black, have gaslit lampposts all around, and have the cast all around,too: on top of you, beside you, in the aisles, and so on. I wanted the whole theater to look like the inside of a coffin. I wanted an organ and an organist onstage for that opening prelude—a loud organsound to start the show. BB: You said you have no part in designing the show, but that’s a very clear visual image you just described—your initial thoughts about it. SS: I have no visual imagination to say, “The costumes should be red.” But of course I have some ideas about staging the numbers. The director can throw them out, but I do go on record with what I am thinking. BB: I’m going to rewind to early in your career, to one of my favorite musicals and one I have not yet hada chance to design. Did you have any visuals in mind as you wrote West Side Story with Arthur Laurents and Leonard Bernstein? SS: Where is Puerto Rico? No, I don’t think I had anything in mind, but I’ll tell you an anecdote, one of those things that one never forgets. Oliver Smith, who designed it, wanted to show us the model of the setso we went out to his house in Brooklyn. He showed it to us and there was concern over the scene with the highway bridge, for the rumble at the end of the first act. Jerry Robbins—or maybe it was Lenny or Arthur—turned to me and said, “What do you think?” I was twenty-five years old! “I agree,” I said. “It just doesn’t seem quite right.” Oliver turned on me and said, “Who cares what you think? You don’t know anything about the theater!” He was really ugly. He was upset that they didn’t like it, but he couldn’t lash out at Jerry, Lenny, or Arthur, so— BB: And you were the new guy. SS: Yes. You know , I understand why he did it. BB: Did you ever work with him again? SS: No. BB: When you’re the new kid, and an old hand lashes out at you, it’s amazing how much it stings. You remember it forever. On my first Broadway show, Spelling Bee, that happened to me. Someone involved in the show, not James, really went after me because I was the new kid. To be honest, I had probably donesomething stupid—but it was unpleasant, and I will never forget it. BB: Last question, and it isn’t really a question. I’m going to shorten the quote, but you’ve said, “Lyric writing has to exist in time. You have to lay the sentences out so there’s enough air for the ear to take them in. There’s music, there’s costumes, there’s lighting. There’s a lot of things to listen to and look at. And therefore, the lyric must be in that sense simple.” SS: The experience of a musical is so rich that it’s like you’re getting two kinds of dessert. You’re getting the pecan cake and the caramel ice cream, so you don’t want to overdo it with either one. SS: All art is about economy of means. It’s about finding the part that is necessary and getting rid of the unnecessary. That’s the hard part, but once you know it, if you’re ruthless, you’ll get rid of the extra and keep the great. In general, in art, less is more. Although you must remember, there is also Tolstoy!