# data[].attributes.body
Please research an interesting prop that has been created for a theatrical production or movie (try to find one where the creator is listed and there are extra details on it!).

What interests you about this prop?

How is it used both literally/physically in space as well as through storytelling?

Share a fun fact about how it was created, or something that surprised you while learning about it.

# data[].attributes.body
For our presentations on lighting design, I want you each to choose a lighting designer that is of interest to you. (There are links below if you don't know where to start.)

Things I want to know about the lighting designer you choose -

Are they currently working in the industry, or if not, when did they work?

What is your favorite lighting design they created and why? (Extra points if you can show pictures!)

Use a lighting design vocabulary word to discuss one of the things this lighting designer does well

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Dahlia Al-Habieli (she/her) Scenic Designer Philadelphia, PA Dahlia Al-Habieli is an award-winning scenic designer and educator. Dahlia was born and raised in Abu Dhabi- a diverse, multicultural city...

# data[].attributes.body
For our unit on sound design, your flipped presentation are going to focus on what sound design can do. Two questions I would love answered -
1. Why is sound design beneficial and/or important to a theatrical production, film, or TV show?
2. Share an example of when and how sound design was used in a theatrical production, film, or TV show that was interesting to you. How did sound change the experience for you as a viewer?

As long as these questions are touched on in some way, you are free to discuss whatever is fun for you and whatever topic you choose (school appropriate... don't be ridiculous). Please come to class on Friday with ideas for the topic you are going to use. Presentations will be the following Friday!

Helpful reflection questions and thoughts if you are having trouble answering the questions above...
What does sound tell us when watching something? Does it announce, suggest, prompt, etc.? Does it help you know when and where you are?
Can you find ways that sound is working with the story and/or with the characters?
What can you learn from volume and the types of sounds being used in specific moments?
If you are still stumped, don't hesitate to reach out with questions.

# data[].attributes.body
Please choose a costume piece from a theatrical production that has either a history or journey onstage that is of particular interest to you (i.e. it was created from the costume of another historical character, it’s part of an onstage quick change, it’s covered in 30,000 hand-sewn sequins, etc.). Please share with us:

An image(s) and/or video(s) of the costume piece you chose

A brief story of how/why it was designed and created and who was involved

How did/does this costume piece aid in the storytelling process?

# data[].attributes.body
Please choose a set design (only rule - must be from theatre and not a movie) that jumps out at you - it has something you’ve never seen before, you love the style, they use a forwardthinking technique, etc. If you need some jumping off points for research, I included a few links below. Feel free to discuss more of the set construction or the painting of the set, whichever is more interesting to you.

Why did this set design jump out at you?

How did the designer use color, shape, or a different element of design to connect the set with the play they were designing for?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This year's lineup of theatrical productions includes a host of standout visual stars, including the awe-inspiring King Kong, the reimagined Broadway classic Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, and a stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. And the Tony Award nominations for Best Scenic Design are as varied as ever. The honor, first awarded to The Sound of Music in 1960, acknowledges the work of talented designers who not only create memorable sets but play a vital part in narrative storytelling. Herewith, AD honors the leading talent ahead of Broadway's big night, the 73rd annual Tony Awards, on Sunday, June 9.

Best Scenic Design of a Play

Some 60 years after its publication, Harper Lee's beloved novel To Kill a Mockingbird hit the Great White Way, this time receiving a radical adaptation by Aaron Sorkin. The story about the principled Alabama criminal defense attorney Atticus Finch's fight of good versus evil is still at the core in the timeless tale of racial divide. Scenic designer Miriam Buether's minimalist sets help tell the tale and evoke images from the 1962 Oscar-winning film with Gregory Peck.

While there are no walls, only windows and doors, the Maycomb, Alabama, sets depict the small Southern town through iconic film settings such as the porch where Atticus would have heart-to-heart talks with his daughter Scout (who is now an adult in the theatrical version). The courtroom set is another essential part of the storytelling, depicted as a decrepit industrial space with decaying walls that are wheeled off and on in front of the audience's eyes while the jury box sits empty.

Take 1969 London; add a struggling tabloid paper known as The Sun, its new owner Rupert Murdoch, a rogue editor, and a gallery of underdog reporters and you have the makings of the hit play Ink. Inspired by real events, the play features period sets-heavy metal desks and filing cabinets stacked in a pyramid along with swivel chairs and typewriters-that are the creation of scenic designer Bunny Christie.

The Scottish Olivier and Tony Award winner, who designed Ink entirely on one set with changes in furniture, lighting, and projection, notes, "The set is a mountain of desks which feels a bit like a machine. It's a world of sweat and ink, a dark, gritty, late-night, smoky world. The journalists are a bit like rats in a sewer, running over and through the set, chasing the story," he says. "The set oozes ink and is threaded through with newsprint." Fleet Street in London, where Ink is set, is where all the newspapers were made-a male-dominated world of late-night drinking and storytelling, and a hub of news and gossip.

Nominated for seven Tony Awards, including Best Play, Gary is a satirical farce set during the fall of the Roman Empire, with Nathan Lane and Kristine Nielsen as street cleaners whose job it is to cart away the dead after the civil wars.

Tasked with creating this quirky world was veteran costume and scenic designer Santo Loquasto, who says, "The script clearly spells out the demands: A banquet room reconfigured in such a way to store the bodies after a massacre. It is Roman in detail but filtered through a silent-film sensibility-more Cecil B. DeMille than Fellini, although when in doubt one always defers to Fellini." The dark comedy designs include hundreds of bodies and limbs piled grotesquely around the actors, alongside foreboding blood-red velvet curtains (think The Ten Commandments). "I would love to think that while the space touches on a kind of kitsch grandeur, it also breathes in the pungent air of an East Village drag show," adds the designer, whose credits also include the production design on a number of Woody Allen films.

Set designer Jan Versweyveld and video designer Tal Yarden raised the bar for interactive set design as they reimagined the UBS television network set for the classic 1976 Academy Award-winning film turned Broadway play Network. It's part spectacle and part performance art; the pair take multidimensional technological design to another level, where audiences feel the palpable intensity of watching a live TV news show.

The designers created a functioning-albeit chaotic and electrifying-newsroom, complete with a glass control booth, that offers a peek into the inner workings of the news set, along with an anchor desk where Emmy Award-winning star Bryan Cranston (as Howard Beale) is "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore." There is even a restaurant on stage left, where theater patrons can dine and experience the action firsthand. The centerpiece of the set is a massive wall-to-wall video screen that bombards the senses with vintage '70s images of commercials hawking tacos, mattresses, and hair products, curated by Yarden.

Versayveld, whose credits include the acclaimed play A View From the Bridge and David Bowie's Lazarus, notes, "I consider myself more than just a traditional set designer. Most of the set designs are actually installations. The set is a machine where the actors and the director can stop in, fly away, and use it in very different scenes and different ways." Designing in collaboration with his partner of 30 years and the play's director, Ivo van Hove, they made the conscious decision to forgo the staid corporate suites and time zone clocks from the film, opting for a more streamlined set.

Twice Tony Award-nominated costume and scenic designer Rob Howell created the look for The Ferryman, a Greek tragedy-style tale of the Carney clan during Northern Ireland's political period known as the Troubles, set in 1981 in the farm kitchen/living room of the family's house. Howell comments, "I looked at masses of reference material for the period and location, alongside all of the architectural details that the story needs." Howell's character-driven details range from a children's painting and craft project on the wall to a faded Irish nationalist flag hanging over the staircase.

Best Scenic Design of a Musical

The famed R&B vocal group the Temptations' journey from the streets of Detroit to their induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is the basis of the bio-musical Ain't Too Proud. "Since their early beginnings in the '60s, there have been 24 members that have come and gone from the group," says scenic designer Robert Brills, "so to tell that dynamic story, director Des McAnuff had a strong feeling that the physical design should take its cue from entrances and exits-both literally and metaphorically. The movement of the actors and how they're delivered to and from the stage was our key starting point, so we employed a 70-foot-long treadmill that's capable of moving not only scenery and props, but also our fantastic company of 16 actors." The designer looked to theater architecture to depict the world of the Temptations that was comprised of "six majestic black brick columns that define the playing space, and a large theatrical marquee that floats up and down," says Brills, "allowing the space to expand and compress effortlessly throughout the evening."

The use of multimedia became one of the most important storytelling aspects of the designs and was created for the show by projection designer Peter Nigrini, whose role was to "inject the space with history, context, color, motion, and specificity." This translated into moments such as the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination depicted with a backdrop of images such as a newspaper announcing his death and the Lorraine Motel, as the Temptations watch and react gathered around a piano. "The use of images to transform a space allows for the theater to co-opt the tools of the cinema," the designer says.

For scenic designer Peter England, designing King Kong is totally about the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room-except in this case, the silverback is a 2,000-pound animatronic puppet brought to life by a group of agile aerialists via state-of-the-art animatronics and technology.

The famed Empire State building climber is now the subject of a multi-million-dollar musical based on the 1933 classic. England explains, "At the heart, the concept is the rise and fall of the empires...and it is essentially a tale of two islands separated by an epic sea voyage. One island, New York City, is a jungle of concrete and steel out of which is a rising empire. The other, Skull Island, is a jungle of vines and webs consuming a crumbling empire."

The larger-than-life gorilla fills 90 percent of the stage area, so the set design has to rely on creating the illusion of Kong "running through the city streets, leaping through tangled jungles, or climbing up the Empire State Building to do battle at the top of the world" through projected imagery. The result is the use of a curved LED screen backdrop that projects imagery of various additional locations such as Times Square, a towering summit, and a mountain cave. England did not resort to special effects such as lasers or pyrotechnics, choosing to go old-school with optical illusions on the LED screen.

The 14-Tony-Award-nominated musical Hadestown continues this season's trend this season of reimagining a classic idea, with the modern interpretation of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Setting the scene against the contrasting worlds of heaven and hell, a.k.a. "Above the Ground" and "Below the Ground," scenic designer Rachel Hauck utilized the influence of New Orleans jazz. "We decided to set this story in a bar in NOLA, one of these amazing old bars full of music and stories, grit and joy, beauty and darkness. We ultimately decided to embrace that great messy city and lean into its joy and darkness," she says. The designer looked to Preservation Hall and the Napoleon House for influence. "For Below the 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."

The designs, rooted in the architecture of the Greek amphitheater, relied on finishes and color. "There is no replacing the great warmth of wood; it's one of the things that makes the bar so welcoming," Hauck says. "There's a lot of it on stage, all made to feel like a barroom floor that's seen the spilled beer of millions 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."

Reinterpreting the beloved 76-year-old Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! and adapting it to the 21st century was the challenge for scenic designer Laura Jellinek. Having turned the production at the Circle in the Square Theater into a set "where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain," the designer notes that "the basic premise is the idea of community which informs the production and design and makes the actors and the audience feel like they are all in the same room together."

No stranger to the show (she has also designed it at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse), Jellinek created sets that evoke life in a rural Oklahoma community, where plywood material replaces the "bright golden haze on the meadow." She also used a faded wall mural of plywood that gives a nod to backdrops from other Oklahoma! productions, and hung 100 guns on the wall along with a fringe of Mylar to provide a pop of color. The musical production even has a live chili cook-off and dances, all part of the storytelling.

The iconic catchphrase "Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice" no doubt conjures images of the devilish over the top aesthetic of the beloved 1988 film. Scenic designer David Korins looked to Beetlejuice creator and director Tim Burton for influence in imagining the Broadway musical, particularly his films Edward Scissorhands and The Corpse Bride. The designer, whose credits include Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen, created three different renditions of the haunted house that becomes an additional character. "Going from the Maitlands' house to the Deetz house to the Beetlejuice game show represented a huge visual and sculptural departure," says Korins. "The angles are what I would call forced perspective to make it more appear more pushed and elevated. Tim Burton has that very specific doorway shape that exists in every movie, and I tried to be inspired but not copy it completely."

From the special effects ("a smorgasbord of magic") to the "Easter eggs" scattered throughout the set-details that pay homage to Burton-the scenic design plays a major role in telling the story of a ghoul who inhabits the home of a recently deceased couple. And last but not least, there is a giant sandworm-the largest ever seen on Broadway-that lives in the walls of the house in the netherworld.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Best Sets From This Year's Top Plays and Musicals

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This year's lineup of theatrical productions includes a host of standout visual stars, including the awe-inspiring King Kong, the reimagined Broadway classic Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, and a stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. And the Tony Award nominations for Best Scenic Design are as varied as ever.