Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 133
underscoring in some plays raises objections that it turns
drama into cinema and suffuses the articulation of ideas
in the syrup of generalized emotion. Many productions
still employ older, more analog sound technologies to
achieve what they feel is a more authentic sound. Most
dramatically, the administration of the Tony Awards
elected, in 2014, to eliminate the Tony Award for sound
design altogether—a highly controversial decision that
has led to much pushback and criticism from designers
and other theatre artists. Nonetheless, despite the disputes
over its official recognition, sound design—as
well as original music composition that makes use of
it—has become absolutely fundamental to the production
of today’s theatre around the globe and is quite definitely
here to stay.
Puppets and Projections
In the spring of 2011, the Broadway (Lincoln Center) production
of War Horse won separate Tony Awards for best
play, direction, scenery, costume, and sound design—but
took no awards for what everyone left the theatre talking
about: its magnificent projections and puppets. These are
currently the two fastest growing design areas in theatre,
and each has seized an important space in today’s theatrical
design; clearly, further recognition will soon be coming.
We will look at them separately.
PUPPETS
Puppet theatre began in China two thousand years ago,
and has long been used in the Japanese Bunraku and
Javanese shadow puppetry, and for supernatural characters
in Shakespeare (almost certainly for some of the
apparitions the witches raise up from their cauldron in
Macbeth, for example), but increasingly they are used
to represent live dramatic characters in major contemporary
plays, such as young adults in the long-running
Avenue Q (in its 13th year at this time of writing), or as
living African animals in Julie Taymor’s The Lion King
(18th year) and in the nine-year-old War Horse, with its
two full-sized “puppet horses,” prancing about on four
Projections are the main—and almost the only—scenery in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a prizewinning
play about an autistic but brilliant fifteen-year-old boy who hates being touched. The set was designed by
Bunny Christie, but the ever-changing video design, which dominated the stage at all times and reflected Boon’s mind,
was by Finn Ross. Graham Butler plays the boy, above, in the 2014 production at London’s Gielgud Theatre; the play
won many awards and opened on Broadway (with a different cast and for a long run) later that year and won five Tony
Awards, including Best Play and Best Director. © Geraint Lewis