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

Theatre 135
Re-Animator: The Musical is a semioperatic
farce staged by Stuart Gordon
(who also directed the film of that name)
that capitalizes on bizarre magical effects
created by effects designer John Naulin
and costume designer Joe Kucharski. The
play premiered at the Steve Allen Theatre
in Hollywood, California, in 2011; the nowheadless
Professor Hill is played by Jesse
Merlin, who is staring at the body of his
Dean’s daughter (Rachel Avery), while the
Dean, played by George Wendt, looks on
from behind. © Thomas Hargis
magic-lantern slides bearing images or titles” to be used
in the production of his 1944 play The Glass Menagerie
so as “to give accent to certain values for each scene.”
(The play’s first director, Eddie Dowling, decided not
to use this device, but many subsequent directors of the
play have done so.)
Today, led by the trend away from strict realism as
well as new technological developments (digital imaging,
video recording, computer-designed animation),
both image and video projections have frequently become
integral to theatrical design. The projection designer
(sometimes called the image designer or video designer)
has, as a result, become a new member of theatrical
design teams around the world. Wendall K. Harrington
has been a particularly important leader in this field,
having been credited as projection designer (or video
designer or multi-image designer) thirty-five times on
Broadway since his work on They’re Playing Our Song
in 1979, and having created the country’s first projection
design program at the Yale Drama School in 2010.
In a landmark moment in the development of projection
design, Tim Bird earned the first-ever Drama Desk
Award for outstanding projections and video design for
his work on the 2008 Broadway revival of Sunday in the
Park with George, the celebrated musical about French
artist Georges Seurat and his influence on modern art.
In Sunday’s 1984 premiere, the first act was staged in
front of a large painted canvas of Seurat’s famous painting
named in the play’s title, with the costumed actors
taking the positions of the artist’s human figures. Bird’s
twenty-first-century design, however, projected shifting
images on an LED wall at the rear of the stage. The effect
allowed the audience to see the painting created from
completely blank canvas to finished masterpiece during
the act. Moreover, the videos created an overall visual
design from thousands of tiny dots of color—a brilliant
replication of Seurat’s style of painting. Sunday’s
composer-creator Stephen Sondheim himself claimed
that “if we had the technology when we first staged the
show, this is the way we would have wanted to do it.”
Not all introductions to new theatre technologies are
received so warmly, however, as can be expected for
an art form with a five-thousand-year-old history. Finn
Ross’s projection design for the 2008 Broadway revival
of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, starring John Lithgow,
included newsreels of the period, large videos of wartime
soldiers, factory workers, and military planes, plus
occasional indications of time and scene changes, and
was both praised (“surprisingly effective,” “insinuating
projections”) and damned (they “do more to harm
the play than bolster it” and “don’t draw us closer to
these people—they push us away”). Similarly, the LED
screen behind the 2009 Broadway revival of Guys and
Dolls was hailed as “majestic and handsomely humanized,”
and Destin O’Neill’s projections on it as “expertly
made,” but the same critic felt the ultimate impact of the
projections was to overwhelm the characters, who were
“upstaged by the fancy video. . . . The wall does all the
talking.”
Nonetheless, projections—both realistic and abstract—
are certainly growing as almost routine theatrical components.
Their critical reception has become more positive,