Live Design: This is the second Broadway musical for George Tsypin, the sculptor, architect, and opera designer, following Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and his first impulse was to send the show airborne. “We had to find a theatrical language to capture the world of comic books,” Tsypin says. “I desperately wanted to bring that illustrative world into space, which led me to the idea of pop-up books, which brilliantly do both. And I felt that everything had to move, and fly, like Spider-Man, and enlarge the experience.”
Friday, September 30, 2011
George Tsypin’s Scenic Design For Spider-Man
Live Design: This is the second Broadway musical for George Tsypin, the sculptor, architect, and opera designer, following Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and his first impulse was to send the show airborne. “We had to find a theatrical language to capture the world of comic books,” Tsypin says. “I desperately wanted to bring that illustrative world into space, which led me to the idea of pop-up books, which brilliantly do both. And I felt that everything had to move, and fly, like Spider-Man, and enlarge the experience.”
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3 comments:
There have been articles after articles about all of the production elements of spider man over the last two years but this is the first one that I have read about the set design. I thought articles have beat this content to death but they find another way. My favorite bit of this article was how the set is mostly black and white which gives a film noir effect which was present when I saw the show but I didn't consciously notice that was the force behind it. This black and white also gives way to the light palette of the lighting designer and gives Don Holder countless options. I think a lot of this set was genius and it does some really cool things.
While I haven't actually seen the show, from what I hear, the production team did an excellent job bringing this comic book world to life on stage. Adaptation from one medium to another is one of the hardest things we do in the entertainment industry. How do you take a story and tell it in different ways? What works in one medium will not necessarily work in another. For example, the Lord of the Rings books had to be cut down substantially to even begin to take shape into a watchable film. The idea of using the pop up elements is an interesting idea from the Spider Man team. It seems like these elements would go great far to help the creative team bring this 2D world into 3 dimensions.
I saw this show back in March when it was in previews. It was a super fun experience but my wife and sat way up in the balcony on the side of the house. As awesome as the set design may be, it looked terrible to us. We spent most of our time look at the backs of set pieces and in the pit. There was very little of the show at all when I could not see a stage hand. Looking at the photos in this presentation, the set looks great. But these two dimension sets did NOT work from such a high perspectives. I will need to sit down center to get the designers true concept of this show.
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