Not Just Horsing Around

A giant clock hangs high above the kerchief-covered heads of young women slaving away at factory looms, ticking away the final moments of toil. Within a few beats, the workday is done and the captives spill out and make their way to a fairground.

To the strains of the “Carousel Waltz,” the scene fills with barkers and townspeople shedding their reserve as they lose themselves in the whirl of the spring carnival.

The dionysian revelry increases until, as the prologue ballet draws to a close, a full-size carousel unfolds downward from the sky, merging seamlessly with the revolving floor and its dancers. It’s a singular moment, capturing the joyous abandon of the music, even as it hints darkly at what Nietzsche called “eternal return”--the life cycle of morality and mortality--that is the show’s theme.

It’s also a moment whose visual spectacle usually draws a round of applause from the house.

No wonder then that, in review after review, the scenic design of this Royal National Theatre staging of “Carousel”--with its impossibly lush blue backgrounds, starry vistas and piquant Maine village--was singled out for praise, both when the show opened in London in 1992 and when it moved to New York in 1994. The New York Times, for instance, called it the “most beautiful” musical on Broadway.

Indeed, it is the set, not one of the actors, that is the star of the show. Yet this “Carousel”--which opens Wednesday at the Ahmanson Theatre, directed by Nicholas Hytner--is hardly the only recent show with a set that’s upstaged its players.

The last decade has seen an unprecedented expansion of the scope and importance of scenic design in contemporary theater. And while many such sets first came to the fore on the commercial stage--in the British musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh (who is also backing “Carousel”)--they’re no longer only there.

Recently, the trend toward spectacular sets has spread to the more serious stage, including the nonprofit arena and non-musical dramas as well. “Carousel,” for instance, began at a subsidized theater and moved over to the commercial arena.

More important, it may be the most sophisticated example yet of a scene-as-star production. It has neither the gimmicks nor the hokey effects of the 1980s mega-musicals.

Yet “Carousel”--which won Tony Awards for best revival, direction, choreography and scenic design--stands as further proof that people go to the theater today as much for the spectacle as for the script.

“We are living in an age of visual spectacle,” says Bob Crowley, the Irish designer and frequent Hytner collaborator who created the sets and costumes for “Carousel.” “[The set] is a major character.”

*

The notion of a play backing a set, rather than vice versa, is an idea that would once have been considered radical. Theater, after all, used to belong to the people who wrote the words and the actors who spoke them.

The rise of big, bold design is no fluke trend, nor is it likely to be a short-lived one. “Even straight plays are becoming more and more events rather than the actual play script,” says theater and film producer Noel Pearson (“An Inspector Calls”).

“The thinking [had been], ‘The play’s the thing,’ but I think, unfortunately, we’re drifting away from that now. You have to have the play plus to get people to go to the theater--and the ‘plus’ has to be either unusual casting or the spectacle.”

To be sure, there’ve been periods--before the current British-dominated boom--when American theatergoers saw stage designs more memorable than the plays for which they were created. The current surge of spectacle is different, though, in part because the designers’ technical capabilities have expanded so much.

Today, designers are among a production’s most major players. Often present at the conception, they are the director’s partner in creating a vision.

“What happens is that you are there at a very early stage,” says Crowley, speaking by phone from New York, where he is designing his first musical since “Carousel,” a new work by musician Paul Simon, “Cateman.” “[Design] is as much an intellectual thing as anything else. You’re asked to participate in conceptualization.”

Crowley, 43, wouldn’t have it any other way. “I was trained to be part of a team, that I wouldn’t just come in to pick the wallpaper,” he says. “That was thrown out the window in England in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Parlors and drapes don’t hold much appeal for designers of Crowley’s generation. “I am definitely amongst a movement in England that has no interest in designing someone’s living room,” the designer says. “I don’t want to perpetuate the kind of work that I don’t want to see.”

Instead, he pursues projects that don’t require his slavish adherence to tradition. Significantly, Crowley--whose only previous Broadway work was on “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” (1987), and who had mostly worked at London’s Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theatre--had never even designed a musical when he signed on for “Carousel.” Yet given the high regard with which the 1945 musical is held, he believed he couldn’t pass up the chance. “It has an iconic quality [in England],” Crowley says. “We can’t write music like that.”

The fact that the musical holds a different place in British than in American culture seemed like an advantage. “It’s in [the American] psyche, collectively, and that’s hard sometimes when you’re over-familiar with something,” Crowley says. “We came at it from a different point of view. When you stand outside something, it comes to you with less baggage.”

Nor did Crowley feel hampered by his lack of previous musical experience--not to mention his distaste for mega-musicals. “I have felt very outside that whole loop really,” he says. “While all that was going on, I was just doing classical work for the Royal Shakespeare Company. I saw all [the mega-musicals], so when I came to do a musical, I said I didn’t want to go that road.

“We’d had 10 years of highly technicalized shows--’Miss Saigon,’ ‘Phantom’--and there have been other musicals that have depended on machinery for their effects,” he continues. “But we didn’t want to turn this into a machine.”

Crowley and Hytner chose instead to start from scratch. “[‘Carousel’] did need a new look, one felt,” the designer says. “It had an old-fashioned image, mainly due to the film. I wanted to clear the decks of everything that had been done before with this piece.”

The process began with a trip to the Maine seacoast where “Carousel” is set in the late 19th century. “I did an immense amount of research,” Crowley says. “I drenched myself in an atmosphere for the piece.”

He also turned to art. “I looked at American painters of the period--obvious people like Grant Wood, Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth,” he says.

The result is an almost naive, if grand, visual lyricism. “We came down to something simple--a more poetic, impressionistic, painterly approach to the piece,” Crowley says. “The overt romanticism seemed to almost demand that approach. And the ballet element meant that I couldn’t, on a practical level, lay great train tracks.”

Innovative and fresh as Hytner and Crowley’s “Carousel” may be, it’s also in keeping with the direction in which the theater craft has been heading for more than half a century. Where once the stage was dominated by actors and playwrights, the rise of directors in the 1920s and ‘30s triggered a fundamental refocusing of the form. As the director emerged, so did the notion of an overall interpretation of a play--an idea to which individual performances, as well as other elements, would be subservient.

While realism ruled the game, set designers were there to do the director’s bidding. Typically, they were regarded as men (or, once in a while, women) who shopped till they dropped, trying to find precisely the right color couch to fit the director’s order.

There were, of course, important exceptions. Pioneering designer Boris Aronson, for example, crafted many realistic settings. But he’s best remembered for the highly stylized, richly colorful and technically innovative sets he created during the 1940s and ‘50s.

Once the reign of realism faded though, so too did the predominant notion of designers as interior decorators.

Enter the experimental theater of the 1960s and with it more abstraction. Suddenly, there was a need for innovative artists who would work in consort with a director and not just at his or her bidding.

Design was also increasingly inspired by activity outside the performing arts. “Work became much more connected with fine art, which began to influence what was happening in the theater,” Crowley says. “A lot of work today is closer to installations in a gallery than it is to getting out the Macy’s catalog.”

In the late 1970s and ‘80s, the serious stage brought forth a new director’s theater, exemplified by the work of Peter Sellars and others. In this work, a directorial “concept” dictated how the play would be stretched and pulled, sometimes to extremes, to fit the purposes of the auteur at the helm.

Somewhat simultaneously, especially during the mid-1980s, the British spectacle musical came to rule the commercial stage. Mackintosh, the Sam Walton of the West End, transfigured the business of theater on both sides of the Atlantic with such spectacle shows as “Les Miserables,” directed by Trevor Nunn and designed by John Napier, and Lloyd Webber’s “Cats.”

Mechanization and computers became the order of the day and bigger-is-better the byword. There was the swaying chandelier of Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera,” and, soon after, the 8,000-pound helicopter of “Miss Saigon.”

In 1993, Lloyd Webber opened “Sunset Boulevard,” once again teaming Napier and Nunn. This time, however, the physical production took the concept of the mega-set to a new level that in some ways was more visually sophisticated.

While the special effects of “Saigon” and other shows were often less believable than the hype would suggest, “Sunset Boulevard” achieved greater feats with more grace. Weighing in at 30,000 pounds, the 32-foot-high set contained a split-level stage operated by hydraulic lifts.

With Norma Desmond’s mansion rendered in rich Gothic detail as its centerpiece, the set transformed to accommodate a chase scene, a pool drowning and sets within sets, making it nearly as filmic as its source.

It had to be. “The way it was written was very filmic, and slightly untheatrical,” Napier says. “A conventional [musical] would have excluded a lot of things in order to make things happen easier. If it had been a piece that had been written for the theater originally, there certainly wouldn’t have been car chases and the like.”

He saw his task to be to create a set grand enough for the leading character. “Norma Desmond is such a powerful icon,” Napier says. “There’s something about the tragedy and the realm that she needs to inhabit. I didn’t see it as a play where you could shove on a sofa and a potted palm.”

In addition, during the time “Sunset Boulevard” was being created, set design was beginning to gain new prominence on the non-musical stage. The Royal National Theatre’s 1992 revival of J. B. Priestley’s “An Inspector Calls” (directed by Stephen Daldry and seen earlier this season at the Ahmanson), for instance, boasted real rain and a towering mansion that collapsed and reassembled itself during the course of the show.

Not surprisingly, there were more than a few observers who chalked up the success of the revival of that 1946 drama with political overtones--which opened on Broadway in 1994, the same year as “Carousel”--to its set, designed by Ian MacNeil.

The case of “An Inspector Calls” underscores the key trade-off inherent in the rise of design: Bigger, better design means bigger costs. It’s something some designers try not to think about. “If you were to try and work within the confines of practicability, you’d just shoot yourself in the foot,” Napier says. “There are plenty of people in suits who’ll tell you it won’t work.

“There are a number of shows that I’ve done that when you first do them people say, ‘How are we ever going to make our money back?’ ” Napier continues. “But my philosophy is you do what’s right for the piece the first time around.”

It’s what he believes he owes the audience. “If I was a regular person paying X amount to see a production, I would not want to feel cheated,” Napier says. “And I know full well that most of these producer chappies would charge the same ticket price even if they had done it on the cheap with a tacky, schlock set.”

His methods seem to work, for Napier has had more success on the large-scale commercial stage than almost any other designer. Yet his experience is markedly different from that of Crowley, who came out of the British national theater system.

“There is a big movement in England now, a huge surge of young talent in the last 10 to 15 years,” says Crowley, referring to designers and others who have nurtured their talents at the National and elsewhere. “We’re not tied down by the commercial vagaries.

“It has to do with the work being subsidized,” he continues. “It means you’re protected. You’re not in the marketplace, so your imagination is more elastic. I don’t have 10 producers breathing down my neck telling me how to redesign Act 2.”

Yet it’s no longer unusual for a show to originate in a subsidized house and transfer to the commercial West End, as did “Carousel.” Then even artists such as Crowley must do battle in the market.

Fortunately, producers aren’t necessarily hostile to the artists’ priorities. “It has changed what we want to accomplish,” says “Carousel” producer Aldo Scrofani, executive vice president of Columbia Artists Management Inc. “A lot [more] of the work is planning and designing to ensure that the people in the next town are looking at a great production.”

Bus-and-truck versions of Broadway shows are almost a thing of the past. “The [former] notion of touring shows being a different standard than what you see in New York is changing a lot,” Scrofani says. “Cameron [Mackintosh] is doing a lot in that regard--with ‘Miss Saigon,’ ‘Les Miserables.’ These shows have toured at a high level and raised expectations.”

“Carousel” is not exactly the same production that was seen in London or New York, but it’s close. Originally staged for a proscenium stage in London, it was adapted to a thrust version in New York, and again to a proscenium version for the traveling incarnation.

“We basically reproduced the London production,” Scrofani says. “It may look the same, but obviously because it moves [from city to city], there were some design changes.

“We have a deck which is a revolve [for instance],” Scrofani continues. “It needs to come apart and yet it needs to be seamless, so the dancers don’t bruise their knees. It’s very expensive. There was a tremendous amount that went into that.”

And it is costs such as these that make “Carousel” less of a cash cow than some might assume. “We believe that we will make money--the question is, ‘How much?’ ” Scrofani says. “ ‘Carousel’ is expensive and it causes us all sorts of problems. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.”

Artistic considerations were weighed against costs throughout the production process. “If you make a commitment to the quality level, you run a fine line in trying to return the investment,” Scrofani says. “Often you trade how much you could make, and put [those resources] onstage [instead].

“From the beginning, you feel you’re going to make money. Then you make artistic decisions that chip away at that.”

But there are other reasons to put on a show besides profit. “We didn’t produce it because we were going to get rich on it,” Scrofani says. “We all felt a passion to get ‘Carousel’ [mounted in cities besides New York]. It just needed to be seen, and we think we’ll be fine.”

There are, of course, those who protest the rise of big design, arguing that it eclipses the literary aspects of theater. But a bold set can both stand on its own and serve a script.

“There’s a stated thing in England which is not as prevalent in America, which is that the only good set design is one you don’t notice,” Napier says. “What I think I and my cohorts have done is change the way people see the art of theater design.”

The resistance to bold design, say some, might be no more than a knee-jerk reaction anyway. “There’s a kind of puritanism sometimes about theater,” Napier says.

“I’m always slightly surprised by what I tend to think is slightly an overreaction to spectacle--mainly on the part of people who have a vested interest in the theater belonging to people who have degrees in English literature,” he continues. “I point out to them that they probably use a PC and not a quill and pen to write their pieces.”

*

“Carousel,” Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens Wednesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m. Also next Sunday, July 21 and 28 and Aug. 4, 7 p.m., and Thursday matinees on Aug. 8, 15 and 22, 2 p.m. $15-$65. Through Aug. 25. (213) 628-2772.