Set Designer Takes Care to Get a Good Look

Designer Neil Peter Jampolis cast a critical eye the other day on his set for “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” an off-Broadway revue that begins previews tonight and opens Thursday in a West Coast premiere for the Laguna Playhouse.

He likes the look it has of old brick and cast iron, suggesting an edgy urban neighborhood of sorts, rich in downtown chic and quite the opposite of the look it has at the Westside Theatre in Manhattan, where the Joe DiPietro-Jimmy Roberts revue, still running after 15 months, is a smash hit.

“The design of the show in New York has blue velour and plexiglass trim. It’s all very glitzy,” said Jampolis, a Tony Award winner who, not incidentally, designed that production too. “It looks kind of like a postmodern cocktail lounge. It just doesn’t have anything that I thought supports the show. It’s extremely neutral, but in the wrong way. This is neutral in the right way.”

Mistakes are a dime a dozen, even for an award-winning designer. For Jampolis, the challenge of creating different sets for the same show in different theaters is minimized to some degree by the fact that no matter where he works he always establishes a modular space that conforms to the 3-by-5 ratio (height to width) favored by the ancient Greeks.

“It makes me feel settled,” he explained. “I think many stages out here in Southern California are too wide and low. Maybe it’s a hangover from Cinemascope or something.”

Given his hectic bicoastal schedule, Jampolis is lucky to have any sense of equilibrium at all. The short, rumpled, 54-year-old set and lighting designer took a break from “Street Corner Symphony,” a $3.5-million Broadway musical that begins previews Saturday in New York, to work on “I Love You.” As soon as the Laguna production opens, he’ll fly back.

“I left my assistants there to take care of things,” he said. “The difference between working here and working on Broadway in the same week is amazing. You go from a high-pressure production with all of the angst and the meetings and the rotating victim--at some point everybody is a victim--to a situation like this, which is all about caring.

“On Broadway, frequently they don’t care. Actually, that’s not true. They care about the money. The meaning is more about professionalism and keeping up a standard, doing it right for the sake of doing it, without a passion necessarily for the work itself. They do it for the sake of the polish. I take pride in that too, but it’s not the same thing.”

Among the things Jampolis likes most about his Laguna set for “I Love You,” an anthology of musical sketches about love, dating and marriage in the 1990s, is that director Joel Bishoff and he have figured out how to stage the show for the first time without a turntable. The Manhattan production and another in Toronto he designed--it opened five months ago and also is still running--both use revolving stages.

“I think we’ve achieved the right look here by giving the impression of a neighborhood of artist lofts,” added Jampolis, who doubles as a full-time UCLA theater professor. “I want people seeing the set to know right away that there’s a certain sophistication to it.”

The effect comes largely from his use of murder-your-wife brick, which gets its name from the 1965 Jack Lemmon movie “How to Murder Your Wife.”

“They took castings of the brick walls of a Greenwich Village building for that film and made a plastic form out of it. You can buy the casting from Warner Bros. But it has to be skillfully painted, because it only comes in gray. The scenic artist here, Chris Holmes, painted what you see. He’s very talented.”

As to his own talent, Jampolis figures that next to some of his Brooklyn schoolmates--Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond and chess champ Bobby Fischer, who all attended Erasmus Hall High when he did--he ranks fairly low.

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Modesty aside, surely a Tony (for the lighting design of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Sherlock Holmes” in 1976)--let alone three other Tony nominations (“The Innocents” in 1977, “Black and Blue” in 1989 and “Orpheus Descending” in 1990) and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award (for “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” in 1987)--have earned him a place in the pantheon.

“It put me in play,” Jampolis conceded, “which was good for my career. I’m not complaining.”

* “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” previews tonight and Wednesday at the Laguna Playhouse’s Moulton Theater, 606 Laguna Canyon Road, Laguna Beach. 8 p.m. $18. The regular run opens Thursday. Performances at 8 p.m Tuesday-Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 and 7 p.m. Sunday. $29-$35. Ends Nov. 30. (714) 497-2787.