From Broadway To Hollywood: Derek McLane's Scenic Designs

Set for 2013 NBC live production of The Sound Of Music.
 
Tony Award-winning designer Derek McLane considers designing Guys And Dolls in a dining hall at Harvard in 1978 (where he was an archaeology major) as a pivotal moment, the seed of his award-winning career—the split second in which his future direction was clear. Next stop, Yale School of Drama, studying with Ming Cho Lee, where his interests in art and theatre intersected, and drawing classes gave way to scenic design.
 
“As a child, I used to make elaborately decorated fish tanks in the basement, but they never held water,” he admits. “They were little visual environments with miniature trees, grass from the backyard, and small temples.” Perhaps a young artist in the making, but theatre design won out in the end.
 
Born in London to American parents, with a two-year detour to India at the age of six, McLane’s childhood was primarily spent in Evanston, IL, where his father was a professor of Indian and Southeast Asian history. Thus, the years in India: “I lived in Calcutta for a few years,” McLane recalls. “I was too young to remember much, but I have been back a few times as an adult and love it there. It feels like home. In some subliminal way, I am sure I have been influenced by the visuals of India. It is so dense, there is so much to look at there, and I try to use aspects of India in my designs when I can.” An example of this is McLane’s set for the play, Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo. “I really felt in my element,” he says, referring to the Islamic architecture found in a Muslim country close to India. 
 
While at Harvard, McLane designed his first productions, including a few at the Loeb Drama Center, where American Repertory Theatre was started in his senior year by artistic director Robert Brustein. Also on the horizon, there was designer Michael Yeargan.“I forced myself on him as an assistant, and he said I should go to Yale and helped me prepare. He was on the faculty at the Yale School of Drama and enormously helpful,” notes McLane, who adds that one of his classmates at Yale (1980-84) was costume designer Catherine Zuber, and, in fact, they are good friends who share studio space in New York City, where McLane moved in 1984. Lighting designers Robert Wierzel and Peter Maradudin also became colleagues along the way.
 
McLane designed the set for the Off-Broadway revival of The Last Five Years. Photo credit: Joan Marcus
 
Once in New York, McLane began freelancing. “I called everyone I knew and starting assisting with at least eight different people,” he recalls. “I worked the most with Doug Stein—we shared a studio for a while—and did a lot of musicals with Robin Wagner. It was interesting to see how he designed and how he handled the business side of being a designer. It was totally eye opening. They didn’t teach you anything about it at school.”
 
McLane recalls at that time, “The only person who had his own professional studio was Robin Wagner. I admired that and felt it gave him a level of professionalism. Most others would work out of their apartments, which made it seem a bit more like a hobby.” One summer, McLane worked at The Guthrie in Minneapolis, where there was one combined studio for all the designers: Christopher Barreca, Douglas Stein, and Stephen Strawbridge. 
 
“I thought this beats working at home alone, and it was great to run ideas by each other,” McLane admits. “Some of us decided to share a studio on 17th Street in Manhattan, and a group evolved.” Today, that space has moved to 38th Street and is shared by McLane, Doug Hughes, and Zuber. “It’s not just one big room anymore. All these years later, we realize we all need our space, so it’s like three studios in one space, and I tend to always have assistants.”
 
McLane’s graduation from assistant to designer was gradual. “I took a lot of non-paying design jobs at first and kept assisting for four years,” he recalls. “The designers I worked for allowed me the freedom I needed to take a week off to tech a show I was designing. Robin Wagner, for example, was always very supportive.” The formula worked, and within five years of moving to New York, McLane was a full-time scenic designer with his sights on Broadway.
 

Break Into Broadway

 
McLane designed the set for Breakfast At Tiffany's. Photo credit: Nathan Johnson
 
His first Broadway production was What’s Wrong With This Picture by Donald Margulies at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. “It was a certified flop,” McLane says with a little laugh. “A wonderful play but it just didn’t work and closed after nine days. I was kind of devastated, but I had done my first Broadway show, and I learned a tremendous amount. It was director Joe Mantello’s first Broadway show as well, and what I had not counted on in advance was that there is no infrastructure. You are creating a production company from scratch, and that can be hard. It makes you understand why teams of people work together so frequently. They develop a shorthand and cohesion, as well as a support staff they like to work with, a programmer, production supervisor, and so on. If you work with the same team, there is a familiarity of how a show comes together and a level of comfort that’s important.” 
 
Since that first Broadway production back in 1994, McLane now has more than 30 Broadway shows under his belt, a Tony win for 33 Variations in 2009, and nominations for Pajama Game (2007), Ragtime (2010), and Anything Goes (2011), for which he won a Drama Desk Award. In deciding what jobs to take, he notes, “Usually someone calls, a director or a producer. I don’t usually ask to be considered, and I have to love a project to do it. Otherwise it’s impossible to work on.”
 
McLane’s most current show is Beautiful, The Carole King Musical, which opened on Broadway in January 2014. “This one is tricky from a design point of view,” he admits. “It quickly moves from offices to studios to performance numbers, with lots of quick transitions.” Some of the challenges McLane faced with this one were the large number of scenes. “Effortlessly getting from one scene to another is the most important thing. Cumbersome or long transitions would slow things down.” 
 
Beautiful, The Carole King Musical. Photo credit: Joan Marcus
 
As a result, McLane built a multistory set that easily transitions yet tells the audience where the action is happening. Many of the music business offices back then had a piano, so there is one on stage that moves from office to office, studio to studio. Carole King’s character says in the show, “It’s just like a factory, but they make songs.” So for McLane the question was, “What does a song factory look like?” He says, “I invented it by pulling elements from recording studios from the ‘50s and ‘60s and music executives’ offices in The Brill Building.”
 
The factory idea translates to lots of tiny little studios perched on top of each other, and where, as McLane puts it, “They were all trying to write top 40 hits in those coffee-stained, nicotine-stained rooms.” To add visual texture, McLane covered the upstage wall with a dimensional collage of soundproofing materials and speaker grille cloths lit in different ways by LD Peter Kaczorowski. “You feel it evokes that environment,” McLane notes, who also used tape decks, mixing boards, mics, and speakers to create the look of the offices and studio cubbies in a beehive of musical creation and energy.
 
McLane finds that the collaboration process “melds more than it used to, certainly with lighting and projection design. The best projection design feels like an extension of the scenic design, while color and style of costume are important as well.” As for lighting, “your set is only as good as the lighting,” McLane admits. “I build a lot of lighting into my sets as well, especially for musicals, as it allows the team to make changes at the speed of light.”
 

Hollywood Calls

 
How To Succeed Without Really Trying. Photo credit: Ari Mintz
 
“I had designed How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying with Daniel Radcliffe,” indicates McLane, to segue into his Hollywood call to design the Oscars. Two of the producers on How To SucceedCraig Zadan and Neil Meron—were tapped to produce the Oscars in 2013. “I read about that online, and then the phone rang the next day, and it was Neil and Craig. They asked if I wanted to design the Oscars, which is a very high-profile assignment.” Luckily, there was help from an experienced art department to shepherd a Broadway designer through his television debut. 
 
McLane’s designs were successful, and he returned to Hollywood in 2014, designing the Oscars a second time. “They called in the spring of 2013,” recalls McLane, “and said confidentially if they produced the show again, they’d like me to design it.” 
 
One thing McLane found is that the process is very different from the theatre. “There is no script to read, just some notions and ideas, so it’s a little harder to know how to start,” he says. “The sets are also more decorative than a play or musical, as there is no story to tell in an awards shows.”
 
Rendering for the Oscars
 
Another goal for McLane was to “honor the traditions of the Oscars, the grandeur and elegance of the show, yet do it in a way that felt original, not pretentious or bombastic. I wanted it to be grounded in a new style, not clichés. Neil and Craig said something wonderful to me. ‘We want this to look like your work,’ and they cited a few examples: 33 Variations, I Am My Own Wife, How To Succeed. They loved all those designs and wanted the Oscar version of that—‘something we would recognize as your work,’ they said. It was very flattering and liberating.” 
 
McLane also collaborated with lighting designer Bob Dickinson, a true veteran of the Oscars. “He’s great,” says McLane. “He has almost a childlike sense of adventure, yet he is ambitious and not afraid to propose crazy ideas.” 
 
Transitioning back and forth from Broadway to Hollywood, having up to four shows running on Broadway at the same time in 2011, designing the sets for the NBC-televised live production of The Sound Of Music (also produced by Meron and Zadan): All in a day’s work for McLane, who has now spent 20 years in New York, and has come a long way from that first Broadway show, two decades ago.
 
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