It took 12 years, but it seemed inevitable that a film grossing more than $131 million worldwide would become source material for a Broadway musical. Such is the case for School Of Rock, the popular 2003 movie directed by Richard Linklater, in which Dewey Finn, a slacker musician played by Jack Black, impersonates a friend by taking a substitute teaching job and then creates a rock band with the fifth-grade students. The eponymous Broadway version opened in December 2015 at the 1,500-seat Winter Garden Theatre, where it has been doing very well at the box office, with a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber, book by Julian Fellowes (writer of Downton Abbey), and directed by Laurence Connor. The design team comprises Anna Louizos, sets and costumes; Natasha Katz, lighting; and Mick Potter, sound. Read about the lighting design and the sound design.
“I didn’t want to be influenced by the film,” admits Louizos. “So I didn’t look at it again for this process.” Instead, the set and costume designer took some of her cues from Lloyd Webber. “He felt the school needed to create an atmosphere of pressured achievement for the kids, an established, staid institution,” she explains, noting that “in England, private schools are very tradition-based. That was in his mind, a suggestion on his part, so I paid particular attention to what kind of architectural details would suggest private schools, such as plaques on the walls, achievement charts, and Gothic-inspired architecture that might suggest Oxford University.”
The trick for Louizos was “to create a fully realized, believable space on stage for the classroom, which would then need to transition to a grungy apartment, a dive bar, or a rock concert stage, and all happen in an instant.” Her solution entailed a lot of planning, working out ground plans, and mocking up scale models, in order to create the illusion of three-dimensional spaces by employing visual tricks. “Some of it is forced perspective,” she says, “and strategically placed elements that create a complete picture in the audience’s eye.”
The schoolroom desks, custom-made by Tom Carroll Scenery Inc. in New Jersey, add to the flexibility of shifting movement on stage. “The desks are moved by the kids,” notes Louizos. “They are well-engineered and slide across the floor. The chairs remain attached and can spin, while the tops are solid so kids can stand on them, but they look like traditional school desks. We have backups built to cover wear and tear and for press events.”
Various locations in the school are created by using two-sided tracking panels: a total of six, four in one line, while two of them pivot. Show Motion built the scenery and automation. “The Gothic panels are built with internal steel pivot-points, which anchor within a frame that tracks in the deck; there is an actor-operated manual release, so the panels can be spun by the actors,” Louizos explains. “We can create different angles with the walls to create hallways and then reveal the other sides with classroom walls.”
The upstage classroom wall, which flies in, has forced perspective elements to the ceiling and wall moldings and is equipped with many traditional classroom elements, such as a flag, tracking chalkboards, bookcases; a header of beams flies in with the crest of the school, all created for the show’s Horace Green Prep School. “There are wings between the various scenic elements to track props, such as desks and musical instruments on and off,” adds Louizos. “From the audience point of view, this is a fully realized room.”
When the actions move to Dewey’s apartment, Louizos notes that she employs “brick sliders that contain hidden light boxes to represent Dewey’s more urban world, as well as two tracking wagons that form the back wall of his bedroom. His bed is fleshed out in two ways: One is on a pallet that tracks from upstage, while the other version of the bed comes up on an elevator from the basement.” The bed is built to look as though it is piled on top of milk crates containing his music collection, suggesting his haphazard lifestyle.
Pivotal Sets
There is quite a bit of automation for the wagons, tracking panels, and pallets, as well as the elevator that brings up not only the bed, but also a bar booth, sofas, and a drum kit. The large, automated, rock ‘n’ roll stage platform used for the concert is stored upstage against the back wall at stage level throughout the show and then everything opens up, and it tracks downstage. Louizos points out that Show Motion engineered a “commutator that allows the platform to spin for ‘onstage’ and ‘backstage’ scenes. It is a very complicated piece of scenery, with power for all the sound equipment and overhead light trusses fed through the deck into the platform.” Ashley Bishop served as project manager at Show Motion, with Ben Heller as production supervisor for the production. Louizos’ associate scenic designers on the production are Jeremy W. Foil and Hilary Noxon.
Doing both sets and costumes was a change for Louizos. “Most of the time, I design sets,” she says, “but the costumes were an opportunity presented to me. In British theatre, the designers tend to do sets and costumes. When I met with Andrew and Laurence Connor, and Nina Lannan, the producer, I was initially offered the set designer position but was then asked if I would do costumes as well. Andrew likes to have one designer do both, and since it is a contemporary story, I felt I could handle the scope of both, since I believed most of the costumes could be shopped rather than built.”
The 14 children on stage wear school uniforms that were sourced from a uniform company for private schools. “I thought about building them, but there was no compelling reason to build them from scratch. It seemed more economical to use bought uniforms,” says the designer, who figures that, with a cast of children aged 10 on stage, there will be a lot of replacements as they outgrow their costumes and their voices change. Various shops built some of the other costumes, such as the Ziggy Stardust-inspired costume, built by John Kristiansen.
For the other actors, Louizos chose clothes based on the characters: who they are and how they dress. “We pulled a lot of clothing from a lot of different sources and had the actors come in and try a lot of outfits on them,” she explains. “I try to give each character a distinct look, and all the actors play different roles from teachers and parents to rock band members to record store owners, and had the clothes tailored to them.”
Louizos says that Dewey was “fun to dress. We found a lot of shirts and vests in thrift stores and liked the patterns, so we had them custom-made, including his red velvet jacket, plaid shorts, and pointed-collared shirts, which were built by Gilberto Designs.”
Wonderfully tacky thrift-store sweater vests became a signature feature for Dewey, so Louizos had them duplicated for Broadway, with custom vests knit by Marian Grealish. The designer also found that “quick changes are one of the inherent challenges with a show like this, especially when the actors play multiple roles. Some of them have to quickly change from band members to parents, so there are a lot of logistics as well as hidden zippers and Velcro.” Lisa Zinni is the associate costume designer.
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