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[0:01] Mason Bray: Welcome back to Real Talk with me, Mason Bray. I so appreciate you being here this week and joining me for the conversation with one of Broadway's best set designers. If you want to follow along with more of my socials, future interviews, Instagram takeovers, and more, you can find all that at bpn.fm backslash Real Talk. Now, into the episode. So, joining me today, we have Derek McLane, the genius Broadway set designer. His Tony Award-winning work can be seen in Moulin Rouge Worldwide, MJ the Musical, Anything Goes, Beautiful: The Carole King Musical, A Soldier's Play, Sunday in the Park with George, and so many more iconic productions. Even if you aren't fully invested in Broadway or theater, Derek has designed the set for the Oscars several times, creating some of the most iconic award show sets that I can remember. After seeing Moulin Rouge both on tour and on Broadway, I am so excited to discuss Derek's design and his career, along with his new book. Hi, Derek.

[0:58] Derek McLane: Hi, nice to be here. Thank you for that lovely introduction.

[1:03] Mason Bray: Nice to meet you, too. I'm so excited for you to be here. To start off, can you tell me how you got started in Broadway and scenic design?

[1:08] Derek McLane: Sure. When I was in high school, before I started college, I had done some house construction work as a summer job, so I knew a bit about construction. When I was in college, somebody asked me to build a set, and I did. And set design was never anything I'd really noticed before. I'd seen some theater, but I hadn't seen a giant amount, and I'd never really contemplated set design until I built this set, and I thought, wow, this is really cool. And so I said that I wanted to design a set, and luckily for me, in college there was no theater program. It was just entirely an extracurricular activity. So I was able to start designing sets, even though I really had no idea what I was doing at all.

I was completely really naive and a real novice at it, but I loved it. The first set I designed was a production of Guys and Dolls that was in a dining room, college dining room. And I cringe now when I think about that set, but it was really, really exciting for me, and that kind of launched me in this path. And it wasn't long before I realized that I really didn't know what I was doing. And then I met the designer, Michael Yergin, incredible set designer, who was and actually still is on the faculty of Yale Drama School. And so I kind of threw myself at Michael and said, hey, I want to be a set designer. What should I do? And he said, well, why don't you apply to Yale? But he looked at my stuff and he said, wow, your drawing is pretty terrible.

What he advised was that I stop designing any more undergraduate sets, and that I just spend the rest of my time studying drawing, because he said it was really, really important that I learned to draw. And so that's what I did.

[3:05] Mason Bray: Yeah. And I think that jumps perfectly into my topic of educational theater, of how important do you think that is for finding people's niche in the industry?

[3:12] Derek McLane: I think it can be super important. You know, I didn't study theater until I decided I'd already decided that I wanted to do it professionally. And then I went to graduate school. So I did not have an undergraduate. I had no undergraduate training in the theater. You know, some people start when they're undergraduates. Some people even start when they're in high school. Some, they go to the right school. You know, I can't really say what the right path is for anyone, any one person. The one thing I will say is that, you know, if you were thinking about going to study in an undergraduate setting, not all programs are equal. Some are better than others. And so, you know, it really depends mostly on who's teaching there.

So I wouldn't say that any old undergraduate training program is worthwhile. I think some of them are actually not really worthwhile, and some of them are. But, you know, people have to sort of make their own judgment on that. And the other thing I'll say is that I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with, you know, waiting until you're done with college to sort of make that decision, as I did. Because, you know, set design is a hard field. It's not for everybody. And it's a very competitive business. It's a very difficult business to make a living in, extremely difficult. A lot of people get discouraged and drop out because they're just really not enough jobs for all the people that want to become set designers.

So I don't say that to discourage anybody, but it's not a field you can go into casually. You really have to have, I think, in order to make a career of it, you have to have talent and you have to work really hard. And you also have to have some luck. I think, you know, you do need some good luck as well.

[5:03] Mason Bray: And for the future of Broadway and the future of what you want to do with your shows and your designs, what are some ways that we can create more jobs and opportunities to get people into the industry and be able to have a more inclusive field in set design, but also across Broadway?

[5:10] Derek McLane: Well, I mean, in order to get more people into it, you know, I think the world of theater needs to increase. You know, there needs to be more shows. Talented people always find a way in, but I think, you know, to really expand it, there would need to be more shows than there are right now. It's a challenging time right now because Broadway is not doing very well at the moment. It's, you know, it's struggling. You know, financially it's struggling because I think, you know, a variety of things, but mostly linked back to the pandemic and, you know, the attendance is down right now. And so I think in the short term that makes, there's some challenges, but I think probably in the long term Broadway will, you know, I'm sure it will flourish again.

It always does. There's a lot of efforts underway to make the world of Broadway and design in particular, more inclusive. There's a number of organizations in New York, some of which are operating nationally to encourage that. So I think there's a long way to go, but there are efforts being made for sure.

[6:13] Mason Bray: Yeah. And I love how you say that Broadway will flourish again. It always does because it does. It does. And some of the best shows are open right now. Specifically, some of your shows like Moulin Rouge is a spectacle beyond compare. It's so good. Every single detail and best play this year is going to be tough for the Tony awards because there's so many amazing works of art.

[6:37] Derek McLane: It's true. And I hope that it flourishes for them and after them.

[6:44] Mason Bray: I agree. Yeah, no, I think already the season artistically is off to a really strong, strong start. And as you say, Broadway goes through cycles and you know, we've been through, I've lived in New York for a long time now, and I've seen all sorts of cycles. I've seen a couple of recessions, stock market crashes, and also 9-11 and 9-11 was an enormous challenge for the theater. And, you know, I don't remember at the time we wondered if we would all survive the, you know, our businesses would survive and they did. And I have no doubt that we'll survive this one as well.

[7:18] Derek McLane: Absolutely. Diving into your design process. Yeah. What are some pre-production steps that you have, like discussions with the director, going through meetings with designers, some of Broadway's best that you've worked with, like Natasha Katz, Justin Townsend, Howell Binkley, and Peter Negrini, all those people going through all of that pre-production. What is your process for that?

[7:25] Derek McLane: Well, number, step number one, of course, is always reading, reading the script. And if there's music, listening to the music and developing my own first impressions based on that reading. I think that experience you get the first time you read something is super important because that's the closest in a way you're going to have to what the audience experiences. You know, the audience is not, by the time the show opens, those of us working on it have seen it dozens, if not more times, and the audience is seeing it for the first time. So I think it's really important to try to sort of figure out what it is, what the essence of the story is when you first experience it and try to hang on to that, because that's going to mean something to the audience who's seeing it.

And there are different ways to do that. Taking notes, talking about it with somebody that, you know, certainly the director, sometimes collecting images, anything you can do to kind of hang on to that, that first, those first impressions is super important. Now I always meet with the director and I try to find out as much as I can what the director dreams for the show, what, you know, I like to start with a place where there is no budget and to say, you know, this show could be, if the show could be anything, what would it be? What is your, you know, I want to hear what the director's sort of fantasy production of the show is, even if that involves some things that are not possible or feasible.

I think that's a really useful place to start. And I also try to identify that for myself, like what are the things that if I could do anything I would do? And again, I try to hang on to that, you know, sometimes if something pops out as really important, I write that down so that I can refer back to it. So that as I sometimes get mired in problem solving, I'm not losing sight of the main goal. And then, you know, after that meeting with the director, or maybe sometimes before I start doing some research, I do a lot of research and the research, you know, might be based on time and place and period of the show, but it may also be based on mood and feeling. And, you know, sometimes the time and the place of the show isn't really that important, but there are other things that are important.

So it's trying to find images that capture the feel, that feeling you have when you read it and that feeling that the director describes when he or she is, you know, his first talking about the story. And then after that, after, you know, sort of collecting some research or a lot of research, I start sketching, I start doing doodles. And by doodles, I mean really, really super fast drawings, often many of them taking two or three or five minutes. And, you know, they're like the sort of equivalent of gesture drawings in a figure drawing class, you know. And I draw all that by hand because it's fast, it's super fast. They're not pretty, they're often frequently not anything I would ever even show the director.

They're for me to work out some ideas and often to try a lot of ideas quickly. Like, you know, let's say that there's a living room, you know, I have some idea of what's required from the script, but, you know, I want to sort of quickly explore like 10 different ways to do that living room. Some of them will be terrible and unusable, but usually out of that exploration, something, you know, exciting starts to happen. And then from those very crude, you know, scribbles of drawings, then anything that looked promising, I start to clean up and make into a drawing that's maybe clear enough to actually discuss with the director. But I generally don't put color in them. These are frequently just, you know, line drawings, color, and a lot of detail will come later.

And it does once things start to get a little more specific. And so, you know, I eventually move on maybe to some more detailed drawings, sketches. But really the crucial thing, I think, for me and for many other designers is making, is that scale model, you know, getting to a scale model. And again, those start rough. The first couple of versions of the scale model are usually not something the director would ever see. These are just rough drafts. And, you know, it's not uncommon for us to make five or six or seven different rough drafts of one particular thing in the set. So it starts to actually feel right. And then once I, once it starts to feel right, that's when I bring the director in and start looking at models.

And then, you know, if it's a show with scene changes like Moulin Rouge or MJ, you know, that's a huge part of this always is figuring out. It's not, you know, it's one thing to design an individual set, but in the context of a show with different scenes, you've got to always be thinking about what is the transition going to be like, because the transitions can be just as much a part of the experience as the set itself.

[12:18] Derek McLane: Absolutely. And then eventually, so, you know, sorry, just to finish that off, that, you know, after, you know, the kind of design is achieved in the model and the director feels good about it, and then the producer feels good about it. And the other designers, the lighting designer and the costume designer have been brought in and maybe the sound designer, depending on the requirements of the show. Then from there, you know, once the design is sort of solidified, then we do, we draft it. We do, you know, scaled drawings that are like an architect's drawings. And those are the things that we then take to the shops for bids so that they can price the design and we can figure out, you know, whether the set is affordable or not.

[12:59] Mason Bray: That's fascinating. And usually it's not affordable, usually.

[13:05] Derek McLane: Usually, in most cases, we discover it's too expensive and then we have to figure out some ways to pay it back.

[13:08] Mason Bray: And it's always fantastic.

[13:11] Derek McLane: Yeah. Well, thank you. With all that, what kind of documentation do you keep? Like, do you keep all those first figure drawings through the renderings? Or is it just like something where you easily forget the beginnings and shape it around what it becomes?

[13:18] Derek McLane: I don't necessarily keep all of them. I mean, some of them are so ridiculous that they're not worth keeping, but I keep a lot of them, you know, even if they're not. Sometimes there's some things I do that I like, but they, for one reason or another, they aren't right. And so I particularly enjoy keeping those because they're interesting. And also because sometimes you might find some other project to use something like that on. So, you know, and actually, truth be told, I do most of my drawing now on an iPad and Procreate. So it's pretty easy to save all this stuff. I mean, I throw away some of the Procreate documents sometimes, but it's pretty easy to keep a record that way. And so, yeah, they exist. Not that anybody necessarily wants to see them. And by the way, just to clarify, they're not actually figure drawings. What I meant was that they're done sort of at the same.

[14:40] Derek McLane: And the cohesive picture of the Moulin Rouge as it relates to the club in Paris is like a velvet wonderland. And I love how you transformed the Al Hirschfeld to take on that form of a can-can dance club. What research had you used to get to that point? Well, it's interesting. I mean, a lot of it actually wasn't based on research. A lot of that was just based on an image in my head. I mean, the actual Moulin Rouge didn't look anything like that. You know, the Moulin Rouge in 1899 looked more like a dance hall with a giant wooden floor and a stage, but it was not particularly lush, actually. And then the Moulin Rouge now is a much more modern thing. It doesn't have any red velvet on the walls.

I mean, it's great for what it is. It's just a different, it's a totally different kind of experience. But this really was born out of, in the first draft of the script that I read, John Logan's description of the club was, it just said, the club, sex and smoke. And I thought that was such a great description. I love when a playwright gives you something provocative like that, but that's not too specific. So, and actually the red velvet came about in kind of a slightly accidental way, which was sort of interesting, which was that we did the show, before we did it on Broadway, we did it at the Colonial Theater in Boston. And I had gone up to see, Alex Timbers, the director and I went up to see it, you know, early on, probably nine months before we were going there, we got to look at it.

And, you know, we were basically asked by the producer to go look at it and make sure it looked okay to us. And we went in and the walls of the Colonial Theater were red, they were painted red. And we said, well, this is perfect. And it had great, a beautiful gold ornate detail. So we thought this is perfect. So then what happened was, probably about three months before we went, you know, the show was due in Boston, I got a call from somebody who was up there and said, I think it was somebody on the technical staff who had gone up to scout some things. And he called me up and said, by the way, I'm sure you know this, but I just thought I should just give you a heads up that in case you didn't, you know, the theaters are covered in green wallpaper because they just did a big renovation.

And I thought he was joking at first. And he said, no, no, it's green, it's green wallpaper. And I said, well, can we paint it? And they said, no, because now it's, not only are they covered in green wallpaper, it's now landmarked. Like, because apparently green was the original, this was like the original color when they built it. The red was some kind of aberration. And so, you know, I was sort of panicked. I was like, well, we can't do Moulin Rouge, a green theater, that doesn't make any sense. And we, you know, Alex and I had already determined that we wanted to do this somewhat environmentally in theater anyway. And so I said, well, can we cover the walls, you know, like, and they said, in what?

And I said, I don't know, red velvet. And they said, yeah, sure, we can do that. And so we, you know, we added up the number of yards we needed to cover the walls of the theater. And it was some absolutely absurd, absurd amount of yardage. And we went to look and there was no source for enough fabric to cover the, you know, there was no one red velvet that we could get that would cover that much of the walls. There was like, we could get enough to do a third of the room. And so then I just said, well, let's just make a virtue of that. And so we ended up using 11 different red fabrics to cover the walls. And so a lot of them are velvets, different types of velvet, cut velvet, velvet brocade, some red satin, a bunch of different fabrics.

And, you know, the sort of justification I had in my mind for all these was that Harold Ziddler, the impresario of the club, had actually put the thing together on a shoestring and he'd gone broke doing it. And so, you know, he had a spectacular imagination, but not quite enough money to do it. And so that was sort of the aesthetic of this thing was that it was like, it looked fantastic at first glance. And if you looked a little more carefully, you saw some of the seediness of the whole thing, you saw that it was actually not entirely professional, the way it was put together. And so that sort of, I think that added a kind of layer of charm to the whole thing, that it's not actually slick. It has a little bit of a, as impressive as it might be at first glance, it actually has a little bit of a homemade feeling to it.

[19:00] Derek McLane: I love that. That's so creative. And the same extent to the wiring, you know, we have something like, I think it's 6,000 light bulbs in the set. But, you know, in a couple of spots, if you look closely, we sort of faked bad wiring as if, you know, they hadn't really gotten a licensed electrician to do all this stuff. It's like, maybe one of Harold Ziddler's wired this stuff up. One of Harold Ziddler's friends. The club was not built by IATSE union members.

[19:22] Derek McLane: Yeah, exactly. Even though it really was. So when you designed Sunday in the Park with George, you perfectly encapsulated like the scenery of the painting. And I wanted to know your thought process of adapting the painting for the stage and the show. Well, I mean, the painting that we did on stage really was, as much as we were able to, really meant to mimic the painting. I mean, that was really the, that was really the idea. It really wasn't meant to be anything else because the painting doesn't exist at the beginning, but you see the painting come to life. So I, you know, I really did try not to vary from Surat's painting any more than I had to. I mean, there were very few adaptations that were made. It was really like blowing up parts of the painting and cutting them out. I mean, we didn't actually do it digitally. It was done by painters, but yeah, that's how it was done.

[20:23] Derek McLane: Awesome. Getting more towards tech rehearsals and getting the show up on its feet before previews, what is your role at that point to handle automation that has been coming up more and more with shows, but also making sure that it's ready to go up for the first preview? Well, luckily for all the shows that have been designed, it has not depended on me to make the automation ready. There are people who are way more, who are actually skilled at that. I don't even really exactly know how the automation works, to be honest. I mean, I kind of know how it works on mechanical, but I don't understand any of the electronics that control it. So it really, you know, there's not that much I have to do in terms of making it be ready, except to make sure that the right people get hired to do that.

Because, you know, if you work with great technical supervisor and great shops, they really handle getting it ready, you know, according to the schedule. Really my job and all that, you know, sometimes it needs, people need an encouraging push from me if they're behind to try to get things back on track, but that doesn't happen all that often. But the things that I really have to do and tend to be more creative, like if we have automation, it's figuring out the queuing of the automation, you know, because you may, it's not all that unusual to have, you know, five or six or seven, or even sometimes 10 axes of automation all going simultaneously. Some things going off stage and some other things going on stage.

And so there's a lot, there's a lot of sort of art to the transition that comes in those timings. And, you know, you can describe it ahead of time, which you have to do in order to get somebody to write the cues for it, because there's a computer that controls all the speeds of all that stuff. But inevitably, once you see it, you want to adjust it. And it has, it often has to do very much with this, with the text. So what is, what is happening on stage? Is somebody speaking during the transition? Is somebody singing during the transition? Or are neither of those things happening? And so they have to do with, you know, sort of what order you want to see things at. Do you want everything to finish at exactly the same time?

Or do you want something to lag? Do you want it to go quickly? Do you want to go slowly? You know, do you want all the scenery that's on stage to go off first and then bring the next scene on? Or do you want them to pass each other? Do you want all the, you know, do you want everything to be coming on as the old scenery is going off? So those are all, those are all decisions that, you know, that I make usually with the director about, you know, and that has so much to do with how the story unfolds on stage.

[23:00] Derek McLane: That's mind-blowing to how all that works. And being the type of person that I am, I often like search for videos on how automation works and there's nothing. Like YouTube has plenty of stuff on lighting design, which is how I've learned everything that I know, but there's nothing on automation. And I wish that I could get a seat into the theater to watch all that happen. Well, I can, I can tell you sort of briefly, there's sort of two, you know, there's two major types of automation you'll see in, say, a Broadway musical. There's the deck automation and there's the fly automation. And the fly automation is really just a winch, an electric winch that is pulling on the counterweight, you know, in the wings, you know, the old-fashioned manual kind of moving a flying scenery was a person pulling a rope that moved a counterweight and the counterweight on the other end of the rope from the counterweight was the piece of scenery.

And so if it's automated, you basically somebody has installed a winch, electric winch, which just runs that counterweight up and down, which just means that you have, you know, you have really great reliable control over the speed at which that moves. And then the deck automation, which is things moving on the floor, you know, furniture going on and off and large set pieces. Those are all run from winches that run cables through the floor. Like every show, every Broadway musical would sound its own show deck that's designed specifically for that show. And if it's got automation in it, there are these little grooves in the floor and underneath those grooves are cables like, you know, aircraft cable and aircraft cables are run by winches.

And then the pieces of scenery that go on and offstage slot down into that cable. And that's what moves it. That's what moves that stuff on and offstage. And you have a lot of control over the speed and you can make it accelerate and decelerate and all that kind of stuff as it goes on and offstage. And so those are the sort of, you know, those other types of automation that are more hybrid or more unusual, but those are, that's sort of, that's probably 90% of the automation you see in any show.

[25:12] Derek McLane: That's awesome. Now, Zoom is telling me that I have like around 10 minutes, but I do want to get to your book, which just came out, Designing Broadway. Yeah. Can you give us a description of what that book is and what you hope that it brings to people? Sure. Absolutely. So I wrote this with a writer named Isla Mel. It was her idea to do this book. She came to me with the idea and, you know, I was a little surprised at first. I hadn't really thought of myself as having a book about my work. And, you know, as I thought about it, I thought, you know, I didn't really feel like I was quite ready for a book that was entirely about my work. I'm so aware of how influenced I am by my colleagues, by the other designers working in the field and also by some designers who came before me.

And so, you know, I said, look, I would love to do this book if I can make it about my work, but also in the context of the influences from the other, the many other designers who I admire so much. And so that became sort of the organizing idea of the book. And so it does include many other designers work in it and different examples of different types of set. And one of the things that I tried to do was group sets by roughly by themes. And it's a kind of an imprecise process, but, you know, there's a series of sets in one section about sets that are based on realism. And there's a series of sets based on surrealism. And there's a section on sets with a lot of rapid scene changes. And there's a section on big American musicals.

And so, you know, there's a bunch of different sections to the book. And so what I try to do in the book, what Mel and I tried to do was show the way I and other designers tackle sort of similar problems and try to, you know, it's a way of, I think, trying to show the breadth of decisions and choices that get made, you know, behind every design and every production and try to give some insight into the thinking that goes into making the visual world of a show.

[27:30] Derek McLane: Yeah. And I think that's so important to upcoming designers, but also those who are still working and being influenced by their colleagues around them. And I can't wait to get the book. I plan on looking into that this week to make sure that I get a copy. Yeah. And, you know, I hope that the book will be interesting to designers, but also to non-designers, people who love the theater, because I think it does offer glimpses. There's also a lot of directors who are included in the book too. And I think it does offer a lot of glimpses into how shows are made creatively, you know, in the physical realm.

[28:06] Derek McLane: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being here. I can't wait to be able to see more of your beautiful sets in the theater, but also just the production images of how wonderful your designs are. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you.