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[0:00] David Korins: Hi, I'm David Korins. Welcome to The Theatre Podcast with Alan Seales.

[0:10] Alan Seales: Hey, everyone. Welcome to another all-new episode of The Theatre Podcast. The guest on today's episode is legendary scenic designer David Korins, who is responsible for designing some of the most intriguing sets I've ever seen. One of my favorite parts of the episode was when he was describing some of the original ideas for the set of Hamilton that were nothing like what it ended up being and what we know it to be now. Another really cool way of thinking is how he describes the importance of just pouring detail, like so much detail, into the set pieces that the audience may actually never see, like the top of a desk that only the actor sees, and it gives these actors on stage more of a story to craft around their characters.

It's just so cool how he thinks about the stage, how the stage designs influence the performances. So, sure, now you know what to do. Find me on socials, tag the podcast in your stories, and now, everybody, please enjoy this episode with David Korins. Our guest today is an internationally recognized, award-winning creative director and designer responsible for creating 360-degree, fully immersive, holistic experiences for some of the biggest stars, brands, and events worldwide and in live theaters and Broadway. He brought to life the environments for smash hits like, you know, Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Beetlejuice, Mrs. Doubtfire, and along with over 20 other theatrical productions, he's worked as a creative director for Mariah Carey, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, Bruno Mars, Sia, and Andrea Bocelli to bring their musical visions to the stage.

I'm only half done. We're still going. His film and TV experience includes series on HBO, CBS, Bravo, IFC, PBS, 2018 Grammy Awards, Grease Live, got an Emmy Award for that, the 2022 Academy Awards. I got to skip because, God, we're going to cover this in conversation. All right. Most recently, his scenic designs have been seen... Oh, he's got three Tony nominations. Can't skip that part. Most recently, his scenic designs have been seen last season in the play Just for Us and the musical Here Lies Love and now this season in The Who's Tommy, which, coincidentally, I just saw last night. Woo, David Korins, welcome to The Theatre Podcast. Jeez. You should ask your guests to show up after you read the bio. It's just ridiculous.

[2:36] David Korins: Hey, thanks for having me.

[2:43] Alan Seales: Yeah, dude, you've been a little bit busy. I think out of 300 and some episodes now, I think you're the first scenic designer I have had.

[2:51] David Korins: Wow, really?

[2:51] Alan Seales: Yeah, I really think so. And I apologize to anybody who I may be forgetting. It's been almost six years. It's been five and a half years, so my brain's a little fried with guests. But I'm so excited to talk to you because...

[3:04] David Korins: Wow, I'm honored to break the seal on behalf of all scenic designers.

[3:09] Alan Seales: You're breaking the seals? Bazing? That's right. The world of scenic design, to me, is so interesting. And I want to back up a second, too, because somebody, after hearing an interview I did years ago with a press agent, was saying, if I had known that I could do press or I could do these other things instead of getting on the stage as an actor, I would have never tried to get on stage as an actor because as a kid, that's all you hear about. So I guess that is a great way to start. And let's get into how you got into this business. And so my first question is then, I guess, at what age did you really start doing what would become what you're doing now? And what got you involved with theater in the first place?

[3:55] David Korins: I've always been a lover of the arts. And actually, I grew up as a musician and an athlete and was really, really competitive and pretty good at both of those things. And I dabbled in acting and I was in some plays and things like that. And in high school, I had a really horrible auditioning experience in which we were doing cabaret. I'm sorry, we were doing Carousel. And I really wanted to be Billy Bigelow, the lead. And I didn't get the part. It was kind of horrific. And my ego crushed. I got Jigger Craig and the sort of second male lead, the bad guy. The theater director said to me, you know, you should really help the math teacher who's the guy who built the scenery. And my crestfallen ego, you know, decided to show up to this work call.

And I realized that they were making these sets out of cardboard and wood. And it's actually kind of exciting. And I knew that I wanted to continue on in the arts. I wanted to continue making theater, but I never wanted to audition for another thing again. And so early on in college, it was really that bad. I mean, I think it also wasn't really my thing. But I loved the community and the team building of making a piece of theater, because it's not really the kind of art that can happen in your backyard or in like a room all by yourself. It's a collaborative art form. And so the musician part of me, the part of me that played instruments in a band and knew my part and knew about improvisation and knew about, you know, your one voice in many is the same one as an athlete who, you know, there's a play, you're kind of going down the field or going down the court.

And there's improv, but there's also set plays. And this idea of people coming together kind of in lockstep to make a thing felt natural in theater. And so I got an internship at Williamstown Theater Festival in 1997, and quickly saw all of the kind of similarities in those teams in those communities. And I was kind of hooked. I could also see because of the way that that program was structured, what it was like to be an intern and the next level of an assistant designer and associate designer, professional designer and all that. And so the road was sort of laid out before me, and I got hooked pretty quickly. So that's kind of how I got into it. And I think you sort of like what you're good at.

I had a boundless imagination and an unbelievable amount of energy and could do a lot of physical things because of my athletic ability, hang off ladders, and you know, I could I was sort of a leader, I could get people lockstep behind this idea. And that's what we do every day, right? A production design, set design, it's one thing to make a world for something. It's another thing to be able to convey that idea to hundreds of craftspeople who ultimately have to come together and realize the vision. It means nothing on paper. It means nothing in model form or rendering form. It means everything in how you execute the idea. And so those communication skills and those kind of team building skills are the thing that still power what I do today.

[7:06] Alan Seales: Well, you were a musician and an athlete, neither of which at the surface lends itself to be creatively creative in the design aspect. So I mean, at some point, you had to kind of switch over and and there's there's the builders who are creating the designs. And then there's people like yourself who are doing both. You're designing, then you're building.

[7:31] David Korins: You know, it's true, but I feel like, you know, I'm definitely not a traditional artist in quotation marks. I didn't grow up with a pencil or a paintbrush in my hand. I have since challenged myself to learn how to draw and articulate things visually with, you know, what's in my head, convey it to a piece of paper. But to me, designing is communicating, right? And so the idea of creating a space or an environment for a show or a concert to happen in is all about conveying, telling the part of the story that the words or the music isn't. And so early on in school, I was having a really hard time being able to articulate what I kind of saw or wanted to, you know, or what I saw in my head and wanted to put down on paper.

And my professor said, get really great research, use a photocopy machine. At that point, there were photocopy machines, we didn't have, you know, scanner, fancy scanners and things like that. And cut things out, rescale them, you know, make a collage, use these tools and find a way to articulate these things. And so you could crop an image, take a little piece of this, make it bigger, you know, do all these things. And slowly but surely, I realized that actually design is just communicating in three dimensions. And so it's less about the artistic endeavor as it is about the holistic storytelling. And so in all of my other work, since I've been a start as a set designer, now moved on to all this creative direction, and kind of immersive experiences and hospitality and architecture and things like that.

It's all the same. It's all you've got a client and a collaborator, they're trying to tell a story, you're trying to render an environment in three dimensions, and you're having people interact with the space. And it's all about what's in your toolbox and the ways in which you're communicating these stories. That's kind of like the gold.

[9:26] Alan Seales: Well, how do you know what tools you have in your toolbox? Specifically, take something like Here Lies Love, which I want to dive into, at some point, because you took you transformed the whole theater into a dance club, it had no proscenium anymore, it had no stage, it was just you, you filed in and the audience had to literally walk through what historically was the wings of the theater to get to their seats in some cases. So you've got those ideas versus your traditional, I'll put in traditional quotes, audience in the house and actors on the stage sort of thing. And then I feel like something that you're really good at is incorporating the audience into the design lighting wise as well. And I mean, talk about The Who's Tommy last night, there were so many times when the lights were shining on the audience.

And all of this is on purpose, right? Nothing at this level is by accident, for the most part. But I guess, yeah, my question is then, how do you know what tools you have in your toolbox? Because something like Here Lies Love, to transform that stage, that house, that's money. That's just, I see giant dollar signs. So how do you know how much you have to spend? How do you know where you have to spend it? How do you know, like, do we have to use plastic? Because that's less expensive than metal versus like, how does all of this come together? Right?

[11:00] David Korins: Well, that was, you've said a lot. So I do say a lot. Usually, there's a producer or general manager, finance people who are telling you what your budget is, how I know what materials I can apply to that budget, come from, you know, comes from years and years and years of experience, I know what a sheet of plywood costs, I know what a stick of aluminum costs versus steel versus whatever. So I sort of have a sense of building methodology, you have to be, as a production designer, you've got to be part engineer, part architect, part, you know, installation artist, and storyteller. So I kind of know what things cost, I could tell you what a wall costs, or a moving piece of scenery costs pretty easily.

But to talk a little bit more about what's in my toolbox, I kind of think everything's in my toolbox, right? So one of the reasons why I do all of the different things that I do is because I think if you tend to work in one medium, you tend to use the same materials, the same building methodologies and the same kind of thinking. And, you know, I have for years thought, because I imagine the design process and the creative process is all kind of the same, from 40,000 feet above sea level, looking down, you know, there's a client, there's a

[15:42] David Korins: And then you're like, okay, well, what do we have in our toolbox? Getting back to the toolbox analogy, lighting, music, costume, proximity, right? In that moment, the entire cast walks downstage and is standing there like a wall of sound and a wall of humanity. And the proximity to the audience is palpable, right? It's just breathtaking and it moves people. And proximity was a lot of the conversation in Here Lies Love, right? We wanted to move seamlessly from a funeral to a wedding to a rally to a riot. And those are kind of crowd scenes, right? Funerals and riots and weddings are places where people gather together. And so how can we change the visual paradigm, right? The wedding, the bride and groom are the stars, right? And so we put them in the middle of this crowd. And so we were working with proximity there.

[16:37] Alan Seales: That's really, really interesting. And I guess, yeah, asking about the feeling, you're right. The scenery sets the stage, no pun intended, for what the audience is looking at and for what they feel. I really love that. It's interesting. Yeah, the Who's Tommy, talking about that scene you're talking about where the penultimate moment, it's very powerful. I heard people around me like sort of audibly like, whoa, yeah, just amazing. And again, with everything put together, the lights, the sound, it comes together perfectly. Time for a quick commercial break. Hang on a second. Welcome back to the episode. Sort of in general, we hear about shows that they'll take a decade sometimes, if not more, to make it to Broadway, if they ever make it to Broadway.

And then even in the final two to three weeks before opening and previews, songs, scenes, lines, changing, cut, ads, all this stuff. At what point, more or less, are the sets frozen? Because you can't just go and rebuild. I mean, you can. Can you rebuild it? Like, oh, this house isn't working. Rebuild the three of the four walls and add these other electronics in here by tomorrow.

[18:06] David Korins: Yeah. I mean, occasionally, you might add a piece, you might tweak a piece. The set is oftentimes the most expensive single biggest ticket item on the P&L, right? So our work often gets done in private way ahead of time, the building and the creation of the set. And then we tweak it and we can do little things and sometimes do big things. Oftentimes, that's the reason why these kind of out-of-town tryouts happen or these long-term iterations, because you might put a show up in Chicago, as we did Tommy last summer, and then we add a couple of bells and a couple of whistles and we take one or two things away because we don't always hit the bullseye dead on in the first try. But yeah, as far as the long-term part of this thing, I was working on Here Lies Love for almost 13 years.

You know, with something like Hamilton, it was five and a half years. Beetlejuice was six and a half years. Tommy was five and a half years. So that's from like, hey, want to do a show to like, congratulations, we opened. But that's a long time. You know, I have children almost the age of how long I've been working on Here Lies Love. Yeah, it's kind of insane how that works.

[19:14] You mentioned Here Lies Love specifically, about like David Byrne came with the idea of the nightclub and whatnot. And then I remember you saying a couple years ago when you're talking about Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen, but Hamilton specifically, that when Lynn and Tommy Kail and the team came to you, they had no clue what the set wanted to be. They just wanted somebody to put their artistic spin on it. And do you prefer, I mean, so you came up with the Hamilton set all on your own, right?

[19:43] David Korins: Well, I mean, I wouldn't say all on my own. You know, it was a great collaboration. I would say when I met with Tommy the first time to talk about Hamilton, you know, I came in with like, seven or eight ideas. Most of them were, again, about kind of movement and about, you know, the great thing about theater is we get to work in metaphor, right? We all know when you're an audience member that it's not a real thing. You're not actually walking into a real house, even if there's a real house on stage. And so a lot of my early my first conversation with Tommy was like, what if it was an old painting and a gold gilded frame of all these kind of like old crusty politicians? And then they like lower, they were all on pillars and they lower down to the ground and that they broke through the frame as though a painting came to life.

Not something that we did, but it was an interesting idea. Like, you know, it's like a picture of like the founding fathers and then we shatter the glass of that thing. Or what if it's, you know, the turntable idea I did, I came with that in the first meeting, mainly because I was thinking about the cyclical nature of the way that Burr and Hamilton keep on meeting with each other. And there's also like the hurricane that sweeps them off the island. And there's all this kind of swirling vernacular in the show. And I thought like, well, could we do a turntable? And you know, we've now talked about this ad nauseum, but Tommy said, yeah, interesting idea. We're not going to do that. And then we went and we designed the show, looking at a ton of research.

The cool thing about Hamilton is you can see what New York Harbor looked like, you know, with your sketches and render etchings and paintings and things like that. So you can see what the, you know, those Federalist architecture buildings look like. And you can see what all that, you know, you can go and research Washington's tent and the Schuyler mansion and things like that. But really, ultimately, we came up with that design together, through a lot of research and a lot of conversation about metaphor. And ultimately, we built a thing that was about the building the framework that holds up the foundation of a country, which is why you see that kind of half build wall and all that, all that scaffolding and stuff like that.

But I don't prefer working in one way or the other, where David and Alex come to me and say, we kind of want to do a nightclub where there's like platforming, what do you got? Or I don't know what this looks like. The interesting thing about the Hamilton process was we went through like a super slick black and metal modern day thing that kind of match the music. We also went through like a really, really old looking thing that matched the time period. And I just like spending time in the room with people who are smarter and more creative than me and kind of filtering all their cool ideas through my own artistic sensibility and then seeing what comes up. But I don't think I've ever come up with a set design myself.

[22:40] Alan Seales: When you say that you went through these various iterations, like the modern and then the super old, and then now you're, you know, version three is just right. Are you building full scale models? Or are you going through just sketches or making miniature models? Like how do you decide what's going to work and what's not?

[23:02] David Korins: Well, it's funny, every process is different. Some of them are more sketch heavy, some of them are more model heavy, you know, something like Beetlejuice. On the first day of that process, Alex Timbers, who also directed Here Lies Love said to me, the house is a character. This is a story about people getting trapped in a house in perpetuity. And we get to see like the kind of awesome thing about that show is we get to see the house as it is owned by the Maitlands. And then it gets bought by the Dietz's and they completely remodel it. And then it gets haunted by Beetlejuice and they get gets completely redone there. And so once we kind of landed on the sculptural idea, we built so many versions of that model because it was so complex that we every little piece we tweaked with all the angles and like drawings wouldn't do it and 3D renderings wouldn't do it.

And so it was model after model after model after model after model with that show. So many different iterations, each one tweaking an angle just a little bit. We probably did, you know, 30 or 40 different versions. With something like Hamilton, there was a bunch of early sketches, including like a huge, the floor was a big scroll of parchment paper and there was like a crow's nest, you know, that was actually a quill, right? So like a bunch of, you know, not great ideas. Do you still have these, by the way?

[24:23] David Korins: I do. I actually drew that one on the cover of the script when it was still called Hamilton Mixtape. And that was just like a bunch of bad ideas. One of them was that there was a dirt floor, and that in the opening sequence when Aaron Burr is talking to the Schuyler Sisters in that number, they would be laying down floorboards. So they'd be saying, work, work. And they'd be laying down boards, and they would eventually by the end of that number have a complete floor. And Andy Blankenbuehler, the choreographer, would look at me and was like, absolutely not. Have you seen the choreography I'm working on? Yeah, there's no way. This is not going to happen. We're like, okay, that's not going to happen.

But I thought it'd be kind of cool if when Eliza was burning the letter, that she could open up a part of the floor and burn it and put it on this dirt floor and all that, and it didn't happen. So some of the processes are more sketch heavy, some are more model heavy. But to me, all that stuff is, again, they're just tools to convey ideas to your collaborators. And then ultimately, once you've landed on the idea, they are tools to convey what the thing is going to look like and feel like for the performers and the producers and all the stakeholders in the operation. And you don't get points for whose model looks better or whose sketch looks better. They're tools to communicate this kind of grand vision to everyone involved, including the scene shop, who ultimately needs to figure out how the heck to build it and paint it and put props on it and deal with it.

[25:58] David Korins: How granular do you get with the scenery? I mean, if you're looking at a house on stage, the material of the curtains, if they're torn, if they look brand new, if they've got wrinkles, if there's books on a shelf, how detailed do you get? Are you just like, here's your model, somebody else fill in the details? We get unbelievably granular. So that was one of the things that I learned in that very first internship at Williamstown. There were some very, very profoundly great designers that I used to, I was an intern and assistant for. And I remember one time we were putting together a set where it was basically a beautiful box set and there were two little ante rooms off stage, which when the doors open on the main set, you would maybe some people in the extreme sight lines in the audience would be able to get to see what was happening in those rooms.

And my job as the intern was that we were painting it and propping it and putting it all together. And this one designer, Hugh Landwehr, had me cut out a label that said like office number or something on a rotary phone. And it was on the phone, on the desk, facing upstage that no one would ever see. And I remember thinking, why am I doing this? And he said to me, it's not for the audience, it's for the actor. And the details were so like dust on the windowsill that you could never perceive even from the audience. And I have come to realize that if you do your job right, you can inform an actor's performance based on the set dressing, the design of the show. Some of my greatest compliments I have ever received are from actors who have said to me, in fact, Chris Jackson, who played the original George Washington, said to me, in this scene, I don't have to do any work of who I am because what is on the desk tells me everything about who this character is.

So the choice of felt, the level of finish of the flask or the decanter or the quill or whatever those props are, what we chose for him, he said, I know exactly who I am. And ultimately, the actor who lives on that set eight times a week will know more about the world than you ever did. You take a stab at it. And then the best collaborations are when you work with the performer and you put all sorts of this granular detail in there and you build the world with them. I remember I did a show with Jane Houdyshell called The Receptionist at Manhattan Theater Club, and we built this kind of desk for her. She played a receptionist and all of the little tiny details that, again, none of the audience would ever see.

But she saw them. She knew who she was based on the world that we had created for her. And that's kind of extraordinary. That's really, really fascinating. And it obviously takes a lot of time and a lot of very direct intention.

[29:11] David Korins: And this leads me nicely, I think, into my next question about TV, film, award shows, theater, whatnot, like the timeline involved. Because when you have theater, when you have years and years and children almost as old as the productions you've been working on, you've got time to tweak and they're around for a while. You can go back and I'm sure sets need repairs every now and then, and then you might update or change things. But for like the Academy Awards in 2022 or the Grammys in 2018 or any of these things that are seen one time on TV, is it a different... I mean, TV and film has a larger budget in general, I would suspect. For a one-time often performance, does that kind of like hurt your soul in a little bit just to see it come and go like that?

Well, you're dealing with... You're kind of doing different exercises, but with the same muscles, right? So you're still storytelling, you're still making environments. The thing about television and film is there's different levels of filtration, right? So when you're sitting in the theater, the ways in which we as an audience member see the actor is filtered only by lighting design and blocking, right? So you can't... You could, if you were bored, look away and look up at the lights or look at the people next to you. In film and TV, there's a director of photography who is irising in on something and then ultimately it's edited, right? And so there's a different shot that the editor could choose or the director could choose.

And so the storytelling method is very different. And so as a production designer in film and TV, you're thinking about everything in that frame. And so if you look at our backgrounds in this, you've got those cool lights, which I've been coveting for a long time. I know they can change color, but I've got a little slice of a door over there. I've got this weird fish eye. But in a piece of theater, everything is scaled to a six foot person. So it's all relative scale. And the storytelling methods are different because in production design, everything flattens out in the camera. So you have to go to great lengths to create depth and have objects in the foreground, the midground and the background.

And things in theater work differently generally than they do in film and TV, which is what I think we did so successfully in Grease Live. We were able to blend the theater and film storytelling vernacular and make it kind of one new model.

[33:09] David Korins: I'll give you an example. In the theater, what we do really well is moving scenery, right? Obvious the scene changes, a wall breaks apart, a thing flies open. We're used to seeing those things really very, very easily and often. You never see that really in film and TV. They do a jump cut, they do a crossfade, right? You go from an office to a gymnasium and you kind of fade into it. In the theater, we talk all the time. Wouldn't it be so amazing if you could open up a door in the back of the theater and go out onto Times Square or whatever it is? And you don't get to do that really ever because you don't get that huge depth. Almost all the depth and the height are in fixed parameters. But in film and TV, you just go outside.

And in Grease Live, we've combined those things. We did all these obvious scene changes, all this theatrical methodology where we literally had a hallway scene and we broke open a wall and then you were in that office and then you broke open a wall and you were in somewhere else. And then we also did all the cool things of film and TV, like we were on a box set and we opened up a door and we literally ran out to the Warner Brothers lot and we had a carnival set up. And so that kind of storytelling, I think, felt so fresh and exciting because we were combining things that you're used to seeing in a different medium on television. And so that's really exciting and that's why I like doing all sorts of different things.

That's why I don't just do rock concerts or I don't just do production design or just do live events. I like to kind of mix and match because you can bring your expertise and apply them to different mediums. And I think when you do that, it feels so fresh and unique.

[36:30] David Korins: Like when was the last time on TV you saw a rotating set like you do in Hamilton, but also in the theater, you see tons of turntables all the time. But in TV, it's like, oh my God, could we actually do that? I'd never thought about that. You're right. On TV or movies, when you do see actual scenery move, it's because they're spoofing or taking it seriously, but they're presenting something theatrical, like a song and dance number for the most part. The camera zooms in, so your peripheral is only what the camera wants exactly you to see. And then the wall breaks apart and all of a sudden, yeah, there's this big ensemble behind you, of which I think something like Saturday Night Live takes really good advantage of, right?

Because that's sketch comedy where the camera, the audience there sees behind the scenes. You have to, there's no way to hide it. But then the camera is always right there. And then as soon as, sometimes we can see the scenery move, but I always like it at the end of the scenes when they always do the wide shot. Yeah, they have those little bumpers in and out, or you can see what the next scene, give you like a little behind the scenes look at what's actually happening in the studio to kind of give you that liveness of it all. I learned that lesson really, really early on. In fact, I was just telling someone about the first show I ever designed professionally. It was in a tiny little theater in Connecticut and I was building this brick wall and it was out on the next to the street, like on a lawn next to the street.

I was carving this brick by hand out of foam and I was painting it and a car pulled over, like screeched to the side of the road and pulled over and a woman got out and said, what is going on? And she couldn't comprehend that it was actually a fake wall. She thought it was a brick wall laying down. And it's interesting, people love behind the scenes stuff. They love the process of making. I remember as a kid when Michael Jackson's thriller video aired on MTV way back before they were streaming and you had no idea when it was going to air. It was just like you had to be sitting in front of the TV to see it. Before they aired it, they showed a making of which John Landis directed and they showed the prosthetics and how his hand bulge and all the contact lenses and the dance rehearsals and those famous pictures of the zombies and all their makeup sipping like Coca-Cola or whatever on break and people wafting the smoke and all that stuff.

And I thought this is more riveting than the video itself, just seeing how they do all this stuff. And so any time where you can show the edges of the storytelling and the kind of theatricality of it, it's not about spending less money. It's not that the Oscars have more money than Here Lies Love. It's about showing your hand as a maker, right? It gets back to that idea of like you get to work in metaphor because people know that it's not real. And so there's actually something kind of really satisfying about the human technique of making something that people really get a great appreciation for.

[36:35] Alan Seales: I miss, miss, I would watch all of those and the bloopers of especially like just messing up, messing up and recovering or making up lines, all of this. I mean, that's really why I started this podcast is to have these conversations to learn about how the sausage is made. And yet here we are hundreds of episodes in and you're only getting one set designer. Boy, oh boy. I will tell you like my, my almost the entire reason why I have an Instagram account is to pull back the curtain on the process of making things because there are so many decisions and so many parts of the process that people don't see, right? They don't see those pain elevations. They don't see all the different iterations of the possibilities of what the space could be.

They have no idea that we're building scale models, that there's, you know, hundreds of artisans working on something, welders, crafts people, props people, sculptors that are all kind of working together to make a thing that they're like, oh yeah, bricks and sticks. Time for a quick commercial break. Hang on a second. Welcome back to the episode. And at what point did you consciously lean into electronics with all of this as well? Because I remember, I remember Dear Evan Hansen very specifically in my mind stands out as holy cow, this is what you can do on stage now. Like it, it was pushing forward the tech that was traditionally like, I guess for a back, a lack of a better way to describe, like, you know, you have your proscenium, you have your, your wings that are flats that are painted.

And sometimes there's dimensions and there's faux finishing to give it the fake dimensions. But then all of a sudden when you add, like the technology catches up and you can have led screens and these great HD backlights and projections and all this stuff. Like, I remember Dear Evan Hansen again, just stood out as like, holy crap, that was amazing.

[38:29] David Korins: Well, first of all, you know, the, you go back to the writing, right? So from the very first reading, there was a moment in that show where, where they use the internet for good, right? They're crowdsourcing there. You know, you see the internet, something like quickens and it gets bigger and it, and it kind of goes viral. And then you see the internet for bad, something goes viral and it's the horrible version of it. And so I was like, oh gosh, we have to like do this online world. What's that going to be? Likely it's going to be digital. Interestingly, you know, Peter Negrini, who was the, the projection designer in that show, is also the projection designer of Here Lies Love and also of Tommy.

And so we've collaborated a lot together and there are those screens in Tommy, which are the first time they've ever been used on a Broadway show. They're, they're kind of these brand new pieces of technology called Muxwave and they're basically clear screens. They're like pieces of glass. So there's LED technology. So that, that scrim, it was not a scrim with a projection. It was actual translucent LCD? The scrim that flew in that got, you know, the big one, the one that kind of is mid-stage, that's a scrim. But those three panels that fly and track and move around, they are like essentially glass and you can, they're completely see-through and then you can push content through them and make them opaque or do whatever you want.

[40:03] Alan Seales: Wow.

[40:03] David Korins: So in that scene in the hospital where they're moving their hands and the content is moving, that's all basically put through glass. You know, five years ago or even five months ago, those things didn't exist. And so Dear Evan Hansen was like the most up-to-date version at that moment, you know, with LCD panels and with projection panels and, you know, scrim and things like that. So you're constantly moving along and innovating along with technology. But again, those things only work if they're there in support of story. And so if you think about Dear Evan Hansen, mainly that world existed in this kind of inky darkness, and we only use those screens to either show you architecture, bits and pieces of the locations that we're in, or when the internet came to life.

The success of the visuals of that show are actually when you take things away and you let this little floating tectonic plate of life, these little circles exist in the darkness, the way that Evan felt isolated. And then, of course, there's that revelation of space at the end where everything goes away and we have, you know, apple orchard trees and saplings and blue sky. That only works because we've spent the entire show in this kind of technological dark world. I'm fascinated by this. Are you using technology that is already there? How do you find new technology? Are you inventing? Are you working with like engineers to invent new technology?

[41:59] David Korins: Some, you know, I'll tell you, in Tommy, we have something that that we kind of invented and made based on things that exist, right? Those light bars that kind of move across the stage. They're brilliant. Thank you. Those are, I mean, it's funny. People in my office joke because for years I have, you know, I've been making kind of electrical objects for years and we've been putting our design from Passing Strange, you know, to like in Motown, we had this thing that we called the Floating Horizon Line, which Natasha Katz and I kind of developed together where there was lights in the front of something, on the back of something, and we were playing with all these shadows and bounce light and all this stuff.

Those light bars are an idea that I have had in my head for years and years and years and years. I've tried to put them into the Academy Awards. I've tried to put them into tons of projects. They either, we either couldn't innovate and make them the right scale. We couldn't make them elegant. We couldn't make them do what we wanted to lighting-wise or content-wise. We couldn't afford them. And it's interesting, Tommy is a perfect marriage of how they work storytelling-wise, how they kind of carve up the space and move and make it kind of a three-dimensional glowing version of a Modrian painting. But also we finally could innovate and put the stuff into a package that was small enough and elegant enough to be able to be on stage.

And they're like, they're in a way, you know, the end result of 10 or 15 years of thinking about objects like that and then how we could, it's a perfect marriage of script, storytelling, and technology. And we finally got there.

[43:02] Alan Seales: It's electronics with lights, with automation that all-

[43:07] David Korins: And with video. I mean, we put video content through it, right? So they perfectly work with the content that Peter is putting in. And so yeah, there's automation because they're timed and they're moved to the music and the choreography, but they're also literal lights and literal pieces of scenery all at once. It's incredible. It's incredible. I love seeing this sort of stuff come to life. And I think something that, you can use this idea for free, is putting movable LCD screens into clothing. Have you seen these? Have you seen the bendable LCD screens? They've been around for about five, six years now, but I've never seen them commercially used. So it'd be super cool to have like somebody's whole costume made out of an LCD screen or something.

[43:53] David Korins: A hundred percent.

[43:54] Alan Seales: Yeah. Yeah. So that's what you need to do next for David Cohen's The Musical.

[43:59] David Korins: Noted.

[44:02] Alan Seales: Okay. God, I feel like I could talk to you forever, but we should wrap up. I want to get into a little new game that I'm playing on episodes, which I just called Plot in 60 Seconds. So I want you to give me a number one through 10. I'm going to put 60 seconds on the screen. And then based on the number you give me, I'm going to tell you a musical and you have to give me the plot in 60 seconds.

[44:25] David Korins: Three.

[44:25] Alan Seales: Three?

[44:26] David Korins: Number is three.

[44:27] Alan Seales: Three. Okay. So your musical is The Sound of Music. You have 60 seconds to give me the plot. Go.

[44:33] David Korins: 60 seconds remaining. A single dad has a bunch of kids. A nun who is kind of a troublemaker, but kind of awesome, gets sent away to become the nanny. She turns the household into a magical creative space, teaching the kids how to sing and make clothing and is awesome. And eventually there's a love match with the dad. And there's also hate for the Nazis, as there should be. And they all run away, getting terrorized or really afraid of the Nazis. And they find happiness in a new place with music and love and laughter, and they create a new, quote unquote, modern family.

[45:22] Alan Seales: How many kids?

[45:25] David Korins: Six.

[45:26] Alan Seales: And who started it?

[45:29] David Korins: Julie Andrews was in the movie, but I like to not do the actor thing because there's the movie, there's the show, there's the revival, there's all those things. You ask for plot. You didn't ask me for production stats.

[45:43] Alan Seales: I know, I know. That was actually the most coherent plot recital that I've been given so far. People get under pressure and they start to describe the scenery, ironically, and the songs. Good job, good job.

[46:01] David Korins: Yeah, well, thank you. I'm nervous. I was scared.

[46:05] Alan Seales: As you should be. This is the hardest interview you'll do in this hour.

[46:10] Alan Seales: Okay, so the three standard closing questions I ask everyone. The very first one simply is what motivates you.

[46:16] David Korins: Wow. I have been fortunate enough to been born with a wiring that is filled with motivation, and as I said before, kind of boundless energy and imagination. And what motivates me is to help creators and artists tell the best versions of the stories that they have to tell. I love being the project catalyst and taking someone who has an idea, whether it's a company or an institution or a writer, and midwifing their idea into something that is more magical and more extraordinary than they could ever imagine. And I love doing that. And I'm motivated to do that every single day.

[47:03] Alan Seales: What advice would you give your younger self and younger people listening now starting out down a similar path?

[47:09] David Korins: Travel a lot. See a lot. Learn how to listen, because if you can learn how to listen, you will learn how to communicate. And leave in your wake things that are really good for the world. Don't do stupid crap.

[47:27] Alan Seales: Don't do stupid crap. That's the name of this episode.

[47:31] Alan Seales: All right, last question. If you could only see one show for the rest of your life, but you could see it as many times as you want, what would you see?

[47:35] David Korins: You know, my kids would make a show every summer on vacation. They would come together with their cousins and kind of put together something. And they were actually rather sophisticated, and these performances were pretty high level, and they were like great acting scenes and music scenes and songs and dances. I would watch any of those on repeat forever. They're the greatest performances you're ever going to see.

[48:06] Alan Seales: That is very, very true. All right, where can we find you online on social media, connect with you and watch behind the scenes videos?

[48:11] David Korins: I'm at David Korins.

[48:16] Alan Seales: Instagram? On YouTube?

[48:19] David Korins: I'm at David Korins, straight up across all platforms.

[48:22] Alan Seales: All right, all right. I am on Threads, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook. Leave a rating and a review wherever you are listening. Thanks to Jukebox the Ghost for the intro and outro music, and David Korins, thank you so much. I've enjoyed this chat.

[48:37] David Korins: Thank you. I've really enjoyed this show. Thanks for having me.