Something new, something borrowed and something blue
Starting points for set design
Evan’s world consists of home, school – and the internet. How to depict a network of information on stage, a place that is not a place? The virtual community is present on the screens, big and small, fragmented into different forms, above the physical events on the stage. Screens are embedded in the side walls and the entire stage can be covered with a projected image. The web surrounds the protagonist and all the people she interacts with in the story.
Our main character is on stage for almost the entire performance. Where Shakespeare ended his scenes with the stage instructions “leave”, the scriptwriters of the musical may cut from one scene to the next as in the film. The performance must maintain its rhythm, so Evan has to move from one situation to another in a few steps taken on stage. Therefore, the stage is divided into several levels in depth, each of which can represent its own place at each moment in the story. Locations can slide in and out around Evan, and the actor’s movement cuts the story from one place to another.
At its core, Evan Hansen’s story is about the lack of encounters between people. At the plot level, it takes place in the rooms of two homes and a school. In the set design, most of the venues are limited to realistically sized rooms, even though the stage is many times larger. In this way, we can construct an image in which we can simultaneously see, for example, each member of the Murphy family in their own space – alone.
The work features an orchestra of eight musicians. In musicals, the orchestra is often completely hidden from the audience’s gaze in the pit of the front stage. In this work, I wanted the presence of a live orchestra to be clearly noticeable to the audience, and the placement of the orchestra elsewhere than in the pit was also guided by practical factors arising from the rest of the repertoire. The orchestra is placed at the back of the stage behind a tulle. Tapestry tulle is an old theatre trick – when lit from the front, it looks like a closed surface, when the light comes from behind, it is transparent. This has allowed us to decide during the stage rehearsal period when the orchestra will be present on stage and when it will be hidden.
Set designer Antti Mattila