When David Rockwell was an architecture student at Syracuse University in upstate New York, he spent some time in New York City working with esteemed theater consultant and lighting designer Roger Morgan. One project they worked on was a Long Island theater, built in an old industrial park. When Morgan and Rockwell sat down to look at fabric samples in colorful hues of reds, oranges, blues and greens, Rock-well suggested that instead of picking one, they use them all. "I said, ‘Wait a minute, David,'" recalls Morgan."‘You're supposed to pick one color.’ He said, ‘No, no, you sprinkle them around.'" Morgan thought about it a moment, then agreed to give it a try. According to Morgan, Rockwell became engrossed with getting the sprinkle pattern exactly right: "it was a wonderful idea and David got deep into it and was fascinated by it."

Twenty-five years later, Rockwell found himself playing with similarly patterned color schemes for the "Lite-Brite wall," a showpiece for the set he was designing for the Broadway show Hairspray. The Lite-Brite wall, inspired by the children's toy, was built in collaboration with lighting designer Kenneth Posner, and would eventually contain over 600 LED fixtures that change color depending on the scene, even mimicking William Ivey Long's gorgeous costume color palette at various points during the show. From a small Long Island theater to the Great White Way, Rockwell was still fascinated with getting the color schemes exactly right. But this time the stakes were high. The show was scheduled for a pre-Broadway tryout in Seattle in May 2002 before opening at the Neil Simon Theatre in August.

MASTERING THE ART OF STORYTELLING
Rockwell was first introduced to the theater by his mother, a vaudeville dancer who also worked as a choreographer in community theater. After graduating from Syracuse, Rockwell headed back to NYC. In 1984 he started his own firm, Rockwell Group, and began establishing himself as an architect with a flair for the theatrical. Projects designed by the firm include the 200,000-square-foot Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut, Cirque du Soleil's theater in Orlando, Florida and the NYC restaurant Nobu. For Rockwell, the theme of storytelling applies to architectural design just as it does to theater. "At Nobu," says Rockwell, "so much of the environment is based on ideas about [chef] Nobu [Matsuhisa]'s food and the way he combines Japanese and South American influences, so in that case the 'script' is the menu."

But theater is a very fast game compared to architecture, where a project can go on for three years. Rockwell was first approached by Hairspray choreographer Jerry Mitchell and director Jack O'Brien in the summer of 2001. He'd worked with Mitchell the year before, making his first foray into set design with The Rocky Horror Show. Rockwell's reaction to the Hairspray invitation?  “Glee. We listened to the score and I thought it was so fresh and great, I was thrilled."

After the initial meeting, the creative team delved into research for the show, which takes place in 1962 in Baltimore. Hairspray, based on the 1988 John Waters film, tells the story of Tracy Turnblad, a wide-eyed, plus-sized high school student who rises to fame dancing on the popular "Corny Collins Show" and winds up integrating the television program and finding true love along the way. Mitchell, O'Brien and Rockwell joined Waters in a trip to his hometown, where Rockwell was able to see first-hand Baltimore's formstone-covered brownstones featured in the movie.

"In going to Baltimore and looking at John Waters' movies," says Rockwell, "it was very clear to me that Baltimore up close, done literally onstage, was going to look an awful lot like Death Of A Salesman. Rockwell decided to solve the problem by taking his cues from 1950s television shows, designing the sets with a flattened perspective to make them appear more abstract and exaggerated.

MOVING RIGHT ALONG
Another challenge presented by the show was its fast pace. O'Brien was adamant that nothing—cast member, set nor scene—rest in one place for long. Rockwell designed models for the Turnblads' apartment and the television studio that could quickly move on or offstage as well as appear simultaneously. While Tracy is watching the "Corny Collins Show" in the elevated apartment set, the dancers of the show fill the stage around her, so theatergoers can see what she's viewing at the same time they watch her. Similarly, the set piece for the Har-de-Har Hut (the name of Tracy's father's comic novelty shop, which Rockwell created with inspiration from the children's game "Mousetrap") is a jam-packed visual treat that rolls on- and offstage.

But the book for the show presented even greater obstacles. "This was a show about integration, but the show isn't integrated until the end," says Rockwell. "The show is arranged so everyone is singing, but the way it's written only half the cast is actually onstage. So there was a need to create ways for people to participate without being part of the primary scene." Rockwell fixed this dilemma by creating a multilevel tower upstage using scaffolding—an abstract representation of Baltimore fire escapes—that cast members could stand on. A backdrop with large cutout ovals was lowered in front of the scaffolding so only the actors' silhouettes were visible, providing movement and sound without identification.

The greatest technical difficulty Rockwell faced, besides the enormous Lite-Brite wall, was the set for Motormouth Maybelle's record shop. Because the flyloft of the theater was almost completely filled with scrims and flats for the show, Rockwell had to give the illusion of a large record shop using only eight inches of depth onstage. The result, with its colorful beads and record covers, employs an ingenious use of false perspective.

Rockwell was nervous the first time he sat in on the cast rehearsal. "You get these butterflies in your stomach about making sure what you're doing is going to work with what they're doing," he says. "But we saw everything mocked up in the scene shop and had a chance to impact all of it as it was being made." The sets for the show were built, painted, electrified and automated by Norwalk, CT-based Showmotion, Inc., a company Rockwell is quick to praise."We've had an ongoing relationship with them," he says, "and they've been just great."

FROM SEATTLE TO BROADWAY
The world premiere of Hairspray took place in Seattle on July 18, 2002 and was a hit with local critics. But Rockwell's job was far from over. While watching the performances, Rockwell found that the scaffolding towers interfered visually with the storytelling, particularly in the first act. So for the New York run, the crew flew the Lite-Brite wall and brought it downstage of the towers, hiding them from sight. The Motormouth set was also reconfigured between the Seattle and New York runs, and pieces that Rockwell had originally designed but not used, like the chandeliers featured in the finale, were added.

Although they'd wowed audiences in Seattle, the designers knew that New York theatergoers and critics could be fickle at best. Roger Morgan was in the audience on opening night. (Typical of the small world of theater, Morgan's firm had expanded the women's bathroom and added seats to the Neil Simon Theatre shortly before the show designed by his former protégé loaded in.) Morgan was impressed."It looks like the work of a designer who's been designing Broadway musicals all his life," he says."It has a deftness to it that typically comes with experience."

The critics agreed. The pre-show buzz combined with rave reviews created a frenzy for tickets. Now that Hairspray is up and running, Rockwell finds himself missing the excitement of theater."I'm having withdrawal, not being there all the time," he says, admitting he can't get the music from the show out of his head. Rockwell was recently appointed to the board of NYC's Public Theater and is currently looking through scripts for his next project."I'd like to have a theater design project going at any one time because I find it thrilling, and I also think it actually makes [Rockwell Group's] architecture more interesting," he says. "The idea of the collaboration involved in theater is something that we more and more want to bring to architecture." For Rockwell, it's just a labor of love.

STAGE DIRECTIONS December 2002

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