Boylston to Broadway
Thanks to set designer Anna Louizos, the Colonial Theatre has a starring role on the Great White Way
"Curtains," which has its Broadway opening Tuesday , is the last musical collaboration of John Kander and Fred Ebb , the composer-lyricist team best known for "Cabaret" and "Chicago." Ebb died in 2004.
A murder mystery starring David Hyde Pierce , "Curtains" centers on a musical during its tryout run in Boston in 1959. More specifically, the musical within a musical is playing at the century-old Colonial Theatre, on Boylston Street, which the set re - creates. The design is by Anna Louizos , whose work includes "Avenue Q" and "High Fidelity." The latter had its own tryout run at the Colonial, last fall.
Louizos began work on the set in February 2006 and mounted it in Los Angeles in June, before the move to Broadway. Recently, she gave a tour of the set at the Al Hirschfeld Theater in New York. Below, she describes her inspirations, many of which came from the coffee-table book "Boston's Colonial Theatre: Celebrating a Century of Theatrical Vision ":
WRITING ON THE WALL
"There was an image in the book of some graffiti scrawled by artists in chalk in the lighting booth. And we decided to do that on our set; we signed the names of various people involved with those shows on the back wall. It adds so much character to the space. It feels right."
A GOLDEN ARCH
"There's such great detail in the book that the scenic artists and the shop were able to construct very close to the look of the Colonial. It's such a beautiful proscenium, with that gilded archway . . . The shop built everything. All the acanthus-leaf detail? All that is vacuformed material. It's like a plastic mold. What vacuform is is a process that allows you to take sheets of flexible plastic and lay it over a positive mold. They drill many, many holes through it and it sucks plastic over the mold and replicates details exactly. You just staple it on a frame and it looks totally solid. The proscenium is primed and painted with red undercoating, then the gilded top, and it has a wonderful gold sheen to it. How much would something like that cost? I have no idea. I try not to think about it! Tens of thousands of dollars."
SHOWSTOPPERS
"Once I saw the book and all the posters from the great shows that played at the Colonial -- 'Lady in the Dark,' 'On the Town, ' 'Carousel ' -- it was inspiring. It made us want to re - create some of the history of the Colonial and pay tribute to some of those shows. So we reproduce some of the posters on the stage here." 