Imperial Theatre – Broadway's Best Shows

Freedom and Flight: Spotlighting the Work of Water for Elephants Circus Designer Shana Carroll

by Ben Togut

Through her work as a circus designer, Shana Carroll strives to tell deeply human stories. When she was approached to collaborate on Water for Elephants, Carroll jumped at the chance, embracing the opportunity to accomplish meaningful storytelling using the visual language of circus.

“I felt like there was potential to have deep and powerful work with circus language,” Carroll said. “Partly because of the story, but also because of the composing team [PigPen Theatre Co.]. They also have a grit and a depth and a humanity to their work [that] I felt was similar to how I approach the circus and my work.”

The depth and humanity of circus are the reasons why Carroll was drawn to the art form in the first place. She recalls the moment she fell in love with the circus—newly eighteen, stepping into the old church where the Pickle Family Circus rehearsed, transfixed by the aerialists that dangled before her.

“I walked in and saw the trapeze artists 10 feet from me,” Shana said. “Seeing it so close up and seeing them with training clothes and messy hair, I suddenly saw the human being inside of it and just how moving and beautiful it was and how real it was. In theatre, we’re always trying to find metaphors for freedom and flight or stakes, and these were like very real stakes and very real feelings of freedom and flight.”

From then on, Carroll decided to devote her life to becoming a trapeze artist. She attended circus school in Montreal and was later involved with the Cirque du Soleil show Saltimbanco. While performing as a trapeze artist, Carroll was deeply involved with directing and coming up with new acts. Soon after founding the circus collective The Seven Fingers in 2002, Carroll shifted focus, committing herself to directing and choreographing full-time.

“I really just got so much more out of being able to work with other people and watch their progress and try to find the artist in them and the brilliance in them and the beauty in them and then also write shows,” Carroll explained.

Shana Carroll in rehearsal with the cast of *Water for Elephants*. Photo by Matthew Murphy.

A pivotal step in Carroll’s creative process for Water for Elephants was determining how circus functions as a narrative device in the musical. By looking through the script and spending time with the characters, Carroll came to see Water for Elephants as a memory play, where the “surreal capacity of circus language” allows the protagonist Jacob Jankowski to revisit the memories of his youth.

One scene in the show that illustrates the work Carroll strives to achieve through circus language happens during the raising of a circus tent soon after Jacob joins the traveling company.

“It’s the moment he’s falling in love with the circus, and so we want to make that feel sparkly and exciting and spectacular,” Carroll explained. “But also the sense of family and community which is so much why we fall in love with the circus. You need to throw someone and catch someone and hold them on your shoulders, and so it sort of speaks to the family element, just in the pure mechanics of circus language.”

Cast members celebrate the first preview performance of *Water for Elephants* at the Imperial Theatre. Photo by Tyler Gustin for MurphyMade.

Helping establish this feeling of interdependence among performers is a critical part of Carroll’s work as a circus designer. While actors and dancers are accustomed to working as an ensemble, performers often face a steep learning curve when real risk is involved as they must prioritize the safety of their castmates above their own.

“Everyone needs to adopt that feeling that everyone has everyone’s lives in their hands,” Carroll said. “Even if you’re not catching someone, you have their life in your hands. I think that’s one reason there’s been this really incredible camaraderie and bonding and spirit in the cast, because they have absorbed that.”

For Carroll, one of the most rewarding parts of working on Water for Elephants has been watching members of the cast and creative team appreciate the circus she treasures, the circus she fell in love with seeing trapeze artists all those years ago.

“I like the circus when we identify with the human on stage and then connect to the human on stage,” Carroll explained. “We care about the fact they’re hanging by one foot or standing on someone’s head and we care for them and their safety because we’ve somehow connected to them as a human.”

Water for Elephants is now playing at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre.

Gut Renovations: Broadway Shows That Physically Transformed Their Theaters

By Katie Devin Orenstein

Some Broadway shows can’t be contained in just a proscenium stage. The Main Stem has one permanent theater-in-the-round, the Circle in the Square, but there’s also a long history of visionary set designers and directors completely renovating one of the other 40 Broadway theaters to serve the needs of a show. The Broadway Theatre, on 53rd Street, has had its orchestra seats ripped out to make room for an immersive staging not once but thrice. A transformed theater, while costly, can fully immerse an audience into the world of the piece, creating unforgettable experiences. Below are some of the most fascinating immersive set designs in Broadway history.

Here Lies Love (2023)

The first theatrical transformation on our list is Broadway’s latest, with this season’s Here Lies Love, which begins performances June 17. It’s the first of the three shows on our list to call the Broadway Theatre home. Something about its massive scale and vaulted ceilings, originally designed in the 1920s for showing movies, makes it a prime choice for mega-musicals like Miss Saigon and experimental immersive productions alike.

Here Lies Loves is directed by Alex Timbers, and the set design by David Korins surrounds audiences in a 1980s American disco like the ones frequented by the show’s subject, former First Lady of the Philippines Imelda Marcos. Premiering at the Public Theater back in 2013, the idea of the show is to envelop viewers in a seductively cheerful world, to demonstrate how Marcos denied her and her husband’s regime’s cruelty, and how fascism packages itself to be attractive, as well as the lingering effects of American colonialism. The disco-electro-pop score by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, originally written as a concept album, is so danceable that audiences can buy tickets for the standing section closest to the runway stage, where they will be part of the show and guided to join in choreographer Annie-B Parsons’ dance moves. (This is the first time in Broadway history that standing room tickets are the most expensive instead of the least!)

The gut renovation for Here Lies Love, taking all the orchestra seats out of the Broadway:

Dude (1972)

The ill-fated Dude: The Highway Life may have only played 16 performances on Broadway in 1972, but this counterculture ‘happening’ from Gerome Ragni and Galt McDermot of Hair fame upended the rules for how a Broadway theater could be used. Bringing downtown uptown, the Broadway Theatre was rearranged by designer Eugene Lee into a theater-in-the-round, with the actors where the orchestra section had been, and some audience members sitting on the stage.

It even featured trapezes and trap doors, with actors, in character as “Mother Earth,” “Suzy Moon,” or the titular “Dude,” frequently interacting with the audience. Its “morality play” plot baffled critics, and Dude closed at a loss of $1 million, very high for 1972.

Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 (2017)

Great Comet, perhaps the most exhaustive and striking theater transformation on this list besides Here Lies Love, originated at Ars Nova, a flexible off-off-Broadway venue. As the show transferred to a tent in Hell’s Kitchen (dubbed “Kazino”), and then to the American Repertory Theater in Boston for its pre-Broadway tryout, director Rachel Chavkin and set designer Mimi Lien worked to retain the intimacy, playfulness, and Napoleonic and Russian flair of the show. Composer-lyricist Dave Malloy based the show on a sliver of War & Peace, and created a score pulling equally from klezmer, EDM, and Sondheim. The entire Imperial Theatre auditorium was wrapped in red velvet, and a series of cascading staircases connected the original stage, the orchestra, and even the balcony section into one cohesive playing space. The titular comet was represented by a gargantuan chandelier, inspired by the one at the Metropolitan Opera and made of thousands of Swarovski crystals. Lien and her team even redesigned the lobby, adding elements of a Cold War-era bunker. Comet was nominated for 12 Tonys, and won two, for Set and Lighting Design.

Mimi Lien’s initial sketches for Comet:

Cabaret (1998/2014 Revival)

For director Sam Mendes’ vision of the Kander and Ebb classic Cabaret, a former Broadway theater that had since been used as an adult movie theater and disco was reshaped into a grungy and sensual Kit Kat Club. Designer Robert Brill transformed the space on 43rd St, then known as Henry Miller’s Theater, for the show’s opening night. (10 years after Cabaret, Henry Miller’s was rebuilt as the Stephen Sondheim theater.) When it became clear Cabaret was a runaway hit, Brill and the producers searched for a more permanent home for an extended run, and decided to overhaul another former Broadway playhouse-turned-disco, the legendary Studio 54 nightclub space, which was in desperate need of renovation after decades of Andy Warhol’s parties. In both spaces, the stage was tightened into a small thrust, like the setup at many nightclubs both in New York and Berlin, and the premium orchestra seats were replaced with small tables and chairs. Brill, the Cabaret team, and the Roundabout Theater Company led by the late Todd Haimes did so much work on Studio 54 that they had reverted it back to its original purpose as a state-of-the-art Broadway theater, and when Cabaret closed in 2004 after a six year run, Studio 54 became home to everything from Waiting for Godot starring Nathan Lane in 2009 to Lifespan of a Fact starring Daniel Radcliffe in 2018, and the return of the very same Sam Mendes production of Cabaret, in 2014.

Candide (1974)

*A production image from Candide; notice the barstools in the background, which were audience seating*

Harold Prince revived Candide, the 1950s Bernstein operetta based on the work of Voltaire, off-Broadway in 1973. It featured a revised and clarified book by Hugh Wheeler, and a stripped-down design ethos that emphasized Candide’s hapless, everyman journey. Audiences surrounded a series of platforms and gangways, with some audience members even inside the rectangle of playing space. Hal Prince, never a risk-averse producer and director, was willing to reduce the number of tickets available in order to fit this conceptual set into the space. To transfer the production from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, set designers Eugene and Franne Lee ripped out most of the Broadway Theatre’s orchestra seating, just as they had done for Dude. Candide fared far better than Dude, running for 740 performances and winning 5 Tonys, including for the Lees’ design, and for Hal Prince’s direction. Eugene Lee passed away earlier in 2023 after designing 27 Broadway shows, and his work can still be seen in Wicked.

The gut renovation for Candide: