Andrew Jackness, the set designer for the first Broadway revival of “Bye, Bye Birdie”, in the first new Broadway theater in two decades, is too much of a gentleman to say that money is what separates Broadway musicals from all other theater, and that much of that money usually gets poured into the set.

Instead, he puts it this way: “Traditionally, people expect something bigger on Broadway, and Broadway musicals have a special aura.”

If you want to see a literally off-the-wall expression of the interplay between money and design, go to West 43rd Street and look at the new theater in which “Bye, Bye Birdie” is playing: The theater itself is a stage set.

The shallow brick facade of the old three-story Henry Miller’s Theater is tacked onto an off-shoot of the new 55-story steel and glass Bank of America Tower.


Looked at from the front, it appears to be a normal theater. You need a sideways view to realize that the facade is at most two to three feet thick. (The dark red brick on the left in the picture at left is all that remains of the original Henry Miller’s Theater.) The theater is no longer behind the facade. Right now, there is nothing more than a lobby on the ground floor and empty space on the floors above; someday there may be a restaurant there, but not the theater. Instead, the theater has been constructed underground. The reason seems straightforward — the above-ground real estate was too expensive to give to a theater… a non-profit one like the Roundabout Theater at that.

There are several such facades of old buildings tacked onto new developments in the city (maybe most bizarrely the old Edgar Allan Poe House on Third Street) — and more to come, including the Provincetown Playhouse, which, like the Poe House, is courtesy of New York University. This seems to give a post-modern spin on Shakespeare: All the world’s a stage set.

The new interior, it must be said, is impressive, and the theater is “green” — energy efficient, environmentally sensitive — a boon for both the actors and the audience.

And for the set designer?

“I liked working in this theater,” Andrew Jackness said, as we sat in the empty mid-day mezzanine, looking down at the designer’s handiwork on the stage. True, there were a few drawbacks to working in a new theater — “there wasn’t a crescent wrench, there wasn’t a screw; no mirrors, no clothing rack” — but there was much that made the designer’s job easier, including the large wing space. “For a musical, the scenery has to store offstage.”

Like any set designer, Andrew Jackness can talk construction with the carpenters, model-making with his drafting assistants, color and pattern with the costume designer, levels with the lighting designer, and the price of things with the producers — as well as locale, concept and movement with the director. But somewhere lurking within him is the seven-year-old who saw “My Fair Lady” and can still recall nearly every detail. “I remember the oval of London that was painted on the scrim, which led to the people frozen in Covent Garden,” he said. “I was completely enraptured with the experience of the world of the theater, the tableau that comes to life on the stage, the beauty of the images.”

He realizes that not everybody reacts the same way to a set; they may not even be conscious of it. “People remember the experience more than the set. If a show is good, they will like the set. People won’t remember the set, or won’t like it, if they don’t like a show.”

Yes, some of the most memorable Broadway sets happen to have been the most expensive — the helicopter landing in Miss Saigon, the massive mansion that lifts into the air in Sunset Boulevard, both designed by John Napier. But some of the most warmly regarded Broadway musicals over the past few decades have had a bare-bones set by Broadway standards, including “Hair” and “A Chorus Line.” Of course, “bare bones” on Broadway has a special meaning. “Even if you’re doing Our Town, you’re going to have to put in a floor; you’re going to have to rent lights.” And minimalism is not exactly a Broadway trend: if “Spider-man Turn Off The Dark” opens on Broadway in February as planned, it will reportedly have the largest budget in Broadway history, some $40 million, about a quarter of which will be spent on the set.

By contrast, the budget for the set of “Bye, Bye, Birdie” was about $650,000. Jackness began working with director Robert Longbottom more than a year ago on the revival, whose official opening is October 15th. The original production opened on Broadway in 1960, inspired by Elvis Presley’s having being drafted into the army three years earlier. Jackness and Longbottom took their main inspiration for the new set from the “Carousel Of Progress” in the 1964 Worlds Fair, “where the audience moved on a ring conveyer belt around scenes from American life from the past to the future.

“I had feelings about the show. It needed to be simple. The show is light and needs to be fluid. To do realistic heavy scenery would weigh the show down. The comedy is broad, a series of vignettes.
In my thinking about it, the set had to be clean and broad.”

Since he thinks visually, Jackness used a computer to build a model of what he wanted, Photoshopping little characters in them. He thought of making the overall set a series of panels with each scene played in the middle.

He decided there were too many panels; it was too boxed-in.

“Every time I tried to get too complicated with the design, it didn’t look good, so I brought it back to simple.”

Jackness played with puppets as a child and he thinks this helps explain what kind of designer he has become, different from the ones who grew up making, say, model airplanes. He thinks of the set as a series of kinetic sculptures.

That is why he came up with a train that the characters travel in:

Here is how the set of the train station looks during a musical number with John Stamos and a half dozen members of the cast.

The set designer’s puppet-playing childhood also helped him come up with the way to re-imagine the most famous scene in the show — the opening with all the kids on the telephone.

“I gave them their own world to spin in,” he said. Here the actors are, spinning (the booths move around with them):

Update: This production of Bye, Bye Birdie was almost universally panned, with the exception of John Simon (!) Only the new theater was praised.

Photographs of Henry Miller’s Theater by Jonathan Mandell. All other pictures courtesy Andrew Jackness and Boneau Bryan-Brown.

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