Rockwellgroup

Projects

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  81st Annual Academy Awards

  Seven years after completing the design of the Dolby Theatre, home to the Academy Awards, David Rockwell returned to design the sets for the world-renowned ceremony in 2009. The ambiance for the 81st Annual Academy Awards evoked more of an elegant party rather than a formal performance atmosphere. Twelve sets inspired by the movie-making process transformed throughout the night, creating a powerful visual narrative and enhancing the energy for both live and broadcast audiences. In an effort to bring presenters closer to the audience, a thrust was added to the theater, while an elaborate bandstand accommodating a full orchestra and the capability of moving up and down was placed on stage.  In a nod to the high-profile fashion associated with the event, Rockwell created a new proscenium, a curtain comprised of approximately 100,000 Swarovski crystals in a variety of shapes and sizes.

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  82nd Annual Academy Awards

  For the 82nd Annual Academy Awards, Rockwell Group built and expanded upon many of the design innovations introduced the previous year, including the Swarovski crystal curtain and new orchestra and seating structure. Following the past year’s focus on the making of movies, the 2010 design revolved around the love of movies. The white template of the stage combined with new integrated LED and projected imagery created a constant play of visuals, light, and movement. Adding to these effects were three circular platforms that acted as moving turntables on stage with multiple levels for a variety of focal points, camera set ups, and presentation locations. Rockwell also developed metalwork architectural screen drops with partly transparent modern decorative patterns for each of the acts.

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  Catch Me If You Can, Seattle

  David Rockwell and Rockwell Group reunited with their team from Broadway’s Tony Award winning Hairspray to open Catch Me If You Can at Seattle’s 5th Avenue Theater in 2007, which then moved on to Broadway. Rockwell Group has crafted sets that reflect the graphic style of the 1960s to capture Frank Abagnale Jr.’s tale of travel and deception. The show featured two full-stage high resolution LED screens, programmed with abstract stylized graphic images to provide the backdrop for different environments like hotels, motels and airports. A series of profile panels, some wavy, some angled, some circular, were used to create different apertures that frame the LED panels for different scenes. These devices are used to create a world of the 1960s television spectaculars. To add to this effect, the band is onstage on a sweeping wave-like bandstand that can track up and down the stage to fit the choreography.

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  Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

  A musical tale of two con men unfolding against the backdrop of the French Riviera, these sets were inspired by the open vistas of the Mediterranean, where pale-blue sky meets deep-blue sea. With a simple, shimmering blue surround and two turntables onstage, the multiple locations represented in the show are not full-blown set pieces, but more like suggestions or fragments through line and form. Just like a well played con, everything is light, airy, and ephemeral.

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  Dolby Theatre

  At the entry of the theater for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, a massive sculptural curtain of crushed glass and crystal parts to one side. Inside, balconies are cast glass and ceiling hosts swirling, silver-leaf latticework. Amidst all the glitter, the functional needs of broadcasting the Academy Awards ceremony are still met. A hydraulic-driven media cockpit in the center of the orchestra becomes the technical hub, housing TV cameras and related equipment. The flexible seating system permits 2,000 guests for live performances and up to 3,300 on Oscar night.

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  Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center

  The Film Society of Lincoln Center opened the new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center to the public in June 2011 as part of the redevelopment of the 16-acre Lincoln Center campus. Rockwell Group transformed this underutilized office space and a parking garage into a new state-of-the-art street-level Film Center, which houses two theaters, an amphitheater and a café. With the opening of the Film Center, the Film Society will be able to dramatically expand its programming with an emphasis on film education.

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  Free Man of Color

  George Wolfe’s production of John Guare’s new play, Free Man of Color, opened at Lincoln Center Theater on November 18, 2010, with sets by David Rockwell.  The titular “free man” is Jacques Cornet, a wealthy early-19th-century New Orleans resident who narrates and writes a play-within-a-play in a decaying Restoration theater.  The action transpires, somewhat humorously, within an almost utopian New Orleans at a moment in its history when all races and creeds are able to enjoy a harmonious co-existence. Moving from the sumptuousness of Jacques’ drawing room to the city streets to a slave ship in the harbor to the Bayou and to the mysterious “white space” of the contemporary maps of the Louisiana Territory, the various locations are created with an economy of means, but with a richness of color and detail on the dark wood-planked thrust stage.

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  Hairspray

  Tapped to turn the 1988 movie Hairspray into a Broadway musical, David Rockwell ’s theater sets aimed to capture the quirky humor of the original John Waters’s film. Set in 1962, the story follows teenager Tracy Turnblad in her quest to land a spot on a dance show at the local TV station in of Baltimore, its row houses represented in the sets by Formstone facades. TV informs the two-dimensional set design of the station, where most of the action takes place, resulting in an array of graphic patterns and abstracted forms. The behind-the-scenes look incorporates a suspended latticework of microphone booms, an LED wall of 610 circular pegs suggesting a Lite Brite toy, and a contoured curtain made of plastic red tubing and blue velour that reads as an enormous hairdo. For the studio’s backdrop of wide vertical stripes, the cool pastels were inspired by Necco wafers.

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  Harvey

  The Roundabout Theatre Company commissioned Rockwell Group to design the sets for the Broadway return of Harvey, the 1940s Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy by playwright Mary Chase. Inspired by the original play’s era, the design favors authenticity over abstraction in two revolving environments: the Dowd Family mansion and Sanitarium. From the wallpaper to the brocade and style of painting used for the backdrop, the set design transports theatre-goers back to times of affluent Victorian-style mansions and opulent landscapes.

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  Kinky Boots

  The musical adaptation of the 2005 British film Kinky Boots debuted on Broadway on April 4, 2013. Directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell, the play features music and lyrics by Cyndi Lauper and a script by Harvey Fierstein. Set in Northampton, England,Kinky Boots follows Charlie Price as he saves his family’s shoe factory with the help of Lola, a vivacious drag queen. Rockwell Group created an abstracted collage of a factory in which light shifts and actor-manipulated bits of scenery reveal peripheral scenes from pubs to drag clubs. To help achieve this shifting effect, a two-tiered factory office unit works as a rolling platform with two companion mobile staircases. Rockwell Group also worked with Jerry Mitchell in designing four fully functional conveyor belts that are incorporated into the choreography and appear throughout the show. The final scene completely transforms the gritty factory into the Milan International Shoe Fair - a glamorous and radiating mirrored showroom equipped with a moveable fashion runway.

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  Lucky Guy

  Lucky Guy, a play by the late Nora Ephron, directed by George C. Wolfe, and starring Tom Hanks, tells the story of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning tabloid columnist Mike McAlary in New York City during the 1980s and 90s. Rockwell Group designed a minimal set, recreating the grittier days of the city in the late 20th century. Mere fragments of scenery and pieces of furniture assembled by the cast recreate the various scenes within the smoke-filled world of the tabloid journalist. The primary defining element of the space is the hovering grid of the newsroom ceiling, which serves both to compress the space and as a projection surface for the images that define many of the scenes.

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  Team America: World Police

  Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the wild wits who created South Park, tapped Rockwell Group to collaborate on the art direction for their film, Team America: World Police. The irreverent and satiric script served as inspiration for the sets, which play with design conventions and scale while creating a totally believable world where the story can unfold. Rockwell Group led the production team in the creation of the film’s unexpected visual language and simplified views of cities. The far-flung backdrops for the crazy cast of marionettes include Paris, Cairo, New York, Kim Jung Il’s Palace, and the team’s headquarters. Subversive and ironic details combine for a humorous and provocative experience.

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  The Normal Heart

  For the production of The Normal Heart, Rockwell Group’s desire was to honor the spirit of the original production while simultaneously crafting an installation/performance space - a memorial to the fallen. The set consists of 3 large white walls that contain 6,310 individually cut out letters that were attached to form sentences that recounted the early events of the AIDS crisis. For the majority of the play, projections and light are used on the walls, which read mostly as a brick or simply textured surface. Scenes are given projected descriptions on a plain white header that floats, joined to ceiling joists, above the stage.

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  The Rocky Horror Show

  Not seen in New York for some 25 years, the cult-classic The Rocky Horror Show was ready for a stage revival. David Rockwell’s theatrical design harnesses the campy, carnival-esque energy of the production while capturing and updating the strong influences of 1950’s horror and sci-fi B-movies. The experience started at the theater entry, where red fabric and mannequins festooned the lobby. A movie theatre within a theater awaits was beyond. Limited sight lines within the small space created an opportunity to bring the audience closer to the show with sets that transform and prosceniums that disappear as the story unfolded.

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