The Scottsboro 2010 BOYS 46 THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS by John Kander, Fred Ebb, and David Thompson. Directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman. Set designer: Beowulf Boritt. Costumes: Toni Leslie James. Light designer: Ken Bilington. Broadway (Lyceum Theater), 2010 49 Sondheim on 50 Sondheim 2010 51 THE TEMPEST Photo by Beowul Boritt 2011 54 THE TEMPEST by William Shakespeare. Director: Kevin Moriarty. Set and costume designer: Beowulf Boritt. Light designer: Clifton Taylor. Sound designer: Broken Chord. Dallas Theater Center, 2011 Prospero 55 2014 ACT ACT ONE by James Lapine based on the autobiography by Moss Hart, directed by James Lapine. Set designer: Beowulf Boritt. Costume designer: Jane Greenwood. Light designer: Ken Billington. Sound designer: Dan Moses Schrier. Broadway - Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center, 2014 one 66 2015 Thérèse Raquin THÉRÈSE RAQUIN by Helen Edmundson based on the Novel by Emile Zola. Directed by Evan Cabinet. Set designer: Beowulf Boritt. Costume designer: Jane Greenwood. Light designer: Keith Parham. Sound designer: Josh Schmidt. Broadway - Roundabout Theatre Company, Studio 54, 2015. 90 92 94 2016 Photos by Matthew Murphy A BRONX TALE by Chazz Palminteri, Alan Menken and Glenn Slater. Directed by Robert DeNiro & Jerry Zaks. Set designer: Beowulf Boritt. Choreographer: Sergio Trujillo. Costumes by William Ivey Long. Light designer: Howell Binkley. Sound designer: Gareth Owen. Broadway (Longacre Theatre) 2016. Bronx Tale is set in Belmont, the A Little Italy section of the Bronx in the 1950s and 60s. It is a tightknit community which the opening song describes as an entire world in a few blocks. Despite being in New York, it has qualities of a small town, both the camaraderie and the suffocating overfamiliarity of everyone knowing everyone else’s business. Beowulf Boritt’s first design jobs in New York were at a small Italian-American theatre in this neighborhood, he worked there for five years so he knows the neighborhood well. The set created Belmont with four massive, multi-story, iron fire escape towers which tracked and spun about the stage creating a wide variety of environments within a world of stylized Bronx cityscapes all painted in red and black like a 1950s three-tone print. It all combined to make a cage that both protects and traps the narrator Cologero as he strives and ultimately succeeds in breaking past his surroundings and charting his own path in the world. Beowulf’s associate Jared Rutherford was crucial to a making this ambitious set. A Bronx Tale A Bronx 95 97 98 COME FROM AWAY by Irene Sankoff and David Hein. Directed by Christopher Ashley. Set designer: Beowulf Boritt. Choreographer: Kelly Devine. Costumes: Toni Leslie James. Lighting designer: Howell Binkley. Sound designer: Gareth Owen. Broadway (Schoenfeld Theater), 2017. 2017 ome From Away is the story of 7,000 airline passengers who were stranded in Gander, Newfoundland when American Cairspace was closed after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. It is theatrical storytelling with actors playing multiple roles often within a single song, but the material is so sensitive, especially to a New Yorker, that the design required an extra level of care. It is a non-literal theatrical space, but all made with real materials with a minimum of artifice. The back wall of the set is painted as a cerulean blue sky, the beautiful color of the sky that day in New York when death rained from above. But that sky is clearly a painted image on a wall of rough wooden planks. The wall transforms effortlessly under light, sometimes representing a sky, but sometimes backlit like louvers, sometimes displaying a field of stars, and often revealing doors or hatches to aid the story. The floor is a matching wood treatment with a turntable which rotates the actors and twelve 106 2017 mismatched weathered, wooden chairs which theatrically make the airplanes, busses, schools and restaurants and other locations in the story. Around the turntable is a forest of mighty tree trunks to help create the world of remote, rural Newfoundland far from the events in Manhattan and Washington, D.C.. In the Broadway production these are real trees chosen by Beowulf Boritt in the Catskill mountains north of New York. The largest of them weighs six thousand pounds, but Beowulf felt it was important to use real trees, not artificial scenic trees for this particular story. Two center stage trees were violently broken, their shattered bases reaching toward the sky, to subtly memorialize the fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center. Because they were harvested in late fall, some of them retained enough water in their dormant state to actually begin sprouting leaves six months later in the theatre when spring arrived, a fitting metaphor for the tenacity of life and hope that Come From Away is about. 107 YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN 2017 108 110 ernhardt / amlet B 2018 H BERNHARDT/HAMLET by Theresa Rebeck. Direction: Moritz von Stuelpnagel. Set designer: Beowulf Boritt. Costume designer: Toni Leslie James. Light designer: Bradley King. Broadway American Airlines Theater, Roundabout Theatre Company, 2018 118 Dressing room 120 122 Cyrano De Bergerac 123 Freestyle Love Supreme 2019 FREESTYLE LOVE SUPREME created by Thomas Kail, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Anthony Veneziale. Directed by Thomas Kaul. Set designer: Beowulf Boritt. Costume designer: Lisa Zina. Lighting designer: Jeff Croiter. Sound designer: Nevin Steinberg. Broadway (Booth Theatre), 2019. 138 Models LS is an improvised show, created in freestyle verse nightly by a revolving cast of performers. FBeowulf Boritt first designed it in 2004 and has remained with the project since then. The scenic challenge has always been to create a tabula rasa to elevate and support the performers on a show with no repeated content. For the Broadway production, the set was built as a forced perspective room which replicated and carried onto the stage the interior décor of the Booth theatre. With forced perspective the set drew that architecture down to a human scale allowing the performers to dominate the playing space. Additionally, the set was made of lexan, translucently painted to look like the wood of the theatre paneling, but which could be backlit to change color like a cyc to enhance the rhythms and beats of the performances. 139 Beowulf Boritt Biography Beowulf Boritt is currently represented on Broadway by Sankoff & Hein’s Come From Away directed by Chris Ashley. He designed the Tony Award® winning set for James Lapine’s Act One. He has also received Tony Award® nominations for his designs for Evan Cabnet’s production of Therese Raquin and Susan Stroman’s production of Kander and Ebb’s The Scottsboro Boys. He designed David Thompson’s Prince of Broadway and Alfred Uhry’s LoveMusik on Broadway for Harold Prince. He designed Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Sondheim on Sondheim and Finn and Sheinkin’s The Twenty-Fifth Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee both directed by Mr. Lapine. He designed Steve Martin’s Meteor Shower directed by Jerry Zaks and Menken, Slater, and Palminteri’s A Bronx Tale co-directed by Robert DeNiro and Mr. Zaks. Other Broadway shows include Lin-Manuel Miranda, Thomas Kail, and Anthony Veneziale’s Freestyle Love Supreme, the New York and Russian productions of Chaplin for director Warren Carlyle, John Rando’s revival of On The Town, Rob Askins’ Hand To God directed by Moritz Von Stuelpnagel, and the long running Broadway and international hit Rock of Ages directed by Kristin Hanggi. He and his work have been called “feverishly inventive” (New York Times), “Visionary” (Playbill), “miraculous” (New Yorker) and “a genius guy who does crazy sets.” (Mel Brooks). Off-Broadway, he has designed over one hundred shows, including Kenny Leon’s production of Much Ado About Nothing and Dan Sullivan’s Coriolanus for Shakespeare in the Park, Fiddler On The Roof (in Yiddish) directed by Joel Grey, the original production of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years for director Daisy Prince, Mike Birbiglia’s The New One, Sleepwalk With Me, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend, and Thank God For Jokes for Seth Barrish, and Strindberg’s Miss Julie for director Scott Schwartz. He has designed scenery for Lincoln Center Theater,The Roundabout Theatre Company, The Public Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage, The Vineyard Theatre, Manhattan Class Company, Primary Stages, The Pearl Theatre, Keen Company, Red Bull, and The New Group. His work has been seen in Europe, Asia, and Australia. Across the United States he has designed for the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, La Jolla Playhouse and the Old Globe in San Diego, Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, the Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, Ford’s Theatre, and the Signature Theatre in Washington, D.C., the McCarter Theatre, the George Street Playhouse, and the Papermill Playhouse in New Jersey, the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, the Ahmanson Theater, the Mark Taper Forum, and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, the Huntington Theatre and the American Repertory Theatre in Boston, the Alley Theater in Houston, the Fifth Avenue Theatre and the Seattle Repertory Theatre in Seattle, the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut, the Ogunquit Playhouse in Maine, The Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Hartford Stage, The Philadelphia Theatre Company, the Dallas Theatre Center, the Cleveland Playhouse, Saint Louis Repertory Theatre, the Cincinatti Playhouse, the Delaware Theatre Company, the Utah Shakespeare Festival and many others. He designed Warren Carlyle’s 2018 production of Jerome Robbins: Something To Dance About and Lynne Taylor Corbett’s 2011 production of the Brecht/Weill Seven Deadly Sins for the New York City Ballet. He has twice designed the scenery for The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. In addition to a Tony Award, Beowulf has been honored with a Live Design Award for Innovation in Scenic Design, a Broadway Beacon Award, an Audelco Award, a Barrymore award, and a St.