The curtain had just come down on a recent Wednesday matinee of the Broadway revival of “Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play set in a small New Hampshire town. But cast and crew members were already in the basement of the Ethel Barrymore Theater, lining up to assemble BLTs.
The fixings were arrayed on a table: hot bacon, romaine hearts and tomato slices, white toast, mayonnaise (traditional and vegan) and, for iconoclasts, honey mustard and avocado. There were noisy debates about whether crispy or chewy bacon makes a superior sandwich.
There was consensus on one matter. “What’s better than bacon?” barked Julie Halston, one of the show’s 28 actors. “Nothing.”
This was not a catered meal or a special occasion. It was a BLT Wednesday, and the bacon had been fried up in the wings, just steps away from the actors as they performed the play’s final stretch. To add a sense memory, two pounds of bacon are fried at every performance.
Kenny Leon, who directed the show, said he was inspired by David Cromer’s 2009 Off Broadway revival of “Our Town,” which featured the onstage cooking of bacon during the same third-act scene, when the ghost of Emily, a leading character, visits her childhood home at breakfast time.
Mr. Leon’s production has almost no props or stage scenery, and without them, he said, “your listening and sense of smell perk up.” He and his creative team decided that cooking offstage would make the scene sizzle. “I want that every night,” he recalled thinking.
Food aromas have been part of the dramatic toolbox for centuries. More recently, the Broadway musical “Waitress” hired a “pie consultant” to bake apple pies to scent the theater. In 2019, before the pandemic, “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” partnered with the fragrance house Joya Studio on a sweet, citrusy smell meant to evoke “an elegant French bakery,” as Frederick Bouchardy, the company’s founder put it. (Concerns about ventilation put an end to that when Broadway reopened.)
Deploying scents also has a history in movie theaters. A technology called Smell-O-Vision was used to emit the fragrance of wine, baked bread and other elements in the 1960 film “Scent of Mystery.” (AromaRama was a competitor.) John Waters went analog for his 1981 film, “Polyester,” using Odorama, a gimmick in which audiences used scratch-and-sniff cards to summon whiffs of pizza and glue — and even flatulence, in true Waters fashion.
Last month, Joya Studio provided a blueberry pie scent for preview screenings of the new horror film “Heretic” at Alamo Drafthouse theaters in Manhattan and other cities. During a scene in which missionaries visit the lead character (played by Hugh Grant), who says his wife is making a blueberry pie, hidden atomizers filled the air with the aroma of blueberry pie as the audience was served slices.
Mr. Bouchardy said Joya Studio had worked with A24, the studio behind “Heretic,” for several weeks to come up with a scent that evoked the right combination of “crust, cream, caramel, blueberry, plum, sugar.”
The finished oil in the diffusers contained about 27 elements, including vanillin and methyl cinnamate, a molecule that gives off a sweet amber scent — a much more complex fragrance than if, say, a blueberry compote were prepared live.
Mr. Bouchardy sounded giddy when informed of the baconating at “Our Town.”
“What? Brilliant. I love it,” he said. “That’s very smart. That scent is so diffusive.”
Meghan Abel, the head of the Barrymore Theater’s prop department, is responsible for the bacon aroma. She also uses strategically placed atomizers to spread two other scents — heliotrope and vanilla — at other points in the performance.
Faking bacon didn’t make it. “I tried a synthetic smell, but it smelled like breakfast, not bacon,” she said.
Every other Wednesday, Ms. Abel spends about $100 for 16 pounds of packaged bacon at a Food Emporium near the theater.
Her showtime routine has to run like clockwork. When she hears her cue for the breakfast scene, she takes the stairs from the basement to the wings and heats the bacon in an electric skillet atop a small table. (She adds bacon fat to give the smell more oomph, and some bacon cooked in an earlier performance to speed up the process.) A foil roasting pan mounted over the skillet acts as a hood to ensure that the steam doesn’t escape upward.
A few minutes later, hearing her second cue — “one can go back there again into living,” Emily says — Ms. Abel removes the skillet’s cover and pushes aside a black curtain to her left. She turns on a box fan in front of the skillet and browns the bacon using tongs in her right hand. The curtain hides her from view as the fan blows the aroma onto the stage and into the audience.
About seven minutes after that — she times this on her silenced phone — she drops the curtain, turns off the skillet and carries it to the basement. There, she wraps the bacon in foil and stores it in a mini-refrigerator until it’s reheated for the weekly BLT meals that are usually held between shows on Saturday.
Harold McGee, an expert on the science of food and cooking, said it all sounded like clever dramaturgy.
“You go to a diner in the morning and there’s a bacon smell in the air and your brain says, ‘I’ve smelled this before and I’m not going to pay attention,’ ” he said. “Smelling it at a Broadway theater, your brain is registering novelty and familiarity at the same time in a totally unusual context. It jumps out.”
For the actors steeping in the scent day after day, there’s not much novelty. Rather, Sky Smith, who plays two characters, said smelling bacon onstage is like getting on a guest list.
“There’s a growing anticipation as the week goes on,” he said, “that a party is waiting for us.”
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