Sarah Snook screen-sharing selfies from a face-filtering phone app. Nicole Scherzinger getting her close-up via movie cameras. George Clooney making onstage television. Robert Downey Jr. superseded by a digital puppet.
High-tech storytelling is surging on Broadway. Over the last year, stages have been brimming with large-scale and high-resolution videos, deployed not simply for scenery but also as an integrated narrative tool. It is all made possible by the growing availability, affordability and stability of the cameras, computers, projectors and surfaces that are utilized as part of today’s stage sets.
The phenomenon, which is presumably here to stay, also reflects the ubiquity of digital devices in contemporary life. In an era when we are rarely separated from our smartphones or smartwatches, and video greets us in our cars and supermarkets, the latest technology is transforming stagecraft and storytelling.
“The majority of Americans’ waking, conscious moments are looking at screens,” said the designer Jake Barton, who last fall worked on “McNeal,” a play that starred Downey as a novelist whose entanglement with generative artificial intelligence is woven into the scenic design. “On one level,” Barton said, “this is just theater naturally evolving.”
Just two weeks ago, the Tony Awards gave the coveted best musical prize to “Maybe Happy Ending,” in which actors playing robots share a stage at times with massive videos depicting their digital memories. The best musical revival Tony went to “Sunset Boulevard,” where performers holding camera rigs film part of the action for transmission to a giant screen that swivels into the audience’s view. And the best play revival honor went to “Eureka Day,” which featured a reliably gut-busting scene in which chat comments posted during a school board meeting were projected above the cast.
“The audience can look wherever they please — that is the fun thing about theater,” said Darren Criss, who won a Tony for playing a robot in “Maybe Happy Ending.” “We talk to screens all day anyway,” he added. “What’s another one onstage?”
Still, there is plenty of skepticism about some of the ways in which screens are being employed onstage. In his review of “Sunset Boulevard,” Jesse Green, the chief theater critic at The New York Times, wrote, “The pictures — live video streamed onto an LCD screen more than 23 feet tall — are so big they almost blot out the show below.” And in an essay about “Good Night, and Good Luck,” the play starring Clooney, James Poniewozik, the chief television critic for The Times, observed: “Watching it is really like watching television: In the reproduced broadcasts, your attention is drawn more to Clooney’s features on a massive screen than to the actor onstage, dwarfed by his projection.”
Wendall K. Harrington, a pioneering projection designer who last year won a Tony honor for excellence, said she has concerns about some of the ways the field has evolved. “I don’t want to be the class crank, but I find it odd,” she said. “It’s attention-grabby and not so deep, and it’s a bad recipe for making thoughtful work.”
Some of the technology being used on Broadway is directly suggested by the stories being told. “Good Night, and Good Luck” was about television, justifying the presence of an onstage television studio and 26 onstage screens; in a meta multiplatform moment, this play based on a movie about television was then livestreamed by CNN.
“Sunset Boulevard” is about the movie industry, which makes the use of movie cameras and a cinema-scaled screen a part of the storytelling. “My director has never allowed me to see the screen, so the only thing I’ve ever seen are the pictures in press outlets,” said Scherzinger, who won a Tony for starring in that musical. She said that, by not looking as very tight shots of her face are projected behind her, “I’m able to disconnect from what’s on the screen.”
In other shows, the technology is not only a scenic element but also a narrative subject. “Maybe Happy Ending” is about robots haunted, if robots can be haunted, by digital memories. “McNeal” was about a novelist’s overreliance on A.I. “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” starring Snook, is about a portrait — in the Oscar Wilde novel it is a painting, but in the stage retelling, digital portraiture is foregrounded. Then there was “Redwood,” a musical starring Idina Menzel, in which LED screens surrounding the stage gave the audience shifting perspectives on a forest.
“It’s all about storytelling, but as our audience members get younger, this type of technology is important, because they’ve grown up with TikTok and Instagram and consume things differently,” said Jere Harris, the executive chairman of PRG, a company that builds sets and technology for entertainment and events. “And I think it will progress more rapidly as younger designers start to be hired for the theater.”
The Tony Awards do not have a category for projection design. Artists working in this area must negotiate, on a case-by-case basis, to be jointly eligible with scenic or lighting designers. This year, the play and musical scenic design prizes were both shared by set and video designers — Dane Laffrey and George Reeve for “Maybe Happy Ending,” and Miriam Buether and 59 for “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.”
A number of prominent designers have been petitioning the Tonys to change. Doing so, they said in their letter, would “draw specific attention to a medium that is often vital to productions that speak to the next generation of audiences.”
Theater makers have long embraced the latest technology, going all the way back to ancient Greeks with their wheeled platforms and cranes, as a way of conveying some aspect of dramatic action. And scenic designers have been projecting images onto stages for decades; the Wooster Group, for example, was an early pioneer with onstage camera use, and in recent years, the director Ivo van Hove (“Network”) has been known for video innovation.
But the technology has improved significantly — media servers are faster and more powerful, cameras are smaller, screen resolution is higher.
“When I was in college, in the late ’70s, we did a lot of experimenting with video, but the technology was so crude — we had these terrible video projectors and these giant cameras that weighed a ton and they had to always be connected with cables, so it was pretty clumsy,” said Derek McLane, a veteran scenic designer.
“What’s happening now is so much at a different level,” he said. “The quality of images is exponentially crisper and more subtle.”
Also helpful: Prices for some technology have fallen as manufacturing has become more efficient. “LED screens were too expensive for theater until recently,” said Ben Pearcy, a video designer for “Stranger Things,” which is a staged prequel to the Netflix series. “Big concert tours were the first to adapt that tool, because they had more financial resources, but the cost comes down, and it is becoming more affordable.”
Arena tours are not the only forerunners for Broadway. The theater industry has also benefited from server technology developed for gaming.
“Broadway is not really the place for experimentation because of the stakes financially,” said David Bergman, the video designer for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The play was first staged at a subsidized theater in Australia, where the mechanics of having that performer combine live speech and movement with filmed imagery could more easily be tested.
That show arrived on Broadway in March after an earlier run in London, and Snook, who won a Tony Award for her precision-demanding performance, said her experience on television made the hybrid work easier to imagine. “Everything, in a cumulative way, has led me to this — the proximity of cameras in ‘Succession,’ and absorbing them into the scene, made me not aware of the cameras onstage,” she said.
So what’s next? It’s hard to tell, even for those most intimately involved with pushing stage technology forward. Certainly, screens are getting brighter, images are getting richer, and environments are getting more immersive. Also, there is more real-time technology — as opposed to filmed content.
“The technology is always going to be changing,” said David Bengali, the projection designer for “Eureka Day” and “Good Night, and Good Luck.” “The question is, how does it get used. The more we can do with video and projection, the more we have to think about maintaining that balance between all the things that technology can do and the human scale of the events and the stories that people are coming to see.”
Video credits: via “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” “Maybe Happy Ending,” “McNeal,” “Sunset Blvd.” and “Redwood.”
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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