Interview with Scenic Designer Jim Hunter

Jim Hunter reveals how the set design contributes to storytelling and the immersive experience of our production of Evita!

Orlando Shakes: Describe your inspiration and direction for the scenic design.

Jim Hunter: Michelangelo said that “Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.” This is just a fancy way of saying “less is more” and that the simple solution is often the most beautiful. We’ve all heard that less is more, but the real trick is how do you pick the “best less.” When designing a large musical like Evita you have to take into account an enormous number of factors. While musicals are emotive interpretations and not documentaries, a good bit of attention must be paid to period accuracy in order to properly tell a fundamentally true story like Eva Peron’s journey. Yet the set for a musical can’t just be a series of locations but rather should strive to evoke all the passion and all the expanse embodied in the sweeping music and movement of this story. The task then, is to select from the vast amount of research, images and sounds to hopefully select the “best less.”

One of the most iconic scenes in the musical is Eva Peron’s speech from the balcony of the Casa Rosada, the office of the President of Argentina. In theatres with limited offstage storage, like Orlando Shakes’ Margeson Theatre, this Spanish cast iron balcony can often be the dominant scenic element. The trick for me was to find some approach that allowed the balcony to be central and then to also breakaway from having our set stuck with just realist architectural motifs. The vitality of late 1940’s Argentine nightlife is a key story element in the musical. Envision the Margeson’s audience, who are literally sitting in the room with the Evita performers and the band, experiencing this story. After much trial and error, ultimately, it was thinking of the set as a sort of “nightclub” that inspired the energy, color, and motifs of the scenic environment.

Orlando Shakes: What was the greatest challenge you faced in designing this set? How did you overcome it?

Evita Scenic Design Rendering by Jim Hunter

Jim: Evita is the eighth production that I have designed in the Margeson. It is quite simply one of the most exciting spaces to experience a high spectacle musical. Most large musicals are produced in proscenium spaces that are literally “theater in two rooms.” The audience is in one room and the performance, up on the stage, is in another. This is not the Margeson! It is so exciting when, say, Anita in West Side Story is tap dancing and twirling just a few feet away.

The Margeson’s thrust stage also provides significant challenges when staging a large musical. There’s no fly tower to move scenery up and off the stage. There is no wing space, areas out of the audience’s view, to move scenery off the stage. The story arcs in such musicals as Spamalot, West Side Story, and Evita are vast and it is hard to fit these musicals within the Margeson. Our Evita attempts to make the best of the space’s challenges by creating a single basic set that hopefully will conjure the story’s spirit and, importantly, also help the director stage the play by manipulating scenic elements and props.

Orlando Shakes: How many different settings are there for this show?

Jim: Our production of Evita would be considered a “unit set with phases”. A unit set is a single structure that incorporates most of the playing spaces and other requirements to serve the script “all-in-one”. The phases in the equation involve moving large sections of the set to multiple positions, thereby altering the playing space to serve all the individual scenes required by the story. Evita requires 28 individual phases, changes to the scenic environment, in order to support telling the story. These phases can be something as simple as bringing on a bed and nightstand to create a bedroom to having the entire rear wall of the set open for Eva Peron’s first grand entrance onto the stage.

Evita Scenic Design Rendering by Jim Hunter

Orlando Shakes: How does lighting play into this design?

Jim: Great lighting is critical to the success of every musical. Lighting is like music; it can evoke an emotional response in audience members the same way that music can. Orlando Shakes is very fortunate to have such a wonderful lighting artist as Bert Scott working on the theatre’s productions. This is my sixth production working with Bert and I so admire his beautiful style and technical skill. I try to help by including many practical lighting elements contained within the set. There are 80 individual up-lights mounted within the floor, three chandeliers overhead that can lower and rise individually as needed, a number of wall sconces and globe lights on the set, and some other surprises. Bert’s work emboldens my choice of color and structural design because his lighting is so beautifully sculptural.

Orlando Shakes: How do you think the unique set contributes to the storytelling and creative direction of the show?

Jim: Ultimately a set design is really just a “machine” in service of telling a story. It is my hope that what we on the scenic design team have created together will do just that, service the staging and evoke the emotions of the story and music. Orlando Shakes is so lucky to have an amazing, dedicated and skilled artistic staff. It really does take a team to make all this happen and every design and production person is an artist. The devil really is in the details and this team is great at what they do.

ABOUT JIM HUNTER

Evita is Jim’s ninth design at Orlando Shakes since 2010 including scene designs for Hamlet, In the Heights, Man of La Mancha, West Side Story, and Spamalot. Other theatres include; Folger Shakespeare Theatre, Theatre Virginia, Phoenix Theatre, Florida Rep, Charlotte Rep, Florida Stage, Arkansas Rep, Veggie Tales Live National Tour, Wall Street Danceworks, Fulton Opera, UniArt at LaMaMa, Arizona Broadway Theatre, Playhouse on the Square, The Lost Colony as well as others. Jim teaches design at the University of South Carolina and served as department chair for ten of his twenty-four years at the university. He currently serves as Vice President for the National Association of Schools of Theatre and member of the Board of Trustees for the Council of Arts Accrediting Associations. Jim is a member of the national designer’s union, United Scenic Artist, Local 829 in scene and lighting design. Visit his online portfolio at www.jimhunterdesigns.com.