Neil Austin, lighting designer: Like on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, here was a chance to catch the next generation of theatregoers. With Potter, a huge percentage of our first year’s audience were first-time theatre bookers. This was another one of those moments – you want a first visit to the theatre to be special, you don’t want to put anyone off!
Finn Ross: I’ve worked on Harry Potter, Curious Incident, Back to the Future … they’re all incredibly precious to people. For audiences this is almost the ultimate in their journey of Frozen fandom – it is seeing the thing that means a huge amount to them come to life. That’s a privileged position to then occupy as a designer and a sChristopher Oram: You’re trying to bring a new energy and life to it yet remain faithful to the world people are expecting.
So the silhouettes remain the same but the details are different. You want to make sure that Elsa is in a long gorgeous blue gown. The dress that Samantha Barks wears is actually very little like the one that the animated character has but it passes what I call the squint test. It’s a very different garment, designed to function in different ways. Snow was the elephant in the room. Frozen is entirely about snow … and snow is an entirely impractical thing on stage.
Finn Ross: We went through a massive process of characterising ice into different emotions – happy ice, sad ice, anxious ice, joyful ice. Now, when I look at ice, I can’t help but anthropomorphise it! But in Elsa’s world, it’s not just frozen water – it’s a product of her and represents how she feels.
0 Comments