Tony Nominee Anna Louizos, 'High Fidelity' Scenic Designer

Anna Louizos can crash the glass ceiling and design it, too. One of a handful of female scenic designers currently represented on Broadway, Louizos re-created the interior of Boston's Colonial Theatre circa 1959 for Curtains and invented Avenue Q's urban streetscape.
 
In case you're keeping score, fewer than 5 of the other 30-plus shows now on the boards have woman set designers. The Tony for set design has gone to a woman just three times in the last two decades.

Louizos, 49, is one of two women nominated this year for Scenic Design of a Musical. In a surprise, she got the nom not for Curtains but for High Fidelity. She also received two Drama Desk Award nominations this season, for Curtains and off-Broadway's In the Heights, and was nominated for a Lortel Award for In the Heights (which just announced plans for a Broadway transfer).

Meanwhile, Altar Boyz, which Louizos designed a couple of seasons ago, is still running off-Broadway, and a Seven Brides for Seven Brothers that she designed opens this week at North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly, Mass., after playing earlier this spring at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse and Houston's Theatre Under the Stars. She also did the sets for the Walter Bobbie-directed White Christmas, which has had simultaneous productions in three or four cities every December since 2004.

While her High Fidelity nomination was a surprise because that show lasted but two weeks back in December and was otherwise ignored by the Tonys (whereas the still-running Curtains garnered eight noms), it wasn't a surprise if you can remember anything other than vitriol from Fidelity's reviews. The Times said, "the most compelling movement onstage is achieved by Anna Louizos's set, which seamlessly and wittily shifts among Rob's bedroom, record store and street and club scenes," while BroadwayWorld.com's Michael Dale raved that the "terrific set…was nearly a character in itself as it comically shifted."

For Louizos, the Tony recognition is a just reward, as she cites High Fidelity as her biggest challenge ever, since director Walter Bobbie didn't want any blackouts for scenery changes. "That meant it had to be automated within an inch of its life," she says. "And it also had to be funny—he told me, 'I want the scenery to dance, and I want it to look like a bunch of smart-guy slackers put it together themselves.' So it was kind of a tall order, because it needed to feel like a real place and at the same time it had to transform before your eyes." Her solution involved sliding units whose front and back were used for different locations, and furnishings for the different apartments—a bed, a nightstand, an alarm clock, a Buddha statue, etc.—that, when needed, popped out of the floor or other set pieces.

As for Curtains, in putting the Colonial's backstage on stage, Louizos included posters of Carousel, On the Town and other shows that ran at the Boston theater prior to 1959. Less visible to the audience are the scribblings on the walls, which include faux autographs of stars who played the Colonial and tributes to the Curtains creators who died before the show made it to Broadway, lyricist Fred Ebb and bookwriter Peter Stone.

Louizos also had to create sets for Robbin' Hood, the musical being performed at the Colonial in Curtains—a Wild West town, saloon and riverboat—and they get a shout-out in the Curtains script. After seeing the saloon where "Thataway" is sung and danced, Cioffi (David Hyde Pierce) enthuses: "This set—who doesn't love red?!" Louizos says that Rupert Holmes, who took over as bookwriter for Stone, came up with that line after he saw the set for the first time. "I was very flattered," she states. The Curtains scenery also includes that sparkling staircase upon which Cioffi envisions romancing Niki (Jill Paice). "I couldn't put enough glitter on that staircase for the director," says Louizos. "He wanted more glitter, more glitter. So [the] last week [prior to opening] a crew member and I were gluing sequins on the staircase."

In contrast with Curtains, In the Heights takes place outdoors and has just one set: a block of 181st Street in Washington Heights, complete with subway station and view of the George Washington Bridge. It's not an exact replica of the real street but is marvelously authentic-looking. "There are enough details on the set that people go: 'Oh, yeah, I know where that is. It looks like the bodega, the hair salon I know,'" says Louizos, who spent a day wandering around the Upper Manhattan barrio taking notes and pictures. Coincidentally, the G.W. is not the only New York City bridge Louizos reproduced for the stage this season. The Williamsburg Bridge was visible, albeit farther in the distance, in the Brooklyn-set High Fidelity.

Avenue Q was the first Broadway show she designed herself, though she'd originally created the set for its off-Broadway run at the Vineyard Theatre. It moved to Broadway in the same season as another of her off-Broadway projects, Golda's Balcony. Her first Broadway design created expressly for Broadway was the 2005 revival of Steel Magnolias.

Louizos' first major off-Broadway production as scenic designer was 2001's tick, tick...BOOM! She has since designed for Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage, Atlantic Theater and Roundabout, among other off-Broadway companies, and regionally for Houston's Alley Theatre, the Old Globe in San Diego, Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House, Hangar Theatre in Ithaca, N.Y., and the Berkshire Theatre Festival.

A frequent collaborator/employer of Louizos' has been Scott Schwartz, who directed Golda's Balcony, tick, tick...BOOM! and several other regional/off-Broadway shows she designed. Such good relationships with directors—and the referrals they generate—are a key to success as a set designer, she reveals: "It's really who you know. Directors are the ones who get the project first, either through a producer or a playwright, and then they usually want to talk to a designer and discuss the concept for the play or musical. They want someone they can trust."

Curtains is the second show she's designed for director Scott Ellis; they'd previously worked together on Terrence McNally's Dedication or the Stuff of Dreams at Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2004 (before its off-Broadway production, which had a different director and designer). She was recommended for In the Heights by producers who knew her from Avenue Q and White Christmas.

As she makes more of a name for herself in a male-dominated field, Louizos notes that there's really nothing intrinsically "male" about scenic design, except maybe for the traditional attitudes of those who work with the designer. "I don't think it has to do with the design process; it has more to do with how you relate to people," she says. "Broadway houses have union crews—a lot of older men who have been in the business for many years. Maybe 20 years ago it was more of an adjustment for them to work under a female designer. I think it's changed considerably since then—they're all pretty comfortable, and there are a lot more younger men, and there are also more women on the crew now than there used to be.

"I think if you know what you're talking about, that's the most important thing," she continues. "Then they'll respect you. 'Cause I assisted for so many years, it gave me a good foundation…just spending time in the theater, getting to know the crew, getting to know the lay of the land—who's in charge, who do you go to when there's a problem."

In any field, women's advancement depends in part on women mentoring and supporting other women. But that can get interpreted differently by observers. "Sometimes people accuse me of hiring only women," says Louizos, "and that's not true." More likely, the reputation has arisen from scrutiny a male designer wouldn't even attract. Louizos points out that her associate on Curtains is a man, as was one of her two High Fidelity associates.

Louizos assisted several well-known designers, male and female, before she started designing on her own. Her Broadway credits as associate or assistant include The Scarlet Pimpernel, designed by Andrew Jackness; The Red Shoes, with Heidi Landesman; and two shows working for Tony Walton, Elaine May's Taller Than a Dwarf and the Roundabout revival of Uncle Vanya.

At the time Avenue Q and (three months later) Golda's Balcony opened on Broadway in 2003, Louizos was working as art director for Sex and the City during its sixth and final season on HBO. But she didn't stay till the end, as she needed the time to help prep Q and Balcony for Broadway. Louizos wasn't entirely upset about having to leave television.

"Art director is basically a glorified coordinator in television, as far as I'm concerned," she says. "It's not very creative. It's a lot about budgeting and hours for the carpenters and how long it will take to build this… The production designer conceives the look of the show."

Louizos' first jobs out of grad school were in television, as associate art director on sitcoms The Cosby Show and Working It Out, and she was art director for the short-lived series Welcome to New York and The Big Apple right before her off-Broadway breakthrough with tick, tick...BOOM! But theater had always been her passion. Growing up in Yuba City, Calif. (north of Sacramento), she wanted to be an actress. "I was in all the high school plays and musicals, and very active in local theater stuff. I always loved to be on stage," she recalls. "My sister, brother and I all had this fascination with musicals, and we would perform them at home for each other."

She had another talent as well: drawing. "I sort of took it for granted—it was just something could do," says Louizos. "I never thought about studying art, because it didn't seem like a practical vocation. Theater seemed more practical…which really makes no sense. I didn't know that set design was an option, that's really what it was. I wanted to be involved in theater, and what was most familiar to me was performing."

So she went to college to study acting, at Mills College in Oakland for the first two years, then NYU to complete her degree. Even her much-praised forays into design didn't derail her from the performing track, though. "I took a design class and my teacher said, 'You should really consider doing this instead of acting.' And I said, 'Yeah, yeah, right, I'm going to be an actress.'"

But once she had her B.A. in theater, "it didn't take long for me to realize that I didn't have the stomach for it," Louizos says of her aborted acting career. "I'd always had an interest in what was backstage and I started looking into taking courses, just to hone my skills." Some five years would pass, though, before she enrolled in NYU's graduate program in theater design. All the while, she was assisting set designers but also working in restaurants to, as she puts it, "pay for my theater habit." She was moving up in the restaurant world, too—promoted from waitress to manager at such East Village eateries as Dojo and Around the Clock—but was finally able to ditch it for scenic design alone once she'd earned her M.F.A. and passed the union exam.

There were still some humbling jobs to come. Her first shows as designer were way off-Broadway—"that off-Broadway stuff where you scrounge around, there's no money, no money for the set, no money for anybody! You enlist your friends to help build things, and you borrow and you beg, and dig in Dumpsters for props."

Nowadays, she has bigger budgets to work with—and scene shops to actually construct her sets. "They have these whiz kids out of college who do this computer drafting, and they figure out the best way to engineer something," Louizos explains. "Sometimes the mechanical way dictates how the scenery looks, and sometimes it's a little bit of a fight between what they think is practical and what I think looks good."

The whole process of designing a show, Louizos says, is "basically like a telephone game—you take something and hand it off to someone else, they hand it off to someone else. You're watching it all the way through the process, but still there are a lot of human hands that touch your idea. Sometimes things don't always turn out the way you think they're going to. You have to be careful to make sure you can guide the process all the way through and make adjustments when needed, of course, but when it does come out on stage the way it looks in the little model version, it's pretty exciting."

Whether a show has a rotating, multi-locale set like High Fidelity, a single set à la In the Heights or a set laden with props like the Steel Magnolias beauty parlor doesn't determine Louizos' endearment toward the project. She simply prefers innovation. "I like when I can come up with a new idea," she says. "To try something I haven't tried before and take a vision in my head first and think, 'Yeah, that might work…' And then to slowly develop the idea and talk to the director about it, and do a little model of it. Then go farther with it, and see it built in the scene shop, and see it go on stage, and see that it actually works—that's the most exciting thing to me."

Innovation is important to audiences, too. "The biggest challenge for the designer in this day and age," says Louizos, "is to make the experience fresh for audiences, which are continually evolving." The primary objective for a set designer, though, should be to "support and enhance the storytelling in whatever way makes sense," she says. "If that means clean, unadorned simplicity, great; if it means automated tracking wagons and shifting backdrops, then so be it."

Louizos is currently preparing for the Avenue Q national tour, which begins in early summer. Later this year she expects to design the musical Vanities, adapted from the 1970s play about three Texas girlfriends coming of age during the women's lib era. In development for the past few years (a reading of the latest version was held last week), the Vanities musical is eyeing a New York run next season, to be directed by Judith Ivey.

In the immediate future, Louizos has her date with Tony on June 10. This season is not the first time her craft has been in a competition. She was nominated for an Emmy for her art direction of the 1992 Tonys telecast. And all the way back when she was 6 years old, she won honorable mention in a children's art contest run by the San Francisco Chronicle.

Anna's designs, from top: the "Last Great Record Store on Earth," High Fidelity; on her set for In the Heights; the "Thataway" saloon in Curtains; the George Washington Bridge, as seen in In the Heights; the Williamsburg Bridge, in the background of High Fidelity; an original sketch for Avenue Q. [Curtains photo by Joan Marcus]