Broadway By Design: Goulding, Hudson, Janas and Owen Bring & JULIET from Page to Stage

In Broadway by Design, BroadwayWorld is shining a spotlight on the stellar designs of this Broadway season, show by show. Today, we continue with the creatives from Broadway's biggest Elizabethan pop concert extravaganza, & Juliet- Lighting Designer Howard Hudson, Hair/Wig and Makeup Designer J. Jared Janas, Sound Designer Gareth Owen, and Video/Projection Designer Andrzej Goulding.

& Juliet flips the script on the greatest love story ever told, imagining what would happen next if Juliet hadn't ended it all over Romeo, and got a second chance at life and love - on her terms. Juliet's new story bursts to life through a playlist of pop anthems as iconic as her name, all written by Max Martin and his collaborators, including "Since U Been Gone," "Roar," "Baby One More Time," "Larger Than Life," "That's The Way It Is," "Can't Stop the Feeling," and many more.

Where did the design process begin? For Sound Designer Gareth Owen, it was all about the music. "I mean, how can any sound designer not be inspired by a catalog like this? I collected up pretty much every song he'd ever produced, holed myself up in my home studio with nothing but a six pack of Diet Coke and a stack of notepads, and geeked out for days, only emerging to sleep and collect pizza," he joked. "By the time I was finished I had a dozen notebooks, filled with thousands of observations, ideas and questions which I then proceeded to barrage Max and his team with."

Lighting Designer Howard Hudson ran with the crossover aspect of the subject matter. "Taking elements of the pop and concert world lighting aesthetic and combining these with a musical theatre story telling vocabulary," he explained. So moments of real 'in your face' lighting and then also quieter, smaller moments reflecting the narrative of the piece.

"Paloma's costumes really gave us a sense of the colour palette for the piece, so I always feel like we sit like a more saturated background for her beautiful work to sit in front of. And also Andrzej's video design also lead us down visual paths, working together to know when we can have our moments and also knowing when to sit back and let the music do the work."

"We weren't bound by really specific time periods or styles," added Video/Projection Designer Andrzej Goulding, "We were open to simply design what was best for the story and let our imaginations run wild. I love drawing so that is always my first step with any design whether it's a doodle within the script or more of a colour study so a lot of my references were paintings and drawings of the various themes within the show."

(Below: the evolution of Goulding's designs for "Confident")

"I was most inspired by modern takes on Renaissance looks," said Hair/Wig and Makeup Design J. Jared Janas, "I walked around NYC and photographed lots of people who had hair with romantic waves, thick braids, and fun rope twists. I also was very inspired by people whose hair colors were unnatural but not blindingly bright."

Where did the biggest design challenges arise? "One of the biggest challenges was being able to keep the ball in the air for the 33 or so numbers in the show," said Hudson. "So constantly trying to give the audience new looks and not to be repetitive. And also knowing when to work more subtly in the background or when we had to really come forward and deliver a light show. Controlling the airflow on stage was also a considerable task to make our smoke filled bubbles work!

"The biggest challenge in designing the hair for & Juliet was striking a good balance of colors and styles on stage," added Janas "We wanted to be sure to represent all textures in a fresh way while still trying to tip our hats to the Renaissance period. You'll notice how we incorporated a combination of braids, waves, and twists in each wig. You'll also notice that two of the wigs incorporate unnatural hair colors into the design."

"Mine was probably just keeping up with the rest of the show pace-wise as I also create and animate all my own content as well as design it," explained Goulding. "But once the idea is there the hard work is done, the rest is just refining and putting that extra gloss onto everything. The other thing was probably just finding that right balance of story based design and the pop concert world."

"The biggest challenge for me as sound designer for & Juliet was doing justice to the music," said Owen. "I felt the same while creating MJ: The Musical, but the difference was that rather than simply imagining what the composer might have thought of my work, this time I had the composer sitting at my left shoulder day in and day out. While Max was never anything less than 100% supportive, I felt the pressure just the same.

"Max has spent his life in a recording studio and as a result is incredibly intuitive when it comes to sound. But he also has an expectation based on a relatively small, highly controlled listening environment - ie a recording studio control room. Meeting these expectations but in a theatre was no small ask and it really pushed us to think outside the box when it came to reproducing the album sound in a theatre. Max is still talking to me so I guess we got it right in the end!"

& Juliet is currently running on Broadway at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre.