During the New Year's Day holiday, the new production version of the Broadway immersive musical "Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812" (hereinafter referred to as "The Great Comet") kicked off its preview at the Grand Theater of Shanghai Jiushue Future Art Center. The new version is produced by the Shanghai Grand Theater, Changyang Culture, and the West Bund Grand Theater. It gathers an international team to move the midwinter of Moscow in 1812 to Shanghai 200 years later, leading the audience into Tolstoy's novel "War and Peace". Start a journey of pursuit of love and faith.
The Broadway version of "The Great Comet" has been highly praised for its infectious songs and innovative immersive stage effects. Compared with the Broadway version, the newly unveiled Shanghai version has greatly improved the stage design, lighting, sound and costumes. The integration of technology and aesthetics has become a highlight.
On New Year's Eve, after the lights are turned on, the Grand Theater of Jiushushu Future Art Center turns into a palace ball scene in 1812 surrounded by fireworks. The star-shaped immersive stage is very special. The original idea for "The Great Comet" came from a tavern that the screenwriter and songwriter Dave frequented when he was collecting music in Russia. From the earliest Off-Off-Broadway small theater version to the later Broadway version, its performance space is arranged in a restaurant style. The stage production of the Shanghai version took a different approach. Wu Biyong, the stage designer of the Korean version of "The Great Comet", found inspiration from the comet's orbit and designed the entire stage from top to bottom into a "galaxy" composed of red circles one after another. According to The four circular audience pools named after the four major families in the play surround the two circles of the main stage. The performance area where the actors move is like the orbit of the planet.
In order to support this "Comet Universe", all the suspension parts of the stage were re-installed with 66 CNC hoists and a 100-meter mother frame structure to meet the total weight requirement of 15 tons for the stage decoration and hardware parts. Among them, 5 were suspended in the air. The circular decoration weighs 12 tons, in addition to 2 tons of hardware and 1 ton of crystal chandeliers.
In addition to the interior world surrounded by red velvet, Wu Biyong designed the exterior world of the frozen land, echoing the lyrics "The external world is experiencing war and chill." The distant ice and snow forest rendered through lighting effects forms a strong contrast with the warm and luxurious social venues, which also appropriately reflects the background of "War and Peace".
On the new stage in Shanghai, the most intuitive feeling is that the space is larger than the Broadway version.
The costumes and props in The Great Comet are huge. There are nearly 200 sets of fashionable costumes. The heroine Natasha has 6 sets, and each extra performer has 3 sets of costumes of different styles. The props include more than 200 stools, more than 500 books, and more than 800 letters. , a customized piano, and more than 2,000 props such as quills, matchboxes, paperweights, prop wooden boxes, candles, tea sets, wine bottles, etc., which required nearly 30 trucks to be transported and installed.
In order to correspond to the stage design, characters, and handle special dramatic effects and atmosphere, the number of lights has increased correspondingly. "The Great Comet" uses nearly 80 brand-new cutting lighting equipment, as well as 4 newly launched domestic light-tracing pan-tilt equipment and nearly 100 imported moving-head dyeing high-power lighting fixtures, so that the lighting designer lamented: "The workload is higher than the Broadway is so big!"
Lighting is not only about lighting and setting the mood, but also about expressing the inner emotions of the actors. Take the heroine Natasha's aria "No One Else" as an example: First of all, we need to create the overall atmosphere. This song has a darker but more romantic tone; then when the actors appear in different stage areas , you need to use lighting to focus the audience's attention on that part; this piece of music has many emotional ups and downs, so you need to use highlights to heighten the mood of the music. After just one song, the lighting changes in countless ways. The same is true for
speakers. The sound designer said that in the same space, how to balance the immersive viewing experience of the audience in the family seats and the needs of the actors on stage to listen back is a major technical difficulty. "We use the sound tracking system to give the audience in the family seats an immersive feeling of being surrounded by the actors. This is an excellent experience." For the audience in the comet seats, the sound design focuses on bringing them closer to the stage distance.
, an innovative international team, created a new viewing experience in "The Great Comet": "We tried our best to use stage high technology to overcome technical difficulties, hoping that the audience can get closer to the emotions expressed in the work."
In this trial During the performance, the most distinctive immersive experience of the Broadway version was retained authentically. The audience entered the atmosphere of an aristocratic ball from the moment they entered: the stage at arm's length, the actors around them, the musicians close at hand, and the attentive butler presented the ball mask... These graceful and smart details made the audience Get an immersive experience like a masquerade during the performance. As the plot develops and the scene changes, the audience sometimes becomes a patron of the bar, sometimes a witness to a duel, or maybe invited to a dance. The interaction between actors and the audience is open, making every performance bring unexpected surprises.
From January 13 to March 3, 2024, the musical "The Great Comet" will officially have its Asian premiere at the Grand Theater of Qiantan 31 Performing Arts Center.
Author: Liu Qing
Text: Liu Qing Pictures: Pictures provided by the crew Editor: Jiang Fang Editor: Xing Xiaofang
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