October 10, 2024 • 14 mins
Join Tony and Olivier Award-winning production designer, Tim Hatley, and DMPA President and CEO Jeff Chelesvig as they discuss Hatley’s amazing career and his approach to design for Back to the Future: The Musical.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Thank you for joining us for this episode of DMPA Conversations.
I'm Jeff Chelswig, President and CEO of Des Moines Performing Arts.
Today I am joined by the Tony and Olivier Award
winning production designer Tim Hatley. His scenic and costume design
will soon be seen on the Civic Center stage in
our Willis Broadway series presentation of Back to the Future
(00:25):
the Musical. These podcasts are created to provide you with
behind the scenes insights into the amazing performances coming to
dmpa's stages. Thank you again for joining us, and now
here is my conversation with Tim Hatley. Tim, thank you
(00:53):
so much for taking the time to join us today.
You have a very illustrious career as a product designer.
I like to go back and kind of get a
little bit of your background. How did you jump into
this world of theater?
Speaker 2 (01:06):
It was.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
I was very fortunate in the sense that it was
all I ever wanted to do, even from a young child.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
And I didn't go to the theater enormously. My parents
were not theater people. My father was in the military. Theater.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Going to the theater it was not really a big
part of my life. Although we did go and see
shows at Christmas most years, but then I wanted to
be an actor. And then I went to London on
a sort of school trip. We went to the National
Theater to see Guys and Dolls. It was Richard Air's
production of Guys. And I saw that production and that
was the first time that I thought, Wow, what.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Is going on here?
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Visually there was Neon and it was real Neon, not
like all of the led Neon we have now, so
it's a big deal. And all these bright colors, all
these signs flying in and flying out.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
John Gunter was the designer.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
And it completely blew me away, and I suddenly realized
that's there's a role here in the program, and it's
a set designer John Gunter, and I thought that's what
I want to do. And it was it was almost
overnight where I decided, actually I didn't want to be
an actor at all, having been in all the school
plays and.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
All of that.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
I wanted to do design, and so that was what
my focus was. It really was from that moment on.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
You're kind of a unicorn here in the United States
because for many of your productions you are designing the
scenery and the costumes, which is not.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
As proper, but I can't asked that quite often, especially
from colleagues in America. The truth of the matter is
that here in the UK, when we were trained, or
certainly when I was trained, the course that I did
was theatre design, and that included sets and costumes. And
if I'm extremely honest, it would be true to say
(02:45):
that actually the set was the bit that really interested me,
and the costumes would be.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Like, oh, I got to see costumes, But they were
always sort of inseparable really from our training.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
And you when you read the play, you thought about
the sets and the spaces, and you thought about the
characters that inhabited these spaces. That was very much our
way of thinking. And I just love it. I love
but I love doing jobs that ruled it always. I
love the jopping and the changing. I don't think it's
healthy for me anyway to be doing the same thing
all the time.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
And I just love the more different a job is,
the better.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
So when a job like Back to the Future comes
along and seemingly impossible and we've got to fly a car,
we've got to do this, we've got to do that.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
To me, that's just delicious.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah, that's a great segue to talk about back to
the future. Let's start with the process that you went through,
because this is a very beloved film here in the
United States. It's been around for almost what forty years now,
it was nineteen eighty five. Can you tell us a
little bit about the process that you went through As
you started to work on the design for this show.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
It seemed like an impossible job.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
I have the call from Colin Ingram our producer a
couple of years really before we started on it, and
asking me if i'd be interested, and I thought, oh,
my god, you know that's that that's not going to happen.
Surely they will never have enough money, they'll never have this,
and that that's just it's too impossible, too big, and
but of course I was very interested. And I remember
(04:09):
him showing me a video of a flying car, but
it was not the car that we have flying in
our production.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
It was very, very different.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
But I do remember thinking, oh, he's sorted the flying
he was very happy with it, and so I thought, oh,
he storted the flying car out. That's one tick, you know,
so maybe it's not so difficult. I was nervous of
it to be honest at the beginning, and I but
I read the script and I and I heard some
of the songs, and I, you know, obviously watched the
movie again because I knew the movie from childhood.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
But I was never a super fan. You know, I've
met so many super fans now having worked on this,
and there was and that they're so they noticed everything
about this film.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
And I sort of realized quite early on I had
to become a super fan and I had to get
into the mindset of what because it's so beloved. So
I spent a lot of time. I did watch the
film number of occasions again and I sort of worked out,
you know, I drew up my list of what absolutely
had to be there and what had to be absolutely right.
And it's the same with Bob's script, Bob Girl's script.
(05:11):
You know, it's not necessarily all the film. It's not
just the film script. It's been tailored to suit the
theater and to work with our version, and he but
he's clearly kept the bits that you know, you've got
to deliver, and I felt I had to do that
in the same way visually. And then I remember we
were doing a photo shoot quite early on a bit
(05:31):
of a teaser for online stuff, and we had a
photographed Marty and we had his skateboard, and we had
his guitar, and we had a puffer jacket we had
and suddenly it all came ave, Oh my god, they've
got this wrong. It's not the right puffer jacket, that's
the wrong color red, there's too many buttons. This isn't right,
that's right, And I just thought I realized just how
forensic everybody was.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Going to be about this show.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
It was a fantastic moment because I just thought, Tim,
you've got a really get your act together here, because
there's no fudging this one because it really is held
so dearly and there's no messing this up. So how
are we going to stage all these things? And it
just became very clear to me that we had the
DeLorean had to be the Delaurean. Everybody wanted to see
(06:15):
the Delarean and that was became a priority really, And
how were we going to do the Delorrean It if
it appears in the show four times, how are we
going to is that going to be the same car
that appears or four times? Are we going to have
the front of a car for one version, the side
of a car for another appearance, a flying car for
another appearance. So how are we going to do all
(06:35):
of this? So that became a way of getting into
the design, and then the rest of the musical I
sort of fitted around those moments, because when you're designing
a show as big as Back to the Future, it
sort of comes an element if it comes down to
the real estate, what stage space is available.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
For you to have these elements.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
And if you have a car and you have that
stored somewhere in the wing, that's a big chunk of
the wings and you can't get anything past there, and
you know, so you've got to You've.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Got to bear that in mind.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
And so that, yeah, there was That was very much
my starting point. But it was about being forensically true
to the film. That said, we have elements in the
musical that had nothing to do with the film, and
we've got a whole you know, design areas that that
that that don't come into the film at all. They're
very much in musical theater and that's really good fun.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Well, it's I have to tell you. When I saw
the musical for the first time on the West end.
The first thing that struck me was just how many
families were there and all the broad ages, young people,
older people. I think it is because this is such
an iconic film and people do love it. Talk a
little bit about this, because this show has both original
(07:54):
music and music from the film, can you talk a
little bit about that as well.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Yeah, I mean it's a good example of how it's
film meeting musical again. So I've talked about the design
doing that, and that's exactly what the music does as well.
And we're absolutely blessed having the score film. You know
that it's when you get those chords and those magical
soaring chords and the car takes off, and they are
the thing, of course, the songs of the things that
(08:20):
catapult the musical forward. That's the songs have the narrative,
which which is always such kind of good fun because
that then informs the characters. The characters have that voice,
they have a musical voice, and I think it's quite
interesting how the types of the songs that the characters
have and how that's been chosen, how that's.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Been put together. So yeah, I think it's it's just
it's a nice way of bringing the characters.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
To life through musical is how the songs that they
sing and how they sing and the types of songs
that they sing.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I want to go back to the set design for
a moment because my recollection, having seen it in the
West End and also on Broadway, is there's a lot
of project action and led in this in this production,
and I think back to a scenic design that for
a show that's very beloved to us, Spam a Lot
that you did what twenty years ago or so now,
which I think was a lot more low tech than
(09:14):
this one. This is my recollection. Can you talk a
little bit about the technology that is brought to back
to the future and how that has changed over time
to what we have today.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
And I think the technology is very really interesting.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
I'm I'm you mentioned Spam a Lot, you know, all
those years ago, and it absolutely was low tech. That
was that was very much the approach. And as a
designer in the theater, I'm not really overly.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Keen on endless video design, and I'm certainly.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Not keen on video design that is representing the scenery,
if you know what I mean. So rather than you know,
having a beautiful for let's say a beautiful interior of
house's that's three dimensional the people are living in, and
then just making that a video on the back wall,
and we're just acting in front of a picture that
has no interest for me whatsoever. And I think for
(10:09):
a long time, quite a while, that was the case
when we were starting to have video in the theater.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
But I think there's some incredible work.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
That's going on with video now in the theater, and
it's become much more affordable. The equipment has gone a
lot better, the resolution is all much better with video,
and there are now a whole generation of video designers
who think in a very video design way. And that's
not as a theater designer. As a set designer, you
don't necessarily think in that video way. And you need
(10:43):
a kind of young, keen mind to get all those
pixels to do what they do, and you've got to
be very it's another way of thinking.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
It's in a way, not a three dimensional way of thinking.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
It's a sort more of a graphic flat way of thinking.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
But I was always very resistant to video.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Whenever directors and producers have talked about productions and we
taught this, should we have video? And I was, you know,
back in the day, I was like, no, I think
would be I don't think necessarily in video, and.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
I was always a bit nervous of it.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Then two productions happened the year that I designed Back
to the Future, Life of Pie and this, and for
both of those the producers were quite keen to use
video design, and then oddly enough with both of them,
when I they were because they were both about well.
Back to the Futures were about the car and the
(11:33):
moving and the traveling of the car. It felt to
me that would be a very useful tool to have.
So that's where video was born. In Back to the Future.
It was really around the car. And the same thing
happened with the Life of Pie and I read that
and I thought we were at sea. We suddenly need
to be, you know, in a hospital room, and now
we need to be at sea. I thought, you know,
the one thing that we can't have real water, but
(11:54):
you know what you can do water, I'm sure brilliantly
with video.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
And that's what we did.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
So it's it's it's interesting that those two shows were
the big video shows for me.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
As not said, I've never had video and anything before.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
I have, but not as integral as this is because
the fusion with video and set and sound is very,
very very core to the design of both Back to
the Future and actually the Life of Pie.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
You'll be happy to know that the national tour of
Life of Pie will be playing our theater later this season,
so we get to see two of your designs this
year very shortly.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
We're kicking that off at the end of the year.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
People may be listening to this before the show, seeing
the show, or after seeing the show, but without giving
away anything, is there something that in particular that you
would draw people's attention to in the scenic design or
costume design for Back to the Future? Something fun to
look for, or something that you particularly like.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Oh, it's a.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Really tricky one that. I mean, the whole show is fun.
I mean, it's enormous fun right from the get go.
That's what's great about this design wise. I mean, you know,
the obvious thing is you know, we've spoken about it,
but the Dolorean, you know, and I think Doc's first
appearance is a lot of fun. When we first meet Doc,
(13:12):
and Doc is fun. I mean, how much more fun
can you have the Doc? You know, he's such fun
and he's costuming.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Was a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
And what I love about the introduction of the Doc
Brown character in the musical is that's when you first
realized you were in a musical. And I remember when
we first did this in Manchester, the first ever audience
was full of hardcore supervancor back.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
To the Future, and I thought, they're going to like it,
because you just don't know.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
I remember looking around at the audience and the car
appeared and out of thin air and the audience just
went bananas. And then I thought, what are they going
to make of the next bit, because of course you
know Doc sings and dances and has dancing.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Girls, and that scene is a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
And I thought, this is either going to be the
moment where they go what are you doing with that?
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Embrace it? And they really embraced it.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Thank you, Tim, We appreciate you joining us for this
special conversation. The d mp A Conversations podcast is produced
by Andrew Downs. To our donors and season ticket holders,
thank you for providing the foundation for great performances and
educational opportunities at Des Moines Performing Arts. Visit d m
p A dot org or wherever you get your podcasts
(14:33):
for future conversations like this one. Thank you again for listening.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of DMPA Conversations.
I'm Jeff Chelswig, President and CEO of Des Moines Performing Arts.
Today I am joined by the Tony and Olivier Award
winning production designer Tim Hatley. His scenic and costume design
will soon be seen on the Civic Center stage in
our Willis Broadway series presentation of Back to the Future
(00:25):
the Musical. These podcasts are created to provide you with
behind the scenes insights into the amazing performances coming to
dmpa's stages. Thank you again for joining us, and now
here is my conversation with Tim Hatley. Tim, thank you
(00:53):
so much for taking the time to join us today.
You have a very illustrious career as a product designer.
I like to go back and kind of get a
little bit of your background. How did you jump into
this world of theater?
Speaker 2 (01:06):
It was.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
I was very fortunate in the sense that it was
all I ever wanted to do, even from a young child.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
And I didn't go to the theater enormously. My parents
were not theater people. My father was in the military. Theater.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Going to the theater it was not really a big
part of my life. Although we did go and see
shows at Christmas most years, but then I wanted to
be an actor. And then I went to London on
a sort of school trip. We went to the National
Theater to see Guys and Dolls. It was Richard Air's
production of Guys. And I saw that production and that
was the first time that I thought, Wow, what.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
Is going on here?
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Visually there was Neon and it was real Neon, not
like all of the led Neon we have now, so
it's a big deal. And all these bright colors, all
these signs flying in and flying out.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
John Gunter was the designer.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
And it completely blew me away, and I suddenly realized
that's there's a role here in the program, and it's
a set designer John Gunter, and I thought that's what
I want to do. And it was it was almost
overnight where I decided, actually I didn't want to be
an actor at all, having been in all the school
plays and.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
All of that.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
I wanted to do design, and so that was what
my focus was. It really was from that moment on.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
You're kind of a unicorn here in the United States
because for many of your productions you are designing the
scenery and the costumes, which is not.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
As proper, but I can't asked that quite often, especially
from colleagues in America. The truth of the matter is
that here in the UK, when we were trained, or
certainly when I was trained, the course that I did
was theatre design, and that included sets and costumes. And
if I'm extremely honest, it would be true to say
(02:45):
that actually the set was the bit that really interested me,
and the costumes would be.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Like, oh, I got to see costumes, But they were
always sort of inseparable really from our training.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
And you when you read the play, you thought about
the sets and the spaces, and you thought about the
characters that inhabited these spaces. That was very much our
way of thinking. And I just love it. I love
but I love doing jobs that ruled it always. I
love the jopping and the changing. I don't think it's
healthy for me anyway to be doing the same thing
all the time.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
And I just love the more different a job is,
the better.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
So when a job like Back to the Future comes
along and seemingly impossible and we've got to fly a car,
we've got to do this, we've got to do that.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
To me, that's just delicious.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
Yeah, that's a great segue to talk about back to
the future. Let's start with the process that you went through,
because this is a very beloved film here in the
United States. It's been around for almost what forty years now,
it was nineteen eighty five. Can you tell us a
little bit about the process that you went through As
you started to work on the design for this show.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
It seemed like an impossible job.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
I have the call from Colin Ingram our producer a
couple of years really before we started on it, and
asking me if i'd be interested, and I thought, oh,
my god, you know that's that that's not going to happen.
Surely they will never have enough money, they'll never have this,
and that that's just it's too impossible, too big, and
but of course I was very interested. And I remember
(04:09):
him showing me a video of a flying car, but
it was not the car that we have flying in
our production.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
It was very, very different.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
But I do remember thinking, oh, he's sorted the flying
he was very happy with it, and so I thought, oh,
he storted the flying car out. That's one tick, you know,
so maybe it's not so difficult. I was nervous of
it to be honest at the beginning, and I but
I read the script and I and I heard some
of the songs, and I, you know, obviously watched the
movie again because I knew the movie from childhood.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
But I was never a super fan. You know, I've
met so many super fans now having worked on this,
and there was and that they're so they noticed everything
about this film.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
And I sort of realized quite early on I had
to become a super fan and I had to get
into the mindset of what because it's so beloved. So
I spent a lot of time. I did watch the
film number of occasions again and I sort of worked out,
you know, I drew up my list of what absolutely
had to be there and what had to be absolutely right.
And it's the same with Bob's script, Bob Girl's script.
(05:11):
You know, it's not necessarily all the film. It's not
just the film script. It's been tailored to suit the
theater and to work with our version, and he but
he's clearly kept the bits that you know, you've got
to deliver, and I felt I had to do that
in the same way visually. And then I remember we
were doing a photo shoot quite early on a bit
(05:31):
of a teaser for online stuff, and we had a
photographed Marty and we had his skateboard, and we had
his guitar, and we had a puffer jacket we had
and suddenly it all came ave, Oh my god, they've
got this wrong. It's not the right puffer jacket, that's
the wrong color red, there's too many buttons. This isn't right,
that's right, And I just thought I realized just how
forensic everybody was.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Going to be about this show.
Speaker 3 (05:55):
It was a fantastic moment because I just thought, Tim,
you've got a really get your act together here, because
there's no fudging this one because it really is held
so dearly and there's no messing this up. So how
are we going to stage all these things? And it
just became very clear to me that we had the
DeLorean had to be the Delaurean. Everybody wanted to see
(06:15):
the Delarean and that was became a priority really, And
how were we going to do the Delorrean It if
it appears in the show four times, how are we
going to is that going to be the same car
that appears or four times? Are we going to have
the front of a car for one version, the side
of a car for another appearance, a flying car for
another appearance. So how are we going to do all
(06:35):
of this? So that became a way of getting into
the design, and then the rest of the musical I
sort of fitted around those moments, because when you're designing
a show as big as Back to the Future, it
sort of comes an element if it comes down to
the real estate, what stage space is available.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
For you to have these elements.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
And if you have a car and you have that
stored somewhere in the wing, that's a big chunk of
the wings and you can't get anything past there, and
you know, so you've got to You've.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
Got to bear that in mind.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
And so that, yeah, there was That was very much
my starting point. But it was about being forensically true
to the film. That said, we have elements in the
musical that had nothing to do with the film, and
we've got a whole you know, design areas that that
that that don't come into the film at all. They're
very much in musical theater and that's really good fun.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Well, it's I have to tell you. When I saw
the musical for the first time on the West end.
The first thing that struck me was just how many
families were there and all the broad ages, young people,
older people. I think it is because this is such
an iconic film and people do love it. Talk a
little bit about this, because this show has both original
(07:54):
music and music from the film, can you talk a
little bit about that as well.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Yeah, I mean it's a good example of how it's
film meeting musical again. So I've talked about the design
doing that, and that's exactly what the music does as well.
And we're absolutely blessed having the score film. You know
that it's when you get those chords and those magical
soaring chords and the car takes off, and they are
the thing, of course, the songs of the things that
(08:20):
catapult the musical forward. That's the songs have the narrative,
which which is always such kind of good fun because
that then informs the characters. The characters have that voice,
they have a musical voice, and I think it's quite
interesting how the types of the songs that the characters
have and how that's been chosen, how that's.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
Been put together. So yeah, I think it's it's just
it's a nice way of bringing the characters.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
To life through musical is how the songs that they
sing and how they sing and the types of songs
that they sing.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
I want to go back to the set design for
a moment because my recollection, having seen it in the
West End and also on Broadway, is there's a lot
of project action and led in this in this production,
and I think back to a scenic design that for
a show that's very beloved to us, Spam a Lot
that you did what twenty years ago or so now,
which I think was a lot more low tech than
(09:14):
this one. This is my recollection. Can you talk a
little bit about the technology that is brought to back
to the future and how that has changed over time
to what we have today.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
And I think the technology is very really interesting.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
I'm I'm you mentioned Spam a Lot, you know, all
those years ago, and it absolutely was low tech. That
was that was very much the approach. And as a
designer in the theater, I'm not really overly.
Speaker 2 (09:44):
Keen on endless video design, and I'm certainly.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Not keen on video design that is representing the scenery,
if you know what I mean. So rather than you know,
having a beautiful for let's say a beautiful interior of
house's that's three dimensional the people are living in, and
then just making that a video on the back wall,
and we're just acting in front of a picture that
has no interest for me whatsoever. And I think for
(10:09):
a long time, quite a while, that was the case
when we were starting to have video in the theater.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
But I think there's some incredible work.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
That's going on with video now in the theater, and
it's become much more affordable. The equipment has gone a
lot better, the resolution is all much better with video,
and there are now a whole generation of video designers
who think in a very video design way. And that's
not as a theater designer. As a set designer, you
don't necessarily think in that video way. And you need
(10:43):
a kind of young, keen mind to get all those
pixels to do what they do, and you've got to
be very it's another way of thinking.
Speaker 2 (10:50):
It's in a way, not a three dimensional way of thinking.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
It's a sort more of a graphic flat way of thinking.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
But I was always very resistant to video.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Whenever directors and producers have talked about productions and we
taught this, should we have video? And I was, you know,
back in the day, I was like, no, I think
would be I don't think necessarily in video, and.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
I was always a bit nervous of it.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Then two productions happened the year that I designed Back
to the Future, Life of Pie and this, and for
both of those the producers were quite keen to use
video design, and then oddly enough with both of them,
when I they were because they were both about well.
Back to the Futures were about the car and the
(11:33):
moving and the traveling of the car. It felt to
me that would be a very useful tool to have.
So that's where video was born. In Back to the Future.
It was really around the car. And the same thing
happened with the Life of Pie and I read that
and I thought we were at sea. We suddenly need
to be, you know, in a hospital room, and now
we need to be at sea. I thought, you know,
the one thing that we can't have real water, but
(11:54):
you know what you can do water, I'm sure brilliantly
with video.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
And that's what we did.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
So it's it's it's interesting that those two shows were
the big video shows for me.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
As not said, I've never had video and anything before.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
I have, but not as integral as this is because
the fusion with video and set and sound is very,
very very core to the design of both Back to
the Future and actually the Life of Pie.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
You'll be happy to know that the national tour of
Life of Pie will be playing our theater later this season,
so we get to see two of your designs this
year very shortly.
Speaker 2 (12:28):
We're kicking that off at the end of the year.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
People may be listening to this before the show, seeing
the show, or after seeing the show, but without giving
away anything, is there something that in particular that you
would draw people's attention to in the scenic design or
costume design for Back to the Future? Something fun to
look for, or something that you particularly like.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Oh, it's a.
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Really tricky one that. I mean, the whole show is fun.
I mean, it's enormous fun right from the get go.
That's what's great about this design wise. I mean, you know,
the obvious thing is you know, we've spoken about it,
but the Dolorean, you know, and I think Doc's first
appearance is a lot of fun. When we first meet Doc,
(13:12):
and Doc is fun. I mean, how much more fun
can you have the Doc? You know, he's such fun
and he's costuming.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Was a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
And what I love about the introduction of the Doc
Brown character in the musical is that's when you first
realized you were in a musical. And I remember when
we first did this in Manchester, the first ever audience
was full of hardcore supervancor back.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
To the Future, and I thought, they're going to like it,
because you just don't know.
Speaker 3 (13:37):
I remember looking around at the audience and the car
appeared and out of thin air and the audience just
went bananas. And then I thought, what are they going
to make of the next bit, because of course you
know Doc sings and dances and has dancing.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Girls, and that scene is a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
And I thought, this is either going to be the
moment where they go what are you doing with that?
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Embrace it? And they really embraced it.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Thank you, Tim, We appreciate you joining us for this
special conversation. The d mp A Conversations podcast is produced
by Andrew Downs. To our donors and season ticket holders,
thank you for providing the foundation for great performances and
educational opportunities at Des Moines Performing Arts. Visit d m
p A dot org or wherever you get your podcasts
(14:33):
for future conversations like this one. Thank you again for listening.
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