For the world premiere stage production of The Last Goodbye, a Musical Adaptation of Romeo & Juliet featuring the music of Jeff Buckley, I worked as the Production Designer, collaborating with Michael Kimmel - the project's creator, writer + director. Our aim was to anchor the raw emotion and reckless abandon of Shakespeare's teenage lovers in the visceral and gritty reality of Jeff Buckley's New York City - the East Village, the Bowery and the Lower East Side of the late 1990's.
The Candle Building at 11 Spring Street in New York City - a worldwide mecca for street artists throughout Buckley's 1990's, encased with years of wheat-paste paper graffiti + street art plastered over regal 19th century brick detailing, cornerstones and archways, and more recently gut renovated, re-pointed and sold as a $26m single family home - served as my architectural anchor of the space. To define an open street for our Verona, I designed a sweeping panorama of 11 Spring St inspired facades - with encrusted + peeling art on stage right gradually fading across the upstage wall to a pristine and regal architecture on stage left. An ornamental metal balcony, reminiscent of the Bowery Ballroom's 2nd floor, ringed the stage. The driving narrative vehicle in the design, echoing a major riff of the text and music, was having the actors tear off layers of wheat-paste street art from the walls to reveal other imagery, pivotal emblems and architectural devices. Gradually stripping the monumental surfaces of the angst and raw emotion, the text concludes in the tomb. As Benvolio sings Buckley's harrowing cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," wrenching grief is followed by hope, salvation and redemption... and the upstage walls fly away as blindingly cold white light floods into the space.
11 Spring Street, New York City. Jeff Buckley. CBGB's. Sin-E. Coney Island High. 1990's East Village, Bowery and Lower East Side. Street artists such as Banksy, Shepard Fairey and others.
