KING KONG: BUILDING THE DREAM

KING KONG: BUILDING THE DREAM

King Kong will be theatre on the kind of scale producer Carmen Pavlovic dreamed of, but we can barely imagine. Making that dream a reality was entrusted to three key creatives, and Coral Drouyn took the opportunity to get inside information from the dream builders themselves. What transpired is a lesson in collaboration.

He fills the entire “fly space” above the stage, hovering there like some great flying monster. He is still, waiting, harmless and yet intimidating. Normally the flies would hold enough scenery for an elaborate production of any other musical – but not any more. He is both astounding and terrifying….he is Kong, the star of probably the world’s most expensive musical King Kong.

To take a B-movie monster and turn him into a leading man…er…creature with a heart and emotions that an audience can relate to, is a mammoth task. And then to surround him with a spectacle and original music, as well as a top supporting cast, in a proscenium arch theatre production, well, the difficulties are compounded tenfold. It’s not surprising it has taken seven years to come this far; to grow from dream to reality.

Musical Theatre is a strange beast; almost as strange as Kong himself, and audience reactions can never be predicted in the way that they can for an arena event. Whilst arena audiences will gasp and ask “How did they do that?”, a theatre audience wants to be swept away, to suspend disbelief and to be emotionally moved. Only later will they ask “How did they do that?”

So the challenge for the team was first to determine IF it could be done, and then HOW to do it. This meant creating the show back to front…with the writer and composers being among the last elements to be added rather than the first. If, as designer Peter England said, if it simply wasn’t possible technically, having the book and the score would be a waste of effort. The process defied the laws of logic and musical theatre, and yet there was no other way, they simply had to have faith in the dream.

Coral Drouyn: So tell me how it all started. What was the process in the early stages?

Peter England (Production Designer): Well, after the success of the two arena shows we were looking for a new challenge, something on a grand scale but with maybe more heart. Carmen was surfing the net looking for possibilities and we found King Kong, the original 1933 film. We knew instantly this was it, but we didn’t know if it could be done. So of course we called Sonny (Global Creatures).

Sonny Tilders (Creature Designer): It’s one of those strange coincidences, because my team and I had been throwing around ideas about King Kong for a while, but when Carmen and Peter contacted me and we all were thinking on the same wavelength, that really locked it in for me. So my first thoughts were size and scale and animatronics. Initially Kong was to be seven and a half metres high.

Daniel Kramer (Director): WhenI was first approached, there were discussions about it being an arena event and I said I wasn’t interested. I’m a theatre person, and what excited me was the idea of actually doing this story on a stage. It’s a double love story and, although it’s dominated by Kong’s presence, it’s actually Ann Darrow’s journey through two loves….the creature who loves her, and the man she falls in love with. It’s personal – and you can’t do personal effectively in a huge arena and still totally engage with an audience.

PE: Luckily Carmen and I had a background in theatre. It was challenging to think of it on stage, but ultimately Daniel was right, and we were really excited. A personal story, moving and emotional, coupled with awesome spectacle beyond the mere human. So then it became a question of scale….how big a stage could we get and what kind of theatre? How big could Kong feasibly be and still move across the stage, how many people would fit on the stage, what kind of set would still allow enough playing space? In many ways it would have been easier to do it as an arena show.

 

 

ST: It would have been so much easier as an arena show. I don’t have a theatre background. My expertise is very specific and geared to a different kind of production. This was right out of my comfort zone so I just concentrated on the idea of Kong; he was going to be my part of the production. I knew I could create him using the same animatronics as I used for Walking with Dinosaurs and How to Train Your Dragon.

DK: Well, I threw a curved ball then. I did NOT want to have a creature entirely made of animatronics. Yes, it works, but it doesn’t give the subtlety, the sense of humanity that I wanted from Kong himself. We have to feel what he is feeling, and animatronics wouldn’t give us that. I think Sonny felt I was encroaching on his territory. After all I swanned in and started saying things like, “No-one wants to see technology at work” to someone who had made an art form of that technology. I don’t blame him for feeling confronted.

ST: I think it’s fair to say that was the first time I was pissed off. I mean, I just didn’t get it.

Time Out. Over a period of around two years Peter, Daniel and Sonny worked on the vision for Kong and how to integrate the overall vision through the creature and the set.

Peter was fascinated by the 1930s posters of steelworkers standing on huge girders being hoisted into the sky. He started working on a series of lifts and hoists to bring them to life. But scenically there were also the challenges of a ship wreck for which a series of hydraulics allows the ship to actually move, an island with a volcano, and of course the Empire State Building. Add to these, the LCD screen which stretches like an old fashioned Cyclorama with stylised images (like a giant computer screen); all new technology to take the place of old fashioned “back projection”.

In Sonny’s case, there were multiple prototypes of the creature which involved creating new kinds of technology to allow Kong’s muscles to move, his facial expressions to change, and yet still allow him to be light enough to move quickly across the stage and to be stored “off stage.”

Daniel had to impart his vision to Craig Lucas who was writing the “book” and to the composers. The decision was made to stay true to the 1933 time frame and to incorporate music from that era along with a brand new score and show-stopping songs. The process was coming together, even though all three were working separately.

CD: So were there many compromises, and how did you deal with them? Did you ever feel like walking away?

PE: I don’t like that word compromise because people think it means settling for something less. We never did that …there was push and pull, and give and take but at every turn it meant something better in the long run. Of course it wasn’t without pain. Nothing worth having is. And this is a smashing together of 1933 and 2013. The simplicity of the story and its presentation on stage, married with all this technology. The music of the thirties meshed with new fresh music….everything about it is different. But not compromise. Even when it seemed impossible it never crossed my mind to walk away.

 

 

ST:  Of course there was compromise…lots of it. And yeah, I don’t remember specifics but I think I spat the dummy a couple of times. I felt a sense of ownership of the creature…all seven variations of him.

I was very protective of the idea and physically I even ran on-stage to protect Kong himself when he was being moved. Everything seems pretty petty now, but I really felt challenged.

Daniel kept pushing me. Every time I thought I had the perfect creature, he wanted more…less workings on display, but more results. We actually had a prototype which was built on a rope motif! It was frustrating, and yes, there were times when I had had a gutful.

But I never felt like walking away. I wasn’t going to be beaten by it. When I saw War Horse and realised how well puppetry could work, that’s when I was ready to give up on animatronics as the main technology. So now we have a combination of things… we have animatronics, puppetry, a marionette, a series of high pressure air beams working the forearm and the Creature’s facial expressions.

He was right to push me…and I’m horrified to think that maybe I would have settled if he hadn’t.

There was one day when I left the workshop, after we had tried out a marionette version and I thought Wow…we’ve got it. This can actually work in a way none of us would ever have thought of when we started. I have an incredible team and they never once said “this can’t be done” though I’m sure there were times they wanted to.

DK:  Compromise? No! Arguments…? I’d call them passionate disagreements…and they were pretty passionate, believe me. But it wasn’t about us wanting to have our own way. It was always about pushing each other and the vision to the maximum.

I guess of the three of us I have the broadest theatrical experience. I was brought up on circus, and musicals and opera. I love Puccini and Lady Ga-Ga. I grew up on Jerome Robbins. I’m eclectic.

BUT, in the long run it’s about excellence and redefining that with every production. We all wanted that, but it meant different things to us.

For Sonny, and rightly so, it was more about the creature, about making the audience gasp when it ran to the front of the stage. If the creature was awesome and brilliant, then the show would be too. That’s a perfectly logical point of view.

But I’d been around theatre so long I KNEW that wasn’t a given. I knew that without heart and humanity the audience wouldn’t connect. I don’t like horror films and I never saw this as a horror story. It’s always been a love story which happens to have a huge creature as one of the lovers. So I would say it’s been evolvement…and part of our job has been to allow it to evolve. We have to trust each other in that process.

ST: I still don’t get it…but I know it will be fine. We have a fantastic projection designer in Frieder Weiss. And when Daniel tells me that Kong is going to wrestle this giant snake and it won’t be a puppet, it will be projection, I can’t envisage it. But I know it will work. It’s part of what makes this project so scary and so awesome at the same time. I don’t have to get it …I just have to trust that Daniel gets it.

CD: So whose vision is it overall?

PE: It’s Carmen’s dream…but it’s Daniel’s vision. No question about that that.

ST: Oh it’s Daniel’s, definitely. Only a small piece of it is mine.

DK: You know, it would be nice to claim it’s mine, but sometimes a vision takes on a life of its own, and it becomes far bigger than the sum of all its parts. That’s what King Kong has become. There’s no magic potion.

PE: But if there was, it would be a love potion.

King Kong opens on June 15, 2013 at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre (previews commenced on May 28).

Images (from top): Esther Hannaford as Ann Darrow - Cave (Photographer: Jeff Busby); Kong Development - Face and Kong Development - 3D Computer Model of Kong (Global Creatures); Esther Hannaford as Ann Darrow - Empire State (Jeff Busby) and King Kong (Photographer: Lucy Graham).

Originally published in the May / June 2013 edition of Stage Whispers.

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Musicals in 2013 and Beyond

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