On Broadway, Her Set Designs Get a Round of Applause
'Transforming Spaces' is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.
The first time she saw the shipwreck, Rachel Hauck began to cry.
It was during rehearsals at the Berkeley Repertory Theater for the premiere in 2022 of 'Swept Away,' a jukebox musical based on the songs of the Avett Brothers about a 19th-century shipwreck off the coast of New Bedford, Mass. The cast and crew had assembled to stage a dry run of the show's spectacular action centerpiece: a full-scale re-creation of the capsizing of the whaler, which overturns onstage to reveal a slender wooden lifeboat, where the remainder of the show takes place.
As a feat of conceptual ingenuity and mechanical engineering, the moment was astonishing — a scene of such extraordinary scale and intensity that, when it occurred nightly during the show's short run on Broadway last year, the audience would break into thunderous applause. It was too much for Hauck, the set designer, who watched that California dress rehearsal with tears streaming down her face.
'It was the emotional journey of it all,' Hauck, 64, said recently, once again tearing up. 'I don't know quite how to articulate this, but it's space and physical objects and emotion, and how those things lift.'
Hauck's grand vision of the sinking ship was so important to the impact of the musical that it's impossible to imagine 'Swept Away' without it. But in fact, nothing of the kind was suggested in the musical's original book, by John Logan.
'In the script, it's like, 'The boat sinks.' That's it. Literally,' Michael Mayer, the show's director, said. 'Rachel had this ingenious and beautiful idea of how to do the shipwreck. And this is the reason why you go to Rachel Hauck for these kinds of complicated shows where there's a giant transformation.'
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