BETH: The world of Nickelodeon’s hit cartoon SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS is a zany one to say
the least.
Who better to conceptualize the watery world of Bikini Bottom for Broadway
than Tony-winning designer David Zinn?
We chatted with the designer about creating the
colorful and creative sets and costumes for the Tony-nominated musical.
--So when Tina Landau, the director, and I started
working on this piece together, which was about five and a half years ago, the the
very first thing, our kind of first subject of the workshop was really how
do two-dimensional creatures, how does a two-dimensional world, how does a
character who's a you know kitchen sponge, how do you make those come to
life in a three-dimensional way?
We just started to answer those questions and
began to show work in front of people to see kind of how they accepted Spongebob
or the world of the thing, how far away we could move, and still feel like you
know that they were seeing the world on the people that they recognized, the
characters that they recognized.
And what we learned was you could move really far
away from it.
In fact, Ethan embodied Spongebob so much so you could just be
in a t-shirt like and just it'd be fine.
You don't need to do much, and it's true.
We didn't need to do much with them.
So that was a such a freedom and such a kind of
blessing in a way because it really allowed us to just let the people that
we brought into this world shine.
And then found a way to to build the world of Bikini Bottom.
You know, it's that crazy thing in theater where you you
like point at a chair and you say that's a rock, and everybody says like okay
that's a rock.
We really exploited that and used that in a way that was also very
freeing which is like we can just point at a bunch of pool noodles and say
that's kelp.
And people are like that's kelp!
That's great and enjoy the fun of the leaps of logic that we're asking them
to take.
you know there's a very famous episode of Spongebob of the series,
where SpongeBob and Patrick order a television.
It comes to them in a cardboard box and they take the television
out and then they play all day inside the box because that's like the most fun.
And that is absolutely that spirit is the way that we've tried to come to the
material, not only by literally you know there cardboard boxes all over and they have to
climb all these mountains of cardboard boxes, but just like here's a thing
you know here's a ladder, here's a pool noodle, here's a cooler, here's a surfboard,
here's a water bottle, here's a Nerf ball, here's a old boombox.
Just turn them into something wonderful.
The color was important.
Obviously the blue was sort of a no-brainer for the
under underwater world as a place to begin.
And we definitely wanted you to feel like you walked into festival of of blue
and and and underwater-y-ness Spongebob in the musical faces a an obstacle
you have to climb Mount Humongous which is a soon to explode volcano.
How do you represent something like that you know in a world of blue?
You do some basic color theory and and go to the
opposite color and of course orange not only means danger, but but also with the
opposite color.
So it felt like it was an appropriate place to just to put a bunch
of orange and make something that was equally strong and and and a world that
we kind of hadn't seen before until we actually get to the mountain.
The volcano the mount humongous is backed by an enormous
dimensional stack of orange cardboard boxes, of which this is a rough
model piece of.
And then the things that they have to climb are sort of wonderful like
factory carts of cardboard boxes that contain a bunch of different obstacles
for Spongebob and Sandy to climb.
They also have to climb, we made these kind of crazy ladder sculptures
that are ladders you know obviously climbing a mountain ladder seemed like a
good you know a way to indicate that you have to climb things.
Ultimately Spongebob has to scale a large ladder wall,
but he also has to kind of climb these crazy rolling ladder sculptures at some
point.
We also blow, with big orange fans, we blow a bunch of orange confetti at
him and Sandy as they try to make their journey
--Zinn illustrates the challenges of making the characters come
to life by taking a closer look at some of the costumes
--Sandy's a good case in point in terms of like costume and character
in a way different from what she looks like in the
series.
Sandy on the series has ears and a tail.
We tried ears and we try to tail, and I found them to be cumbersome because also she's
a sort of great karate master and and we really wanted the actor playing her
to have the freedom she needed to do to do all those moves.
But also there was a there was a point at which it felt a
little like Children's Theater, in a in a not in a in an illustrative way, in a way
that we're trying to move away from to like have the squirrel we taken these
other kind of leaps with the characters and felt like, We can do this without the
tail.
So we sort of captured the sense of her helmet with her hairdo.
She has a big wonderful afro with her trademark flower in
it.
When she's outside of her bubble, she wears a spacesuit on the space helmet
or you know what pressurized helmet so she can breathe.
So we turned that into kind of an awesome jump suit
that was we wanted a just to be sort of cute and wearable but also strong and
tough and a sort of awesome like badass girl thing to wear.
Ethan's just like, in a way, it's like the simplest costume, you know?
Ethan, he never stops moving.
He dances, he break-dances, he does the splits he
climbs a wall, he goes upside down does just this in constant motion and so we
really needed something that served him practically and that meant that we just
couldn't have things that got in the way.
We tried him in shorts, we tried him in you know.. he'd been in a any number of things.
He was in a yellow wig at some point, but ultimately we just found like all
of that stuff got in the way of Ethan and his sort of wonderful humaneness.
And so we sort of pulled all this stuff away.
We nod to the character.
We could capture a few elements of the cartoon so that they were recognizable, but
but but could leave the leap we really could even leave like the shapes and
stuff of them behind like...
We just had to kind of hold on to a few things to
to keep people into who was who and and and I think otherwise who really found
a new human world for them.
--As audiences enter the human world of Spongebob, Zinn hopes they feel the fun
and joy of the new musical.
--I think when you leave the theater, I want you to feel
like you've had fantastic time, that you've been to a
really great party with a bunch of crazy people that you never knew before.
And I think, I hope that you also are touched by
the message of friendship.
There's something so contagious about the way that
Spongebob deals with the world, and and I think it's hard not to have some of
that rub off on you and and that seems great.