Inside Kazino, the Home of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812
Manhattan’s newest meatpacking-district venue, which officially opened its doors May 1, was specially built for the show. The production was granted a new life by commercial producers, including Howard and Janet Kagan, after a run at the significantly smaller Ars Nova last fall. “We knew that we wanted the opening date to be May 1, and that was not moving,” says Mimi Lien, the show’s scenic designer and the architect of the full space. “We looked at so much real estate for two months, December to January. Finally, we decided that we wanted to do it in a tent.” That was near February.
“We had a couple of different options,” said Howard Kagan. “We looked at nightclub spaces and we looked at some traditional theaters and raw land with this in mind. We had a tent person lined up. We have a real-estate broker who is looking for us, and they found this piece of land, which is basically in a holding pattern, waiting for permits to build a tower on. The people who are going to build gave us the land for the period they figured they wouldn’t be building.”
Lien, meanwhile, had just about three weeks to draw up plans to not only rebuild the environmental set, but to organize the surrounding spaces, including dressing rooms for the cast, a bar, a kitchen where Russian-style cuisine would be cooked, and other assorted amenities. “Every day, I’d be drawing the thing that they’d be building the next day,” she remembers. “We were drawing stuff for the drywall contractors; we were drawing stuff for the riggers who were installing the [lighting] truss; the curtains that were being sewed, the banquettes that were being fabricated, and the set. We had three weeks to put it together.”
The tent floor only went down on April 1, a month before the scheduled opening. “The whole thing, from the first line drawn, was probably two months total,” Lien says, adding that “a lot of the conceptualizing happened at Ars Nova, so it was expanding that idea.” And it is quite similar to the renowned off-Broadway incubator. “Even the main shapes are similar, the idea of the stage and musicians’ pit jutting out into the space,” she notes. “Really, the challenge here was trying to maintain the same intimacy we had while quadrupling the space.”
Ultimately, Kagan notes, “We wanted to have a space where you would feel transported into another world. Even if it was a traditional theater, we’d trick it out, so it would feel different.” That might not be too far off. When those building permits come through, this iteration of Kazino will have to shut its doors, but the production will live on in a different space.
But that won’t be until the fall at the very least. Until then they have their great tent on West 13th and Washington. Step inside Kazino in the photo gallery below and join Lien on a walking tour.
A sign on Washington Street beckons you into Kazino.(© David Gordon)
“From the very beginning, we knew that we wanted the action to happen all around the audience,” Lien says. “We wanted the actors to sit down right next to them and have it be a complete, three-sixty experience. And we knew that we wanted this idea of a supper club — that you come here and you eat and you drink.”(© Chad Batka)
“The curving ground plan came about because, in so much of the music, you have this heady whirl of activity around you, so it felt that the curves were the right idea, as opposed to straight lines or right angles,” Lien notes.(Courtesy of the production)
“The way that Rachel Chavkin wanted to direct it,” Lien says of the ground plan, “There was a lot of Natasha promenading, reading a letter; there were a lot of walking paths we wanted to create. All of that put into the hopper came out as this undulating, sinuous playing space that wraps itself around the audience.”(© Chad Batka)
The low-hanging chandeliers are part of the environment and were part of Lien’s design. “We wanted to bring the ceiling of the room down lower and have the sense of enclosure…And they become the comet at the end. The design of it is loosely trying to combine Sputnik and the Metropolitan Opera chandeliers, putting the two in one. We drew them up and had them fabricated.”(© David Gordon)
“The paintings [on the wall] are a pan-historical image history from the nineteenth century to contemporary Russia today,” Lien says. “We go through landscape paintings, War of 1812 paintings, Moscow burning, Napoleon…There are sections, but [the layout] was sort of arbitrary.” This section is “the religious section, because that is where they stage the scene where they go to church. There’s a cross and icons [spread throughout].”(© David Gordon)
“I don’t know how many people notice these,” Lien remarks of the various paintings and photos on the wall, some of which are tongue-in-cheek references to Tolstoy and War and Peace. We have a picture of Audrey Hepburn playing Natasha in the movie version of War and Peace from the 1950s. (© David Gordon)
“It was fun to design the bar,” Lien remarks. “It’s not something I normally get called upon to do. This space I designed with the idea that it was to have as great a contrast as possible to the inside of the space. This is to feel like a twentieth-century bunker, war torn, and inside wants to feel nineteenth century, lush.”(© David Gordon)
“The structure of the tent was dependent on the placement of the lighting trusses,” Lien says. “These had to be designed first. They go through the subflooring and they’re actually reinforced at the gravel of the lot. A couple layers of plywood go on top of that. Then they put in the tent structure, and then we put in this drywall wall [that] works as a sound barrier. There are moments of the show that are really quiet, and we have a kitchen and a biker bar across the street.” (© David Gordon)
“This is the [tech] booth. We thought that a sixty-foot-by-one-hundred-foot tent would be really big. The Ars Nova set was about fifty feet long by twenty-one feet wide, so we thought with sixty-by-one-hundred, everything would fit. And then we saw that the booth didn’t quite fit, so we had to raise it up and make a passageway under. It’s a little bit treacherous. So there’s a skinny staircase up and this is actually one of the main entrances [to the stage].”(© David Gordon)
For the actors, the place to relax and unwind is outdoors, just off Washington Street. “Since this is only a summer show, it’s viable for the green room to be a patio,” Lien notes. “Unless it’s raining.” There are individual dressing rooms indoors, tiny as they are. “They each have a little fourteen-inch-by-thirty-inch table,” she says.(© David Gordon)
Dumplings bake in an oven confined to a tight corner, as the backstage area at Kazino is taken up by three different parts. “It’s basically divided into wardrobe, kitchen, dressing rooms,” she says. “The kitchen is completely packed into one corner of the perimeter of the space. The entire kitchen has to be contained within this space.” (© David Gordon)
Within Kazino, Lien has a variety of places she likes to sit. “Either I like to sit high up so I have this overlook across the whole room or I like to be along the bar, where you really feel like you’re in it,” she notes. (© Chad Batka)
Lien’s personal favorite place to sit? The banquettes. “For me, they’re the heart of the supper club aesthetic. Just as an audience member, you don’t get to watch a show sitting at a banquette quite often.”(© David Gordon)
