The Yankees Dream Differently on Broadway

By LINDA BUCHWALD

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Wherever it’s playing, the show demands an imaginative staging, not least because all four scenes are set in different places. The hotel room section, which charts a conflict between player Reggie Jackson and manager Billy Martin, gives way to the scene in the Berra’s bedroom. After that, there’s a fantasy sequence in a dining room in which Yankees past and present come together for dinner, and finally, the action moves to the Yankees’ locker room in 2008.

“There are bunch of big things that you need to tell the location of each place,” says set designer Beowulf Boritt. “A challenge was always, ‘How do those things come and go, and look good once they get there?'”

It worked, but it wasn’t ideal.

“When you see so much effort being put into a scene change, the audience immediately invests in that effort,” says Simonson, who is also directing. “And you want them to invest in the show, not the scene change. When you have an effortless, magical scene change like the bed that descends from the heavens, it not only relinquishes the audience from expending that energy into a scene change, it’s also a lot of fun to watch those scene changes happen.”

However, at least on major design element was carried over from the last production: Once again, the show features a frieze that once decorated the upper deck of Yankee stadium. As Boritt says, “It serves as a nice visual element to tie it all together and put us in Yankeeland all the time.”

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Linda Buchwald tweets about theatre as @PataphysicalSc

Photo provided by Beowulf Boritt