So the Show Did Go On

Set designer Robin Wagner, costumer Theoni V. Aldredge and lighting expert Tharon Musser gathered in Providence, R.I., a couple of months ago for a final look at the revived “Dreamgirls” before it hit the road for a pre-Broadway tour.

“The only one missing was Michael,” Wagner says.

Michael Bennett, that is--the director-choreographer who shaped these designers into a dream team for his musicals “A Chorus Line” and “Ballroom” before “Dreamgirls.” He was an inspiration; he was family. And then he was gone--having succumbed to AIDS in 1987.

As “Dreamgirls” came back to life onstage, however, Bennett came back with it.

“His presence was very much felt,” Wagner recalls. “After watching the run-through, we all looked at each other and asked, ‘What happened? Where did he go? He was just beginning to fly when he got cut off. What a loss.’ ”

Wagner, Aldredge and Musser all re-created their designs for the tour, which arrives Tuesday at the Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills and is expected to reach Broadway in late April.

Aldredge sighs at the “bittersweet memories,” and Musser adds that revisiting the show was difficult, “because all we could hear was Michael and what he had said. We loved that man very much.”

Yet life--and the show--must go on.

So the designers went to work with Tony Stevens, the new director-choreographer. “Tony knew Michael very well, and he knew his work very well,” Wagner says. “But he is, of his own, a very fine director and choreographer.”

The designers had to “rediscover the show through Tony’s eyes,” Wagner says, adding: “He’s brought some freshness to it, which Michael would have done--he never wanted to do anything the same way twice.”

“I really think Tony did a magnificent job,” Musser agrees. “I wouldn’t have been in his shoes for anything.”

In back-to-back telephone interviews, Wagner, Aldredge and Musser reminisce about their work on Tom Eyen and Henry Krieger’s musical about a Supremes-like singing group. Wagner talks from his studio at 890 Broadway in New York, the rehearsal facility that Bennett turned into a hit factory. Aldredge talks from her home in Stamford, Conn., while Musser chats from hers in Newtown, Conn.

Memories of Bennett bring a couple of them to the verge of tears, but mostly their words spill out in a torrent of excitement as they talk about their work staging “Dreamgirls” for Broadway in 1981, Los Angeles in 1983 and a national tour / New York reprise in 1987. Bennett died just four days after the ’87 revival returned the show to Broadway.

Wagner, Aldredge and Musser came to “Dreamgirls” trailing long lists of credits. Aldredge had won an Academy Award for her costumes for “The Great Gatsby,” as well as Tony Awards for “Annie” and “Barnum.” Wagner had received a Tony for the set of “On the Twentieth Century,” while Musser had won Tonys for lighting “Follies” and “A Chorus Line” (she would also earn one for “Dreamgirls”).

Brainstorming with Bennett, they came up with a look for “Dreamgirls” that is at once simple and complex.

The action unfolds from the early 1960s through the early ‘70s, shifting from city to city as a trio of starry-eyed singers work their way up through the show business ranks. Along the way, the ambitious and temperamental lead singer gets booted and must go it alone while her glamorous replacement leads the trio to success. The score conveys its own drama, as earthy soul music and other distinctive Motown sounds are turned to watered-down pop--to give them supposed crossover appeal.

“Michael wanted the people in this piece to be entrapped by the entertainment machines that they were involved in--in sound studios, stages, television studios, photographic studios,” Wagner says.

So the designer came up with a network of movable lighting towers and bridges, which could be reconfigured for each scene. These were natural building blocks, Wagner says, because these structures--which provide mounts for lighting equipment--would be found on all the stages and studios that the singing group occupies.

In the original Broadway and Los Angeles productions, the towers moved on cables and were equipped individually with motors (which enabled them to turn). The bridges raised and lowered on elevator lifts. Operated from offstage, the equipment seemed to have a life of its own.

It was Bennett’s “great experiment with machines,” Wagner says. “He always used to say that I could make the toys and he would play with them. That was the biggest toy that I ever made.”

Because the set consisted, essentially, of the nondescript towers, Aldredge’s costumes and wigs had to complete the picture, indicating such things as time (women’s hair exploding from bouffants into frizzy cascades) and the characters’ changing fortunes (from puffy and frilly girl-group gear to sleek, shimmering gowns).

Musser’s lights lent still more texture. For the heightened reality of the songs, lights became brighter and colors more saturated; for the nonmusical scenes, the lights were toned down and made more lifelike.

The 1983 Los Angeles production at the Shubert Theatre--which opened while the Broadway production was still running--became even more elaborate. Most notably, it gained a mirrored back wall, which, for the finale, appeared to be occupied by an entire orchestra. (This was later added to the Broadway set as well.)

For the ’87 revival, however, the set was simplified so that it could be continually torn down and rebuilt at each city on the tour. The bridges were eliminated, and the scaled-down towers were turned by the performers rather than by electronics.

When the tour reached Broadway, several critics noted that the change made the show seem more human, allowing the audience to focus on the story rather than the mechanics. Wagner agrees. “It works so well,” he says. Because the performers who move the towers are dancers, “their timing is so much better than the motors ever were. They arrive on the note of music, and they take off on the note of music. It’s got a human pulse.”

For the current tour, Aldredge supervised a virtual sequin-for-sequin rebuilding of her original 1981 costumes, while the others re-created their scaled-down ’87 designs. Wagner presided over the refurbishing of that tour’s leftover sets, and Musser adapted her lighting to Stevens’ staging.

The post-Bennett years have been discouraging at times, the designers say.

“We all lose people,” Aldredge says, “but this was such an important part of our lives.”

Yet, she adds, “he left us with such a wealth of knowledge and a wealth of taste and a wealth of what works and what doesn’t work. You have no right to sit back and say, ‘I’m not going to work anymore.’ You’ve got to apply what you were taught by this genius; you must leave something behind for somebody else--pass it on.”

And so they have. Wagner moved on to design sets for such Broadway shows as “City of Angels” (for which he received a Tony Award), “Crazy for You” and “Angels in America.” Aldredge costumed such shows as the Tyne Daly “Gypsy” and “The Secret Garden,” as well as numerous movies, including “Moonstruck,” “The First Wives Club” and “The Mirror Has Two Faces.” Musser lighted many of Neil Simon’s recent plays, including “Broadway Bound” and “Lost in Yonkers,” as well as such Los Angeles productions as the Mark Taper Forum’s 1989 “Dutch Landscape” and the Ahmanson’s 1995 “Candide.”

“Michael always said, ‘I want my clothes to dance, I want my lighting to dance. I want my scenery to dance,’ ” Aldredge recalls. “So, we’re all dancing.”

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“DREAMGIRLS,” Wilshire Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills. Dates: Opens Tuesday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Ends Dec. 21. Tickets: $30-$55. Phone: (213) 365-3500.