Picture the iconic rock show atmosphere of Madison Square Garden. All of the lights and spectacle are focused on a solo, Grammy-winning Icelandic jazz singer, Laufey, with a voice so soft and haunting, it’s bringing the audience to tears. It’s a difficult balance, creating a set where you don’t lose the artist in an arena like that. But STUFISH Entertainment Architects are no strangers to this contrast.
The team at STUFISH is behind the concert sets of some of your favorite artists, from Benson Boone and Chappell Roan to Lana Del Rey—and that’s just this year. While Broadway sets can stay backstage for weeks on end, concert architects face an incredible scenic challenge: create something transformative, and make sure the whole thing can be folded up five minutes after the show. Ric Lipson, partner and registered architect at STUFISH, kept this front of mind when putting together Laufey’s magical set. “This show had to have whimsy, beauty, femininity, and theatricality, and still go in the truck and be moved around by elder gentlemen that sleep on buses,” Lipson says.
Lipson and Zarya Vrabcheva, a senior designer at STUFISH, were concentrated on framing the artist, not distracting from the artist. They were able to get creative insight from someone extra close to the artist: Laufey’s creative director—and twin sister—Junia. The sisters are so “in tune,” Lipson says, that they never even met Laufey until rehearsal. But when they finally did, it felt like they’d known her for months.
Together, they leaned into Laufey’s newest album, A Matter of Time, to create this whimsical world, undefined by a specific period of time. “It just feels like it’s taken out from a fairy tale, or from an existing world that only she belongs to,” Vrabcheva says. While creating this ephemeral scene, Junia came up with plenty of references to make it feel approachable for the audience. Old Hollywood and musical theater influences were huge: think Busby Berkeley films and dancers from the Ziegfeld Follies of the early 20th century.
For Laufey’s song, “Snow White,” the STUFISH team leaned into the magic mirror imagery, with a double-sided mirror creating a up-close, vulnerable moment.
With such heavy theater influences, Lipson and Vrabcheva decided to rely on old-school theater techniques to bring the scene to life. Less technical effects and more tangible sets, moved and managed by real people, like a Broadway stage crew. “Relatively speaking, the stairs get moved by some blokes coming out when you’re not watching, and they push them into place,” Lipson says. “But when you come back to it, ‘Oh my god, the castle’s moved and there’s this mountain!'”
A modular set meant the architectural language of the show could switch at any moment to match the mood. A grand ballroom staircase broke into pieces and gave way to an isolating, lonely tower in seconds. “I thought it was quite successful to use the same set,” Vrabcheva says. “Without bringing additional props or anything, we completely managed to transform the room.”
The B-stage of Laufey’s show was this clock-shaped jazz club, giving a swinging speakeasy energy to some of the more lively songs of the set.
The STUFISH designers also know that, with modern concerts, you have to make the set work for portrait mode. The screens flanking the stage need to feel just as immersive for the nosebleed seats, or for the ones reliving the night via mobile videos. It’s not like a theater proscenium, where you can keep it widescreen. That meant adding some height to the stage, hence the sweeping opera house curtains and castle stairs.
And then there was the B-stage: a clock-shaped platform complete with moving hands, that Laufey and her band transformed into a jazz club. It was inspired by the album cover, and became a “silent protagonist during the show,” Vrabcheva says. The time display changed with each new moment of the show, defining the story, and when Laufey emerged in a flapper dress to perform sped-up jazz versions of her music, it invited the sold-out audience to New York’s swankiest speakeasy.
“When I was thinking about how I wanted the show to look, the only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted a jazz club in the middle of the room, because I wanted to find a way to be close with all of you,” Laufey told the audience during her second night at Madison Square Garden.
As much as Junia, Lipson, and Vrabcheva would appreciate you noticing all the little set details, the thing they want to do first and foremost is provoke emotions within you. It means the attention to detail counted, and their design worked as a whole. “For people to exit the usual reality we’re all in, enter a completely new world, immerse themselves,” Vrabcheva says. “And as they’re exiting, something in them has been moved or changed.”
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