With no slight to Broadway intended, since this is the Tony Awards season, we reached out to Set Decorator Prerna Chawla SDSA to tell us of her experience partnering with Production Designer Steven Wolff to create the sets for this filmatic spoof of so much more than the stage...so very much more! 
 
From Set Decorator Prerna Chawla SDSA
“I received an email about an A24 original musical starring Nathan Lane, Megan Mullally and Megan Thee Stallion and of course, I was very intrigued! Fast forward a couple of weeks, and I was decorating the sets for this bizarre and completely unconventional (this being an understatement) musical comedy...a modern-day, raunchy, queer musical, if you will.”
 
“Production Designer Steven Wolff and I discussed the freedom we had to create a fantastical world set in no specific time period, taking aspects from any time period we desired. The only specific was that the story is set in New York City. What a fabulous way to begin!”

Evelyn’s Apartment, Dining Room. Photo by Justin Lubin ©Sewer Boys LLC.

“There were eleven built sets, located in two small warehouses converted into stages in Sun Valley, which my team and I had to decorate in only a couple of weeks. We had a small crew and an even tinier budget, so there wasn't much room for error, indecision or rethinking. This was a challenge my team and I were excited to navigate in the few weeks that we had for prep, dress and shoot!”
 
Evelyn... 
“My favorite set in the movie was Evelyn’s apartment. Evelyn, played by Megan Mullally, is the quirky mom who hasn't left her New York apartment in a few decades. I call her a “curated hoarder”, as she’s a maximalist with a flair for design. We took inspiration from the designer Iris Apfel and her apartment. Steven gave me great bones to work with, including an almost psychedelic wallpaper that was featured in the dining room, above. I loved playing with different colors and textures in her spaces. I tried to give her collections of items in every room, like an entire wall of unique clocks of different shapes, sizes and eras.”

Evelyn’s Apartment. The settee & pouf the two stars are reclining on in the photo at top of the page. Photo by Justin Lubin ©Sewer Boys LLC.

Evelyn’s Apartment. Two corners of the sitting room, to the right, the collection of wall clocks. Photos courtesy of A24.

Evelyn’s Apartment, looking through to the formal living room. Photo courtesy of A24.

Evelyn’s Apartment, Living Room. Photo by Justin Lubin ©Sewer Boys LLC.

Evelyn’s Apartment, multi-room view. Plenty of room for dancing... Photo by Justin Lubin ©Sewer Boys LLC.

“The apartment did not need to make sense to an outsider, only to Evelyn. When Megan entered her dressed apartment for the first time, she looked around and exclaimed ‘Wow!’. It's always rewarding to see actors walk on set and vocalize their excitement for our work, and this time was no different.”
 
“Every shelf and corner was curated carefully, but I also had fun adding in the humor. My favorite corner was with a big taxidermized ostrich on a pedestal with Mardi Gras beads crowning her head. The director, Larry Charles, insisted that the set should be bursting at the seams with the amount of tchotchkes in Evelyn’s space.”

Evelyn’s Apartment, Dining Room. Note Ostrich in left corner, and a plethora of tchotchkes throughout. Photo courtesy of A24.

“I worked closely with the Special Effects Department as well, since some of the tchotchkes needed to come alive and move during one of the songs. We always had carts of tchotchkes on standby...pieces that my buyer Madeleine Arellano painstakingly hunted for and found...as this set simply devoured them! Since we had strict clearance regulations, we made sure that the featured tchotchkes were cleared to use. This meant we couldn't just use thrift stores or random prop house finds unless we changed them significantly. One of my set dressers put a little lace hat and dress on a porcelain doll to modify it, and it still hangs today, as is, in the Warner Brothers prop house!”
 
Harris...
“In stark contrast to Evelyn’s apartment stood Harris’s luxurious brownstone loft. The apartment was designed to be as minimal as possible to heighten the contrast. We are introduced to Harris, played by Nathan Lane, as he is about to come out of the closet to his son, in the song Gay Old Life.”

Harris’s Brownstone. Minimalist interior. Photo courtesy of A24.

“I also played up the fact that Harris is well traveled and has artifacts from all over the world. He is obsessed with the finer things in life and that is reflected in the choice of designer-esque furniture and extravagant silks and brocades.”
 
“There was a place for everything and everything was in its place, as the saying goes. I added a few bold statement pieces in this apartment, including a beautiful five-foot-high angel sconce and a life-sized male nude statue that was added last minute as part of the action.”

Harris’s Brownstone. Angel sconce through the arch on the left. Photo courtesy of A24.

“Due to timeline and budgetary restrictions, we could not custom fabricate the nude statue. We hunted far and wide locally for something that would fit perfectly in the space. We ended up with an actual stone statue that literally weighed half a ton and Construction had to move their permanent set walls so this could be wheeled in on a specially constructed dolly.”
 
“I also put a taxidermy peacock on a pedestal in the corner, which became a call back to Evelyn’s ostrich.”

Harris’s Brownstone. Peacock in deep background through the left archway. Photos courtesy of A24.

“In the narrative, Harris also had two pets, Whisper and Backpack, whom he had rescued from the sewer, thus they are referred to as the Sewer Boys. They now live in a cage in his apartment and are a part of a big reveal. It was a fun challenge finding something that would work for the Sewer Boy puppets, which had already been fabricated. We ended up finding a beautiful antique bird cage in Boston that was then shipped to Los Angeles. With a little bit of customization for the puppets and the set, and getting a custom fabric cover made, the reveal worked beautifully! It was amazing to see Nathan Lane along with the choreographers, the Kuperman brothers, using the set and set dressing to the maximum in his songs and choreography.”
 
GVPI office...
“GVPI is the acronym for Global Vroomba Parts International, whose CEO, Gloria, is played by Megan Thee Stallion. Steven had this idea that the office for this vacuum-cleaner-parts sales company would be inspired by an old basement boiler room, and we went to work. I sourced 1970’s colorful tanker desks and gave it a retro design, complete with typewriters and landlines.”

Global Vroomba Parts International, basement boiler room business selling vacuum parts. The set is geared for extensive dance choreography. Photo by Justin Lubin ©Sewer Boys LLC.

“Fun fact: this is a perfect example where budgetary constraints helped my artistic process, because it opened the door to working more in collage and mismatch and finding the beauty in that, as opposed to going the uniform, corporate route. We had all these massive desks on wheels so that the dancers could do various configurations during their big number. The Kuperman brothers came up with wonderful choreography and were a dream to collaborate with. We ended up saving a lot of money not getting desktop setups for every desk, and the retro set dressing became an integral part of the choreography. The set was completed with old industrial overhead lighting, conduits and pipes.”

GVPI: Closeup. Detail of photo by Justin Lubin ©Sewer Boys LLC.

 
Acknowledgements...
DICKS: THE MUSICAL was a collaboration in the truest sense of the word...from the writers and stars, Joshua Sharp and Aaron Jackson who were always stoked about anything we brought in, to the A24 producers whose excitement was almost tangible while they stood in front of our moodboards, to my lead Monica Cervantes and our small hard-working team. Working on a musical like this was outside my normal wheelhouse, but as a set decorator, my goal and purpose is to always showcase a range of human emotions, through space and objects. DICKS was no different and the proof is in the pudding… er…tchotchkes.