A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(November 2018) |
Industry | Specialist Design |
---|---|
Founder | Leo Warner (co-founder Mark Grimmer) |
Headquarters | London , United Kingdom |
Number of employees | 35 |
Website | www |
Fifty-Nine Productions (59 Productions) is a design studio with offices located in London and New York City. [1] [2]
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59 Productions was founded in Edinburgh by Leo Warner (shortly joined by co-founder Mark Grimmer). Their early public projects were largely video-led designs for theatre, and included video designs for Stellar Quines Theatre Company's Sweet Fanny Adams in Eden in 2003, [3] and video designs for the then recently-formed National Theatre of Scotland's Roam and Black Watch in 2006, which was featured at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and won several awards. [4] [5]
59 Productions relocated to London, where they began a series of collaborations at the Royal National Theatre. [6] Critics at The Guardian commented that with an adaptation of The Waves that they worked on, the team had "created an entirely new art form". [7]
Warner and Grimmer were part of the original creative team for War Horse in 2007, which won several Laurence Olivier Awards [8] in London and five Tony Awards for its subsequent production on Broadway. [9]
59 Productions worked on its first opera in 2007 at the English National Opera, providing the projection design for Philip Glass's Satyagraha , directed by Phelim McDermott and co-directed/designed by Julian Crouch, both of the theatre company, Improbable. [10] This was the first of several collaborations with Improbable, including the design for the Metropolitan Opera's 125th Anniversary Gala in 2009, which raised over $10 million. [11]
In 2012, director Danny Boyle asked 59 Productions to provide the animation and projection design for the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics, which was viewed by over a billion people. [12] They also led the design of the David Bowie exhibition for the Victoria and Albert Museum. [13] The company was commissioned for the Light the Sails project at the Sydney Opera House for the 2014 Vivid Sydney Festival. [14] In 2015, they were responsible for the projection design for the first-ever Broadway production of George Gershwin's An American in Paris. The production won four Tony Awards, including Best Scenic Design of a Musical for Bob Crowley and 59 Productions. [15]
In 2017, the company developed and produced its first production. It was an adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass, written by Duncan Macmillan. City of Glass was a co-production with the Lyric Hammersmith, HOME arts center, and Karl Sydow. The production was described by The Daily Telegraph as a "neo-noir thriller that rewrites the rulebook for theatre design." [16]
In 2018, 59 Productions provided both the set and projection design for The Last Ship, a musical by Sting that tells the story of shipbuilding in North East England. The production opened at Northern Stage before embarking on a UK tour. Other projects include the design of Marnie, an opera by Nico Muhly that transferred to the Metropolitan Opera after an initial run at the English National Opera in London. The company also designed events in 2018 for both the first night of the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall and the Edinburgh International Festival.
Alongside their work on the stage, 59 Productions made two virtual reality films in 2018: Grenfell: Our Home, [17] a collaboration with Parable and Channel 4 that won the Audience Award at Sheffield DocFest, [18] and Nothing To Be Written, [19] which was commissioned by the BBC and won Best UK Experience and two other awards at the Raindance Film Festival. [20] In November 2018, Deep Field, their film collaboration with composer Eric Whitacre and NASA, premiered at the Kennedy Space Center. [21]
Les Misérables, colloquially known as Les Mis or Les Miz, is a sung-through musical with music by Claude-Michel Schönberg, lyrics by Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel, and a book by Schönberg and Boublil, based on the 1862 novel of the same name by Victor Hugo. The original French musical premiered in Paris in 1980 with direction by Robert Hossein. Its English-language adaptation, with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer, produced by Cameron Mackintosh, has been running in London since October 1985, making it the longest-running musical in the West End and the second longest-running musical in the world after the original Off-Broadway run of The Fantasticks. A film adaptation was released in 2012.
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John Newport Caird is an English stage director and writer of plays, musicals and operas. He is an honorary associate director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was for many years a regular director with the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain and is the principal guest director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm (Dramaten).
Enda Walsh is an Irish playwright.
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Gareth Patrick Williams is an Irish composer based at Edinburgh College of Art. He was the first composer in residence for Scottish Opera from 2012 to 2015. His work spans from opera and music theatre to chamber music.
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Elaine J. McCarthy is an American projection and video designer for theater and opera.
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