John Iacovelli has designed over 300 theatre productions across the US. He won a prestigious Emmy Award for the A&E broadcast version of Broadway’s Peter Pan starring Tony nominee Cathy Rigby. He has been honored with the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, 14 Drama-Logue Awards, the Bay Area Drama Critics Circle Award, and Backstage West Garland Award.

Always on the innovative front of integrated digital art direction, he has designed extensively for film and television, including as art director on Honey, I Shrunk the Kids! and The Cosby Show; supervising art director for Telemundo Network’s West Coast operations; and production designer for The Wild West and National Lampoon, among others. Some of his other credits are NBC’s The Book of Daniel, the syndicated TV show Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and TNT’s Babylon 5, as well as industrial designs for NASA, Disney World, and for the Atlanta Olympics.

One of the master scenic designer’s most recent projects was, in his own words, “a unique challenge,” that is, creating an exciting world (literally!) for Loving the Silent Tears: The Musical.

Let’s trace some of Mr. Iacovelli’s career highlights and the wonderful creativity he brought to the Loving the Silent Tears production.

Scenic designer John Iacovelli's Emmy-winning creations for Broadway musical Peter Pan

Q: You designed the fantastic 1999 revival of Peter Pan. Then you were honored in 2001 with an Emmy Award for your art direction of the A&E broadcast of Peter Pan.

John Iacovelli: In my career, I’ve been very lucky to work on a Broadway musical that was iconographic in the Broadway kind of idea. And Peter Pan that I designed with Cathy Rigby, which was Tony-nominated, that is one of those shows that you think that it’s a magical place. You know, that was a surprise in a way, winning an Emmy for Peter Pan because Peter Pan, let’s face it, was a Broadway show that went on tour. I was very lucky that year…. I was up against a Cirque du Soleil show, and The Grammys and The Oscars, and I feel what set Peter Pan apart was again the storytelling. It was a great honor and I feel that it was a great thing for me because it was the intersection of my two careers in theatre and in television. And it was like a theatre thing that then got a television award. How weird is that, but how wonderful!

Q: Tell us about some of your most interesting TV design work.

John Iacovelli: I started on a TV show called Babylon 5 about 15 years ago now. It was a sci-fi show set in the future, and we were the first show to take advantage of computer-generated graphics and the idea of immersing characters into the backgrounds.

Working on The Cosby Show was really fun. It really was the number one show at the time. The cast was so wonderful. I think that changed all of America and really the world. I mean, when I was in Mexico working on Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!, I remember looking at the television one time and it was a re-run of The Cosby Show, dubbed into Spanish… it was so universal. And that was the joy of working on that show and it was a beautiful show to work on.

Q: It's said that production designers create dreams and exciting places. What do you think?

John Iacovelli: Really, a lot of making those dreams is the practical. So it's sort of the marriage of taking the idea of the play or the show or the script, and trying to transport the audience into a magical or a new world. If it’s a written story, like in this case [of Loving the Silent Tears], it's a series of poems that are webbed together by kind of a wonderful journey.

Q: What has it been like working on Loving the Silent Tears?

At a Loving the Silent Tears creative team meeting

John Iacovelli: Loving the Silent Tears is a unique challenge because the energy of the show is it’s a one-time event. And to get it right with only one shot, it’s hard. We started out with working with these beautiful poems. Vincent has taken the idea with the writers of a journey on a train. And it’s a kind of journey that is of the imagination and of a spiritual level. So what we’ve done is I’ve come up with a beautiful curvilinear set that things can glide on and glide off. We have a train car like maybe in that movie Hugo or in other fantasy movies where the train is not combined to the tracks.

We have a beautiful curved shape for the opening, these feathery, kind of gauze portals, and a beautiful projectable screen in the back.

Then also distilling down different cultures and ideas into something graphic – for example, the Chinese section will have big red lanterns – and things that are sort of emotionally tied to these different cultures.

Q: That’s fascinating! Tell us more about the magical train.

John Iacovelli: Style-wise, I took the old 19th century kind of steam locomotive and the 1930s sort of art modern, streamlined thing, kind of smooshed them together, a little bit of sci-fi thrown in there for the skeletal version of it, so that it should feel like this really cool train journey that you would want to take.

Q: The musical is based on the poem collection, Silent Tears, by Supreme Master Ching Hai. Have you been drawing ideas or inspiration from the poetry?

John Iacovelli: These are beautiful poems and that is the inspiration for the whole show. The cool thing about the poems is they do tell a journey. I think you go into this kind of dreamlike state in these poems, where they appeal to you on a deeper level than just reading them. I find every time I read them, it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t realize that.” So that’s good poetry, when poetry speaks to us on a level that is not surface.

Q: The poet, Supreme Master Ching Hai, will also be honored at the musical’s world premiere for her worldwide humanitarian contributions.

John Iacovelli: Supreme Master, and, for me, someone that sacrifices so much of their own personal life, I put them right up there with anyone in the great service of people, because basically they have taken their life and put it over to a greater good. And so for me that’s the message: is that we all can do that at a certain level. You know, I think that’s her message to me. It’s about how do you make the world a better place. I am really excited about the idea of getting to know these poems better and this teaching better, and I think that by being able to manifest it in this work of art, it will have a life after the show. And that’s what is going to be exciting.

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