Putting on a Broadway musical is no easy feat. But “Only Murders in the Building” production designer Patrick Howe faced that challenge in the Hulu comedy and murder mystery series’ Season 3, in which the characters write and
stage an original musical titled Death Rattle Dazzle.
“It’s challenging when designing a show from scratch, especially
when all the departments have to make up everything almost at the same time with not a lot of information to go on,” said Howe, who came to the job
with experience in theater design.
“Normally, designers are inspired by a score and lyrics and certainly a book of a musical—from those elements we can get inspiration and make a lot of design choices. But the book [for Death Rattle Dazzle] was never going to exist. I had to make the designs before I was ever going to hear any music or lyrics. We were all in the same boat. The composers were off doing their thing, we’re doing our own things at the same time, and then we had to have our fingers crossed and meet up in the end and hope it all came together.”
Howe got a sense of the vibe and style of “Death Rattle Dazzle” by receiving basic plot points from showrunner John Hoffman.
“He said the primary set would be a lighthouse in Nova Scotia on some craggy rocks where a dead body would be found and that the triplets were going to be accused of the murder in song,” he said. “So we definitely needed a lighthouse and we needed a place for Loretta, played by Meryl Streep, to make an entrance. I was able to piece all these things together from his descriptions and put together a lighthouse look.”
“I did find in the research that there was an iconic type of lighthouse that was all over the Nova Scotia area, so I took all the best components of a few different lighthouses. When John saw sketches of color and scale, he was able to
sign off on whether that was hitting the right mood and atmosphere,” Howe added.
Howe’s goal was to make the lighthouse as large as possible while also fitting it on stage.
“I used a lot of trickery of perspective to make the lighthouse look taller than it really was,” he said. “Obviously in real life lighthouses can be
many, many stories tall and the theater stage is not as tall.”
He used steep steps for perspective before he realized that three of the lead actors—Steve Martin, Martin Short and Meryl Streep—were in their 70s.
“I brought Meryl to the set and she was a real trooper and had no problem working on it,” he said. “It meant a lot to me that those rather famous actors were happy to make use of that scenery and even chew it up a little bit.”
Though the concept for the set was established long before filming on Season 3 began, rewrites pushed the set’s full appearance from Episode 1 to Episode 10, giving the design team more leeway.
“It was only shortly before the first episode began filming that we knew we wouldn’t have to show the lighthouse,” he said. “There were other aspects we needed to show, but not the lighthouse, so we did have more building and painting time available to complete it at a comfortable pace.”
Once Howe heard the songs, he added additional set pieces, such as the nursery used for Streep’s ballad “Look for the Light” and Steve Martin’s “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?”
“There was probably two or three weeks time to sort what I thought the needs would be and should be and then work a design up to be able to show and then get that design drawn and then in the shop and built, painted and ready to film,” he said.
In addition to the set, Howe enjoyed giving the audience a behind-the-scenes look at the theater’s wings, backstage corridors and dressing rooms.
“You’re seeing the musical from the audience point of view and then you’re seeing it from the actor’s point of view,” he said. “You see it from on stage and off stage and it makes it very layered. I loved to organize the sequences to where that all made sense.”
Howe’s full set design presented in the Season 3 finale scored “Only Murders in the Building” an Emmy nomination for production design. All together, the show received 21 nods for the season, including Outstanding Comedy Series and Selena Gomez’s first nomination for the Lead Actress category.
“It’s actually very exciting and it means a lot to me,” Howe said of his Emmy nod.
His production design will next been seen in “Only Murders in the Building” Season 4 premiering Aug. 27, which will follow Charles, Mabel and Oliver as they head out on a bicoastal adventure to solve the murder of Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch) and see their true crime podcast turned into a Hollywood film, with a star-studded lineup of guest stars including Streep, Molly Shannon, Eva Longoria, Eugen Levy, Zach Galifianakis, Melissa McCarthy, Kumail Nanjiani, Richard Kind and more.
The first three seasons of “Only Murders in the Building” are available to stream now on Hulu.
A version of this story first ran in the Down to the Wire Comedy Series issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the Down to the Wire Comedy Series issue here.
