How Peter Nigrini Builds New York Without Building New York

There is a version of projection design that serves as wallpaper. You know it when you see it: a backdrop that tells you “this is a city” or “this is night” without adding anything the set or lighting couldn’t already accomplish. It fills space. It confirms location. It recedes. Peter Nigrini’s work on Hell’s Kitchen is the opposite of that, and understanding why is a useful way to think about what projection design can be when it’s doing its job fully.

Hell’s Kitchen — Alicia Keys’ semi-autobiographical musical, written with playwright Kristoffer Diaz, directed by Michael Greif — is set in a specific New York: the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of the early 1990s. That specificity matters to the show. The story is about a seventeen-year-old named Ali who wants to be a musician, and the neighborhood she grows up in is not incidental backdrop. It is the pressure system the story breathes. The crowded apartments, the street corners, the particular quality of late-afternoon light through a Manhattan window — these are not settings to be illustrated. They are forces acting on the characters.

The scenic design by Robert Brill gives the production its physical grammar: platforms, a staircase, a doorframe that becomes multiple doorframes, the geometry of a building facade that opens and reconfigures. It’s architectural and somewhat abstract. What it deliberately does not do is pretend to be literally New York. That work falls to Nigrini.

The Projection Designer as World-Builder

When projection design is working at this level, the designer is not decorating a set. They are collaborating on the spatial logic of the production: deciding what exists in the world of the play, at what distance, in what relationship to the bodies on stage. Nigrini’s approach to Hell’s Kitchen involves projecting onto multiple surfaces — the facade elements, the floor, the scrim — in ways that create depth and atmosphere rather than illustration. The result is that the audience understands they are in 1990s Manhattan not because they have been shown a photograph of it, but because the accumulated visual information — light quality, texture, the scale of urban architecture surrounding these small human figures — produces that understanding physically.

This distinction — between showing and creating — is the central challenge of projection design for any production with a strong sense of place. A photograph of Hell’s Kitchen in 1993 would give you accurate information. It would not give you the sensation of growing up there, of being seventeen in that specific neighborhood with that specific ambition in that specific decade. The projections serve the story by creating the sensation, not the documentation.

What Changes on Tour

Any Broadway production translated to a national tour carries a design question that doesn’t exist in the original run: what does the design require from the theatre, and which theatres can provide it? Projection design is particularly vulnerable here. The original production at the Shubert Theatre was designed for a specific room — specific throw distances, specific surface geometry, specific ambient light conditions. On tour, the show plays Reynolds Hall in Las Vegas, the Orpheum in Minneapolis, the Fox in Atlanta. The rooms are different in ways that affect everything: projection throw, surface angles, the relationship between projected image and live performer.

Nigrini has navigated this challenge on other large-scale tours — his work includes productions that have moved from Broadway to extended national tours while maintaining design integrity. The touring version of Hell’s Kitchen carries its own projection infrastructure, adapted for touring. What arrives at the Smith Center is not a compromise of the original design; it is a version of the design calibrated for the conditions of Reynolds Hall.

The 1990s Problem

There is an additional challenge specific to this production: the 1990s are far enough away to feel historical but close enough that the audience has strong personal associations. This creates a trap for designers. The temptation — and you see it in productions that don’t handle this well — is to lean into recognizable signifiers: specific brand imagery, particular clothing, the visual shorthand of the era. This produces nostalgia rather than atmosphere. It tells the audience “this is the 1990s” in a way that creates pleasant recognition but does not serve the story.

Nigrini’s solution, as described in interviews about the Broadway production, is to work through light quality rather than image content. The specific color temperatures of streetlights from that era, the way neon signed interacted with wet pavement, the quality of fluorescent light in apartment hallways that hasn’t been upgraded since the building was wired. These are not images you can photograph and project. They are atmospheric conditions you reconstruct through careful calibration of hue, intensity, and texture. The result is a period sensibility that functions below the level of conscious recognition — you feel the decade before you identify it.

Why This Matters for a Las Vegas Audience

The Smith Center has hosted touring productions across a wide range of design philosophies. What Hell’s Kitchen brings to Reynolds Hall is a production in which projection design is structural — load-bearing in the same sense that Robert Brill’s set is structural, that Natasha Katz’s lighting is structural. Remove any element and the world of the show ceases to function. That integration is relatively rare in large-scale touring work, where design elements are often designed to travel independently and recombine in different rooms without creating anything that depends too precisely on the combination.

Audiences who see Hell’s Kitchen at Smith Center in June will likely not think about any of this consciously. They will feel the neighborhood. They will understand Ali’s world without being told about it. That invisibility is the achievement. It is also, for anyone interested in the craft of how live performance creates reality out of light and surface and human presence, exactly the thing worth paying attention to.

Hell’s Kitchen runs at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, Reynolds Hall, June 23–28, 2026. Tickets at thesmithcenter.com.