What Jeff Tidwell's Projection Design Does That Broadway Couldn't
A note-by-note look at how BSC's Dear Evan Hansen uses technology not as spectacle but as emotional infrastructure. Read the full piece →
The original Broadway production of Dear Evan Hansen made a choice that changed the grammar of modern musical theatre: it put social media onstage. Projected text messages, notifications, viral videos — the stuff of adolescent digital life rendered as theatrical scenery. It worked because it was honest about what isolation looks like in 2015.
BSC's Nevada premiere, designed by Jeff Tidwell, makes a harder choice. It doesn't show you the internet. It shows you what the internet feels like from the inside.
"The projection isn't decoration. It's the play's nervous system — ambient, intrusive, beautiful, and damning all at once."
This is what distinguishes a projection designer from a projection operator. The former makes aesthetic and dramaturgical decisions about what light means. The latter executes a cue sheet. Tidwell is clearly the former: every image choice reads as an argument about the character, not an illustration of the script.
The craft note worth making for anyone building this kind of work: Tidwell's design achieves its most powerful moments by going still. In a form where projection is tempted toward constant motion — because motion is attention — the held images in "Words Fail" create a silence that the orchestra cannot. That's a design philosophy, not an accident.