Designing for Dragone: Building Large-Format Spectacle
Across Splendor in Wuxi, Souk Wonders and Terhal in Diriyah, Patrick Larsen has been one of the production designers turning Dragone's vision into physical reality.
Souk Wonders, Diriyah Season — a full-scale Najdi-style fortress town built inside a venue, with mud-brick walls, balconies and lanterns as the architecture of the show. A Dragone creation. Production design by Patrick Larsen, Studio Bound.
I've worked inside Dragone productions for a long time now. Franco Dragone, who founded the company, made shows you don't really compare to anything else — big, emotional, image-first. He passed away while we were in the middle of one of these jobs. The company carries on. I keep getting asked back.
What the work has in common
The Dragone projects I've designed run across a few continents and forms — Splendor (The Taihu Show) in Wuxi, Souk Wonders and Terhal in Diriyah. They share a way of working. You start from a feeling and an image, then you engineer something big enough and precise enough to deliver it every night.
Splendor (The Taihu Show) in Wuxi — a Dragone creation built around a revolving stage, a tilting lift and a 360° LED dome. Dragone's materials credit Patrick Larsen as "Kinetic & Set Designer."
A set that has to transform
A Dragone show almost never wants one set. It wants a world that moves — reveals, reconfigures, opens up. As a production designer, I'm holding two things in the same thought: the artistic intent, and what it actually takes to build it and run it. If one of those slips, you can feel it from the audience.
Steam Punk, Wuxi, China (2019) — produced by Sunac, directed by Michael LeFleur under artistic direction by Franco Dragone. Set design by Patrick Larsen, Studio Bound: a Victorian iron-and-brick hall built as a single architectural envelope, re-scenes through light, props and performers.
Why I keep coming back
I keep getting brought into these jobs because I can sit between the director's instinct and the build. That's the seat Franco needed filled, and it's the seat I still try to fill on every Dragone project I work on.
