As someone who started their career with dreams of building sets on Broadway, production designer Patrick Howe was thrilled with season 3 of Only Murders in the Building. “I loved everything about season 3 that was relating to our stage musical,” he says. “It was really great to mix all of those things and pull on… things that I learned in my undergrad days of theater.”
Season 3 of Only Murders in the Building takes place a year after the second season, when the star of Oliver’s (Martin Short) Broadway play suddenly collapses on stage during the performance. As Mabel (Selena Gomez) and Charles (Steve Martin) help solve the case, Oliver turns the play into a full-blown musical called Death Razzle Dazzle.
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Although it was a return to his roots in theater, crafting sets for a musical that doesn’t have a full story presented a challenge for Howe. “Normally, when you’re designing a show,” he says, “you generally have the book, the lyrics, the score… none of that existed… So, it was a lot of me doing my own Only Murders detective work with [showrunner] John (Hoffman) to find out what the musical is theoretically about so I can come up with what we need.” After some phone conversations, Howe was presented with some basic elements – a lighthouse in Nova Scotia on a craggy, rocky foundation with an external staircase. “It was a little vague and loosey-goosey, but it was enough information to research and develop something.”
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A nursery set was also built for the musical, where both Loretta (Meryl Streep) and Charles have songs, which Howe decided to build as separate from the main lighthouse. “Stylistically, I liked that more with the lighthouse in the background and an interior of a nursery that was front and center that really gave a lot of focus to Meryl’s song, ‘For the Sake of a Child’, and also in particular Charles’ song about the Pickwick triplets.”
Outside of the musical sets, Howe also had the chance to redesign Mabel’s apartment since her Aunt intends to sell it. “That was essentially an opportunity to come up with a new idea from scratch, visually, but still it was important to me to have some connectivity to the space it had been,” he says. Since the apartment is being sold in NYC, the palette would need to change to something more neutral, and much less characteristic of what the audience expects of Mabel. “The main thing I wanted to do was have the apartment’s floorplan be recognizable… so that was terrific about presenting a new, fresh glamorous Mabel in that way.”
Click the video above to watch the full interview.