The Design of Transitions
Anatomy of a Revue, Part 2: The Designer's First Job
Murray just told you how to program an evening. The shape, the three laws, the index cards. That's the director's job and he's the best I ever saw at it. Now he hands me the running order — twelve numbers, two acts, an intermission — and says: make it flow.
My first question is never "what does each number look like." My first question is "what happens between them."
Because in a revue, the audience never stops watching. There is no curtain call between numbers. There is no pause while the house lights flicker and the crew shuffles scenery in merciful darkness. The moment one number ends and the next begins — that gap, that breath, that shift — is where the revue lives or dies. Get the transitions right and the evening feels like one continuous act of magic. Get them wrong and the audience sees the wires.
I designed transitions first and scenes second. I learned to do this at the Greenwich Village Follies with Murray in the twenties, and I never stopped because it never stopped being true: the flow between numbers matters more than any single number.
Six Verbs
Every transition is a verb. The audience reads that verb unconsciously — they don't know they're reading a grammar, but they are. The designer's job is to conjugate correctly.
Here are the six verbs I used across forty years of revues:
The Drop: "We are somewhere new."
A painted cloth descends from the flies. Behind it, in the dark, the crew strikes one world and builds another. The drop is the fastest reset in theater — it buys you sixty to ninety seconds of covered change while giving the audience something beautiful to look at.
At the Follies, I painted drops that were meant to be seen for less than two minutes. Full compositions — a Venetian canal, a Parisian café, a tropical garden — rendered in theatrical scale, designed to read from the back of the balcony. Some designers treated the drop as a nuisance, a necessary screen. I treated it as a number. If the audience is going to look at something for ninety seconds, that something had better be worth looking at.
The drop says: trust me. A new world is being built for you. Enjoy the view while you wait.
The Crossover: "Meanwhile."
Performers cross the stage in front of a curtain or drop while the set changes behind it. This is the workhorse transition of the revue — a specialty act, a comedy bit, a musical interlude played on the apron while the real work happens upstage.
The crossover is the most honest transition because it acknowledges the mechanics. The audience knows something is happening behind that curtain. They can hear it. The crossover says: we know you know, and we're going to entertain you while it happens. It turns a limitation into a feature. Some of the best comedy in revue history happened on crossovers — a comedian with a spotlight and four minutes to kill while the stagehands built a set. Necessity is the mother of patter.
The Wagon: "The world is arriving."
A rolling platform carries a full set piece — or an entire scene — from the wings onto the stage. The wagon is bold because it happens in full view. The audience watches a new world roll toward them. There's a grandeur to it when it's done right, a sense of event and occasion.
The danger of the wagon is noise. Casters on a stage floor, the grind of the track, the thump when it hits its mark — these sounds break the spell if you haven't solved them mechanically. I spent as much time choosing casters as I spent choosing fabrics. A silent wagon is invisible. A squeaky wagon is all the audience remembers.
The Revolve: "The world is turning."
The turntable. One world rotates away and another rotates into view. It is the most cinematic transition because it suggests continuous motion — the idea that all these worlds exist simultaneously and the stage is simply revealing them one at a time.
Murray and I used the revolve at the Hippodrome for Jumbo, where the scale demanded it — you couldn't strike a three-ring circus set conventionally, so you turned the whole stage. But I've seen revolves work beautifully in small houses too. A twelve-foot turntable in a black box, turned by hand, can achieve the same feeling of transformation. The principle scales. The principle is always: the change itself is part of the show.
The Blackout: "Stop."
Lights out. Total darkness. The crew moves fast — fifteen seconds, twenty at most — and when the lights come back, everything has changed. The blackout is the most violent transition, the hardest cut. It says: that was then, this is now. Don't ask how we got here.
The blackout only works if it's fast. Thirty seconds of darkness and the audience starts to cough, shift, whisper. The spell is broken. I timed blackout transitions with a stopwatch and if my crew couldn't do it in twenty seconds, I redesigned the change until they could. A blackout is a controlled explosion. It must be precise.
The Transformation: "Watch this."
The set changes in view of the audience. Flats rotate to reveal new faces. A scrim goes transparent as the lights shift behind it. Pieces fly out while new pieces fly in, all choreographed to music. The transformation is the most theatrical transition because it makes the mechanics part of the spectacle. The audience sees the magic happening and is more amazed, not less.
This is the hardest transition to design because it requires the most coordination — lights, flies, crew, music, all synchronized to the second. But when it works, it is the single most thrilling thing a stage can do. The world changes before your eyes. That is what theater is. That is what theater has always been.
Tempo
Not every transition should be fast. This is the mistake young designers make — they think speed equals professionalism. It doesn't. Speed is one tempo among many, and a revue needs all of them.
A painted drop descending slowly while a singer finishes a ballad in a tightening pool of light — that's a slow transition, and it's devastating. The audience watches two things end at once: the song and the world it lived in. A blackout after a comedy sketch, bang, lights up on a solo dancer — that's fast, and the shock of the contrast makes both numbers hit harder.
Tempo in transitions follows the same rule as tempo in music: contrast creates meaning. A show that's all fast transitions is exhausting. A show that's all slow transitions is a funeral. You alternate. You surprise. You use the speed of the change to tell the audience how to feel about what's coming.
The Practical Reality
I know what you're thinking. You don't have a fly system. You don't have a revolve. You don't have forty stagehands. You've got a black box, six volunteers, and a budget that wouldn't cover the paint for one of my Follies drops.
Good. The principles are the same. You just scale the vocabulary.
Two rolling platforms and good lighting can create the feeling of continuous transformation in any space. A fabric panel on a pipe, flown by hand, is a drop. Two performers doing a bit downstage while your crew resets upstage is a crossover. A single work light snapping off is a blackout. You don't need Broadway machinery. You need the understanding that the space between numbers is not dead time — it's theater.
I'll say it again because it's the whole point: the transition is not a pause between numbers. The transition IS a number. Design it with the same care, the same intention, the same respect for the audience's attention. Because the audience is always watching. Even in the dark. Especially in the dark.
The Modern Temptation
LED walls. Projection mapping. Automated flies. Digital scenery that changes at the push of a button.
These tools solve the mechanical problem of transitions completely. You can go from a forest to a ballroom in a blackout that lasts exactly as long as the video crossfade. The physical limitations that made transitions expensive, slow, and risky are gone.
And that is a danger.
Because the magic of a transition was never in the result. It was in the transformation. The audience doesn't gasp when they see the new set. They gasp when they see the old set becoming the new set. The revolve turning, the drop descending, the flats opening like pages of a book — the change itself is the spectacle. A digital crossfade has no verb. It's not "we are somewhere new" or "the world is turning." It's just... different now. And "different now" is what a television does. Theater should do more.
Use the new tools. They're extraordinary. But don't let them rob you of the transformation. Let the audience see something change. Let them watch the world become a different world. That is what they came for. That is what no screen can give them.
What Transitions Give You
When the transitions are right, the audience forgets they exist. That sounds like a contradiction — I just spent two thousand words telling you to design them with the same care as a number, and now I'm saying the audience shouldn't notice? Yes. Exactly.
Great transitions are invisible in the same way great typography is invisible. You don't notice the font. You just read the words. You don't notice the transition. You just feel the evening flowing. One world becomes another and it feels inevitable, effortless, as though the stage always wanted to do this.
That effortlessness is the result of enormous effort. Of choosing the right verb for each gap. Of timing each change to the second. Of understanding that the audience's attention is a living thing that must be held, guided, surprised, and respected — especially in the moments when nothing seems to be happening.
Those moments are everything. The numbers are the jewels. The transitions are the setting. And any jeweler will tell you: the setting is what makes the stone catch the light.
This is Part 2 of "The Anatomy of a Revue," a ten-part series by John Murray Anderson and Raoul Pène du Bois. Previous: Murray on programming the evening. Next: Murray on light as narrative.