Photo by Chris Sorensen

Theatre

A Magician’s Touch

Paul Tate dePoo III brings a flair for illusion and a love of spectacle to his lavish set designs for Broadway and beyond

“Who made that?” he asked.

“The football people,” one of his parents responded.

“And I famously said, ‘The football people did not make that.’”

That’s dePoo’s earliest memory of a true spectacle. Growing up in Key West, Fla., he was far from Broadway. But childhood trips to see the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and magician David Copperfield cemented his interest in entertainment. By high school, dePoo was designing his own elaborate magic show, which included making an airplane appear onstage.

Now the owner of Tate Design Group, the New York–based production design studio he established in 2012, dePoo has worked on a long list of plays and musicals, including Sweeney Todd and Grand Hotel, for which he received a 2020 Helen Hayes Award. He designed Turandot for the world’s largest outdoor opera stage, in Vienna, Austria, and Usher’s 2021–2022 residency in Las Vegas, Nev. He’s designed restaurants, corporate events, and a TEDx stage. “It’s all theater, it’s all drag, it’s all performance,” he says.

DePoo’s productions have ranged from the modest to the grand. His first Broadway show, The Cottage—directed by Jason Alexander (’81, Hon.’95)—takes place in a living room. His designs for a revival of the musical Titanic achieve a very different tone and scale, dominated by massive criss-crossing trusses and walkways.

DePoo relishes using a magician’s flair for illusion—but he’s also inspired by the exposed rigging and structures of a circus tent. “The base of my style, no matter the scale of it, is that as you zoom further and further in, there’s so much detail,” he says. “It’s intricacy and a very deceivingly simple perspective.”

There are projects that dePoo still dreams of designing—the Academy Awards, an Olympic Games ceremony, and, of course, the Super Bowl halftime show. For the past four years he’s been living out one of those dreams: bringing The Great Gatsby to Broadway.

Gatsby Comes to Life

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel has lived in dePoo’s mind since high school.

“I wish I still had the book—I remember doodling what it would look like if it was a play,” he says. “I remember thinking that was one of the darkest books I had read because of how much there was beneath this facade of spectacle. I’ve always been obsessed with it.”

DePoo’s set design for The Great Gatsby. Photo by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade

When dePoo heard that director Marc Bruni was working on a musical adaptation of Gatsby, he created a series of renderings of his vision. After meeting with Bruni about another project, he pulled them out. “I’m usually not that up-front about asking for something,” he says. “But I would’ve regretted it if I didn’t.”

Bruni hired him as scenic and projection designer. DePoo reread the book multiple times and listened to an audio version on repeat, searching for clues about the story’s key locations. Each mention of billowing curtains or a rose-hued interior helped inform his elaborate designs.

Working closely with the lighting and costume departments, dePoo and his team designed almost everything on the stage. To create models of the sets they used 3D modeling programs, 3D printers, and laser cutters. The finished designs were shipped off to specialty shops where the life-sized sets are built. “We are the architects,” dePoo says. “We are also the interior designers and the personal shoppers.”

When The Great Gatsby opened at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, in October 2023, a New York Times critic wrote, “More than once I wished I were sitting farther back in the audience because a production this lush…deserves, like the novel, the long view.” Before the move to Broadway in 2024, dePoo and his team added even more detail to their scenes. There are elegant mansion exteriors, immaculate interiors, waterfronts, and two cars. With a video projection, they transformed the orchestra pit into a virtual pool.

The sets for the show’s 50-plus scene changes fill every backstage nook at the Broadway Theatre. They require 22 winches, plus tracks to move the sets on- and offstage. DePoo compares the behind-the-scenes choreography to a game of Tetris.

“The design team here has pulled out all the stops and achieved something nearly unprecedented in terms of scale and quality,” wrote Christian Lewis, a critic for Variety magazine.

DePoo takes pride in designing video projections as well as physical sets. They allow him to extend the scenery and animate surfaces with textures, movement, and light. Used well, they can bring static sets to life. In Gatsby, they play a starring role. When the actors are in a car, for example, projections create a sense of motion; when they’re on the waterfront, Long Island Sound ebbs and flows behind them.

“His projections are masterful, utilizing tiny details (rolling clouds, lapping waves) to transform what might be painted backdrops into amazingly realistic backgrounds,” wrote Lewis in Variety. “Rarely has projection design been so expertly executed.”

Tate Design typically has multiple projects in the works. They’ve recently been working on Immediate Family, a play directed by Phylicia Rashad; a national tour of Spamalot; and a Los Angeles production of Sweeney Todd directed by Alexander. And, dePoo says, “Gatsby is multiplying.” They’ve built sets for productions in London and Seoul, and a US tour begins in January 2026.

A Flair for Magic

DePoo’s career may have gone in a different direction—if not for Hurricane Wilma. He was preparing an elaborate magic show in Key West, with about 20 high school classmates assisting, when the 2005 storm flooded the theater where they were working.

“I remember it being the biggest relief,” he says. “I knew that the show I had wanted to create in my mind I probably wasn’t able to do at that age. And I remember thinking, I wish I knew how to properly do this.”

After that realization, he decided to pursue design rather than performance. But dePoo has retained the language of a magician, where illusion and sleight of hand and confusing the audience combine to create a true spectacle.

He still has a vivid memory of sitting in the audience at a David Copperfield show. “Thousands of people were on this journey to believe something that actually wasn’t possible,” he says. “I get a thrill in defining and creating the impossible.”