The Village Theatre, 2020
Music: Jerry Bock
Lyrics: Sheldon Harnick
Book: Joe Masteroff
Director: Karen Lund
Costumes: Esther Garcia
Lights: L.B. Morse
Sound: Brent Warwick
“This show manages to hit every mark and then some, from the stunning forced perspective, dollhouse-like set from Matthew Smucker and the gorgeous complementary lighting of L.B. Morse to the pitch perfect costumes from Esther Garcia.” - Broadway World
Production Photo Credits: Mark and Tracy Photography
ACT, 2019
Playwright: Steven Dietz
Director: John Langs
Costumes: Deb Trout
Lights: Andrew Smith
Sound: Robertson Witmer
“… [W]e can move on to the gushing about the gorgeous work on hand including Matthew Smucker’s delightful scenic design which is centered on a huge wall of what are essentially coffins that move about in a fantastically terrifying way. And, Deborah Trout’s beautifully color coded costumes (white and cream for the “good guys” and black/red for Dracula and his minions). As well as Andrew D. Smith’s wonderfully dramatic lighting scheme and Rob Witmer’s very nuanced sound design and music composition which includes superb live music performed by an onstage Rachael Beaver, who also contributed music composition to this production. This Dracula looks and sounds like a million bucks and comes complete with lots of terrific stagecraft involving creepy coffins, blood dripping down walls, fun puppetry and all sorts of stage magic craft that delights and dazzles the eye and the ear. These elements are by themselves worth the price of admission.” - Seattle Gay Scene
Production Photo Credits: Truman Buffet, Chris Bennion, Matthew Smucker
Denver Center for the Performing Arts, 2019
Playwright: Donnetta Lavinia Grays
Director: Valerie Curtis-Newton
Costumes: Melanie Taylor Burgess
Lights: M.L. Geiger
Sound: Larry Fowler Jr.
“Two years ago, Valerie Curtis-Newton directed the Denver Center’s Colorado New Play Summit workshop reading of Last Night and the Night Before. She returns to this production with a finely tuned sense of heart and physical flow. The cast gives her deeply rooted performances. And she’s deftly abetted by scenic designer Matthew Smucker, who has created a handsome set that establishes a fluid tension between Brooklyn and the fictional town of Vixten, Ga. Lighting design, by Mary Louise Geiger, accentuates the real-life feel of Rachel and Nadima’s apartment even as it plunges the past and the clandestine into evocative shadow.” - The Denver Post
Production Photo Credits: Adams VisCom and Matthew Smucker
The Fifth Avenue Theatre, 2019
Book: Chris D'Arienzo
Director: Lisa Shriver
Costumes: Cathy Hunt
Lights: Elizabeth Harper
Sound: David Patridge & John H. Shivers
Production Photo Credits: Mark and Tracy Photography
The Village Theatre, 2018
Music and Lyrics: Tim Minchin
Book: Dennis Kelly
Director: Kathryn Van Meter
Costumes: Melanie Taylor Burgess
Lights: Alex Berry
Sound: Robertson Witmer & Brent Warwick
Production Photo Credits: Mark and Tracy Photography
ACT, 2017
Playwright: Arthur Miller
Director: John Langs
Costumes: Deb Trout
Lights: Geoff Korf
Sound: Sharath Patel
“Brilliant! The best production I’ve seen in months! And, no, that’s not hyperbole…” - Arts Stage
“Langs has guided uniformly powerful performances from his stellar cast, who enact the story against an almost bare stage strewn with wooden chairs and an enormous back wall chalkboard where characters write the names of the accused as they are charged (set design by Matthew Smucker). The actors are in modern dress, reinforcing the idea that this is a drama that could, and does, play out across time.” - Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Scenic Designer Matthew Smucker has taken a quite sparse and deconstructed view of the stage itself as the walls of the set are repeatedly represented only with chalk outlines drawn by the actors. This lack of set allows for a sense of openness and transparency even in the midst of all the secrets and lies as we constantly see the comings and goings of the actors or even see them just sitting "off-stage" as their fellow actors perform. And that chalk goes on to serve an even more sinister purpose as the actors continue to write the names of the accused witches on the stage and back wall of the theater and with that open and inclusive atmosphere you almost expect them to come into the audience and write some of our names up there too.” - Broadway World
“ACT's production of The Crucible, directed by John Langs is so good that it makes me want to use all the clichéd phrases that PR people like to clip from reviews and paste on billboards and follow-up press releases. "Stirring!" "Thrilling!" "This is most necessary urgent play we need right now more than ever 4 lyfe!" "Before today there was a world where ACT's production of The Crucible didn't exist, and that world was a duller, lonelier place." Have at it, you marketing assholes.” - The Stranger
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
The Village Theatre, 2017
Music and Lyrics: Stephen Sondheim
Book: James Lapine
Director: Kathryn Van Meter
Costumes: Melanie Taylor Burgess
Lights: Alex Berry
Sound: Brent Warwick
“Visually, this Into the Woods is lovely, the set by Matthew Smucker so redolent of paper it almost smelled like a fairy tale tome” - City Arts
“From the first moments of the show, it is clear this is a world built on stories. Literally. The woods are made of the pages of the fairytales – floor, leaves, and branches all. Once the characters begin to travel through the woods, the set (designed by Matthew Smucker) rotates which puts the characters in a constant state of uncertainty. It adds an element of danger that is normally hard to depict onstage.” - Drama in the Hood
“The stage is made up of spindly, eerie trees with ladders for trunks and paper for leaves. In the center, a revolving turntable, designed with rocks and varying levels to convey the forest floor. The notion of using pieces of paper as leaves for the trees came from the folkloric “wish trees” of Eastern Asia and Great Britain. At a wish tree, people write down their wishes or leave other offerings in the hopes that their desires will be fulfilled. “The idea of the wishing tree grew into idea of these wishes as the foliage,” Smucker said. “The idea of wishes comes so directly out of the script. ‘I wish’ are the first and the last words of the show. It’s the idea that these wishes, these desires of the characters, are what the world is made out of.” In the second act, as the wishes of the characters begin to fall apart, Smucker explained that the stage becomes littered with the foliage of the trees, evoking a sense of winter to Act I’s summer. The “actors have to find their own way around, they no longer have this neat frame [of a fairy tale] around them.” - Bellevue Reporter
Production Photo Credits: Mark and Tracy Photography
The Fifth Avenue Theatre, 2016
Composer: Mitch Leigh
Lyrics: Joe Darion
Book: Dale Wasserman
Director: Allison Narver
Costumes: Harmony Arnold
Lights: L.B. Morse
Sound: Chris Walker
"It is a striking visual that greets theatergoers filing into the 5th Avenue Theatre for its current production of Man of La Mancha. An impassable, impossibly tall fence stretches across the width of the proscenium, lined at the top with concertina wire, backed by concrete walls that reach for the ceiling. It is a brutal, cold, and dark setting for the theater’s reimagining of the 1964 musical inspired by the 1605 novel Don Quixote de La Manche and its author Miguel de Cervantes—one that invites contemplation in a moment when prison reform is a hot topic, as is President Obama’s failure to shutter the Guantanamo Bay detention center.
While the script is unchanged from the original, the modern trappings of this staging extend beyond the concertina wire and concrete that introduce Matthew Smucker’s smart set. The guards are gun-wielding fascist thugs, the machinations of the prison industrial, and the prisoners adorned in the denim and leather of a biker gang. These modern touches, though, are secondary. Once Cervantes’ play within a play begins, brutal reality recedes into the background and gives way to an imaginative staging." - Seattle Weekly
Production Photo Credits: Mark and Tracy Photography
ACT, 2015
Playwright: Anne Washburn
Director: John Langs
Costumes: Deb Trout
Lights: Geoff Korf
Sound: Dominic Cody Kramers
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
The Village Theatre, 2015
Music and Lyrics: John Kander and Fred Ebb
Director: Brian Yorkey
Costumes: Alex Jaeger
Lights: Alex Berry
Sound: Brent Warwick
"Cabaret’s [set] is a maximalist, textured (and literally textual) feast of stuff. The Kit Kat Klub is a womb of light and motion crowded on all sides by the scraps, swastikas, posters, propaganda and news clippings of the Nazi era in Germany. This theme creeps into scene changes: Bradshaw’s apartment wall is a page from the show’s original source novel Goodbye to Berlin. The obsession with paper ephemera works powerfully as a visual metaphor for black-and-white reality creeping in on the characters’ delusions." - The Bellevue Reporter
Production Photo Credits: Mark and Tracy Photography, Matthew Smucker
ACT, Seattle, 2014: Arena Staging
Artists Repertory Theatre, Portland, 2015: Thrust Staging
Playwright: Ayad Akhtar
Director: Allen Nause
Costumes: Rose Pederson
Lighting: Kristeen Crosser
Sound: Brendan Patrick Hogan
"There are moments when you encounter a work that completely revitalizes your love of good theater. Such was a moment for me the other night when I was lucky enough to catch ACT's production of The Invisible Hand. I really wasn't sure what I was in for except that it was a play about politics and economics in Pakistan from Ayad Akhtar, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Disgraced. What I got was an absolutely gripping evening of theater thanks to a killer production and a riveting play that I cannot urge you enough to go see." - Broadway World
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
Strawberry Theatre Workshop, Seattle, 2015
Playwright: Thornton Wilder
Director: Greg Carter
Costumes: Melanie Taylor Burgess
Lights: Reed Nakayama
Sound: Dave Tosti-Lane
"Go See Our Town at the Brand-New 12th Avenue Arts: It's a better production of Our Town than you've ever seen, with better actors than you've ever seen do it, and a better set than you've ever seen—made out of the construction leftovers of 12th Avenue Arts. The ladders? The paint can lids? The sponges and dish soap? I don't want to give too much away, just go, go, go. I cried, and so did the guy I went with." - Slog
Production Photo Credits: Dave Tosti-Lane and Matthew Smucker
Seattle Repertory Theatre, 2014
Playwright: Edward Albee
Director: Braden Abraham
Costumes: Heidi Zamora
Lighting: L.B. Morse
Sound: Matt Starritt
"Matthew Smucker's set design is diabolically and deceptively tense. He's assembled a disheveled academic home circa 1960—books everywhere, African and Asian artifacts, abstract-expressionist paintings—but has built it so we're not looking toward the traditional flat wall, but sitting in one corner of the room looking into the V of the opposite corner. Like the play, the set seems sloppy and homey at first, before you realize it's coming right at your head." - The Stranger
Production Photo Credits: Alabastro Photography and Matthew Smucker
ACT, 2012
Playwrights: Stephanie Timm & Yussef El Guindi
Directors: Kurt Beattie & Sheila Daniels
Choreographer: Maureen Whiting
Costumes: Melanie Taylor Burgess
Lights: M.L. Geiger
Sound: Brendan Patrick Hogan
“There is poetry here, but it’s the moments of heightened theatricality that create a vivid spectacle — as when characters drop down from the sky on bungee chords, battle with pole and saber, or square off atop rolling bamboo staircases.” - Seattle Times
“Go see this show! Hire the babysitter, arrive early (to catch the awesome Indian bazaar in the lobby), and prepare yourself for one of the most glorious and magical evenings I've had in the theater for quite awhile as ACT Theatre presents an exquisite and epic tale that mesmerizes from beginning to end.
And I must mention the astonishing backstage designers whose praises I cannot sing enough. Matthew Smucker has created a simplistic yet gorgeous world for the performers that completely transports you to another land. And his set is only accentuated with the outstandingly stunning costumes from Melanie Burgess. And accentuating the characters more were some wonderful puppet characters created by Greg Carter. Lighting and sound designers Mary Louise Geiger and Brendan Patrick Hogan only serve to heighten this glorious world with their work.” - Broadway World
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
ACT and The 5th Avenue Theatre, 2013
Music and Lyrics: Scott Frankel & Michael Korie
Book: Doug Wright
Director: Kurt Beattie
Costumes: Catherine Hunt
Lights: M.L. Geiger
Sound: Brendan Patrick Hogan
"Set in The Allen Theatre—a theatre in the round—the cast is surrounded on all sides by the audience, but their ebb and flow around the stage (some of the entrances and exits happen up and down aisles) prevent a fishbowl feeling, and keep scenes from growing stagnant. Brilliant sets (Matthew Smucker) ascend and descend from beneath the stage, much like puzzle pieces. You never know what is going to come up next. It gives the “house” a feeling of interchangeableness—look what it was, look what it is...things will come and go, but it will always be Grey Gardens. A newsprint pattern covers the floor and sides of the stage—a subtle reminder that the Beales were women always surrounded by papers, gossip, celebrity. Part of the tragedy is that these two beautiful women went from the society pages to scandalous headlines for their descent into cluttered, reclusive lives." - City Arts
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
Seattle Rep, 2012
Playwright: Liz Duffy Adams
Director: Allison Narver
Costumes: Catherine Hunt
Lights: L.B. Morse
Sound: Chris Walker
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
The Fifth Avenue Theatre, 2012
Composer: Richard Rodgers
Book and Lyrics: Oscar Hammerstein II
Director: Peter Rothstein
Choreographer: Donald Byrd
Costumes: Linda Salsbury
Lights: Tom Sturge
Sound: Ken Travis
"Director Peter Rothstein understands something crucial: For all of its broad comic gestures and a rousing, joyous rendition of the title tune at the finale, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first collaboration is a fundamentally dark — or at least, incredibly ambivalent — work. The possibility of the unknown means hope and fear are co-mingling in unsettling ways, and with the promise of new statehood comes the reality that a big bright future may not be in store for everyone.
Nowhere is that subtext more precisely evoked than in Matthew Smucker’s brilliant scenic design. The opening scene frames Curly against a rectangular cutout of the sky, evoking an iconic doorway image from John Ford’s The Searchers. A series of shifting barn door panels occasionally make way for the big blue vista of the wide-open Oklahoma sky in the background, but more often they constrict, letting just a little bit of that sign of boundless potential through. It’s haunting, thrilling design work that sees the enormously talented Smucker outdoing himself again." - Blogcritics.org
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
The Village Theatre, 2011
Music: Andrew Lloyd Webber
Book & Lyrics: Tim Rice
Director: Brian Yorkey
Costumes: Melanie Taylor Burgess
Lights: Alex Berry
Sound: Gino Scarpino
"Matthew Smucker's main set is a refuse-strewn netherspace amid decaying buildings—conjuring images of Ground Zero, its dusty air pierced by Alex Berry's surveilling searchlights. The opening scene bodes wonderful urban menace, as street toughs crawl out of the shadows, scale a gigantic chain-link fence, and dance a mashup of rave, pop, and hoedown styles (percussively enhanced by Doc Martens on their feet). Jesus wears a hoodie, Judas is buttoned-down and scholarly, while Mary Magdalene is punked out with pink- and yellow-streaked hair. Caiaphas and his priests sport long white coats and cereal bowl–sized yarmulkes. Pilate's Armani mafia harkens to fascism. We meet Herod face-down, butt-up in a massage parlor, which makes his lyric "Jesus, I am overjoyed to meet you face to face" the funniest in the show. Yorkey also salts in references to glossy magazine culture, the Wall Street meltdown, torture, and even our own WTO protests, as helmeted jackboots rhythmically thwack batons on shields. It's a dazzling farrago of the topical and the spiritual." - Seattle Weekly
Production Photo Credits: Jay Koh and Matthew Smucker
Seattle Rep, 2011
Playwright: Annie Baker
Director: Andrea Allen
Costumes: Christine Meyers
Lights: Andy Smith
Sound: Matt Starritt
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
Intiman, 2011
Playwright: Arthur Miller
Director: Valerie Curtis Newton
Costumes: Melanie Taylor Burgess
Lights: M.L. Geiger
Sound: Chris Walker
Seattle Repertory Theatre, 2010
Playwright: Edward Albee
Director: Allison Narver
Costumes: Melanie Taylor Burgess
Lights: Allen Hahn
Sound: Paul James Pendergast
“Matthew Smucker’s beautifully minimal set suggests an entire room without actually being one. It’s an abstraction of a space, the vaguest memory of an actual location represented on stage. The result is an existential world that lives outside of time but falls in and out of phase with it. It’s both engaging and slightly disorienting.” - The Sunbreak
“Everything about this production earns high praise but let us begin with Matthew Smucker’s beautifully designed and executed set, the luxurious but classically simple bedroom of ‘A’. The proscenium was framed, like a painting, to focus the attention on the surreality of the drama on stage, and the walls of the bedroom were all sheer, white draperies that rippled when the actors walked near them and they reflected the colors of the lighting… it was a delicious fever dream of a set that nestled someplace between plausible reality and the fractured subconsciousness of the dying woman. It was a beautifully realized set and Mr Smucker probably just earned himself a slew of awards nominations for it. High praise also, for Allen Hahn’s dramatic lighting, Melanie Taylor Burgess’s immaculate costumes and the subtle and effective sound design by Paul James Prendergast. And, it was all executed under the astute direction of Allison Narver, who directed with a clean, carefully choreographed but organic purpose of intent.” - Seattle Gay Scene
Production Photo Credits: Matthew Smucker and Chris Bennion
ACT, 2010
Playwright and Director: Steven Dietz
Costumes: Marcia Dixcy Jory
Lights: Rick Paulson
Sound: Brendan Patrick Hogan
ACT, 2010
Playwright: Horton Foote
Director: Victor Pappas
Costumes: Frances Kenny
Lights: Rick Paulson
Sound: Brendan Patrick Hogan
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
ACT, 2009
Playwright: Tom Stoppard
Director: Kurt Beattie
Costumes: Carolyn Keim
Lights: M.L. Geiger
Sound: Brendan Patrick Hogan
ACT, 2009
Playwright: Richard Dresser
Director: Pam McKinnon
Costumes: Deb Trout
Lights: Rick Paulson
Sound: Brendan Patrick Hogan
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
ACT, 2009
Playwright: Jeffery Hatcher
Director: R. Hamilton Wright
Costumes: Marcia Dixcy Jory
Lights: Rick Paulson
Sound: Brendan Patrick Hogan
"One of the great treats of 2009 was getting to sit for two hours watching the lab of Dr. Henry Jekyll rise and fall on the ACT stage. While Matthew Smucker's sets for the April production of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were often minimalist to the point of merely hinting at a locale, he made sure every Victorian test tube and cabinet was just so in recreating the not-so-good doctor's private lair. The result: Every time the lab appeared, the audience wondered, "Is this when we're going to see Jekyll's throat-clutching transformation?" Smucker's set became a character in itself—both emblematic of the doctor's secret identity and a sinister presence all its own." - Seattle Weekly
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
ACT, 2008
Playwright: Sarah Ruhl
Director: Allison Narver
Costumes: Melanie Taylor Burgess
Lights: Michael Wellborn
Sound: Chris Walker
“...it's as much meditation as play, with Allison Narver making the most of her cast and set designer Matthew Smucker's eerie end-of-summer dreamscape. Smucker's dilapidated swimming pool (complete with a prodigious diving board looming above) nods both to Carl Jung's notions of water-as-unconscious and to the bygone innocence of those '50s romances popularized by Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue. In fact, a still photo from any of Eurydice's early scenes would have made a fine cover for a pulp novel from the era.” - Seattle Weekly
Production Photo Credits: Matthew Smucker and Chris Bennion
New Century Theatre Company, 2009
Playwright: Craig Wright
Director: Allison Narver
Costumes: Melanie Taylor Burgess
Lights: Geoff Korf
Sound: Robertson Witmer
ACT, 2007
Playwright: Clare Booth Luce
Director: Warner Shook
Costumes: David Zinn
Lights: M.L. Geiger
ACT, 2007
Playwright: Sarah Ruhl
Director: Allison Narver
Costumes: Frances Kenny
Lights: Michael Wellborn
Sound: Dominic Cody Kramers
ACT, 2006
Playwright: Martin McDonough
Director: Kurt Beattie
Costumes: Marcia Dixcy Jory
Lights: M.L. Geiger
Sound: Dominic Cody Kramers
"The thrilling staging plays like a vivid nightmare... Matthew Smucker's monstrous industrial set easily takes us through the various worlds McDonagh has created. Full of tricks and surprises (too delightful to give away here), this scenic masterpiece is a stunning accomplishment.” - Broadwayworld.com
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker
ACT, 2005
Playwright: Charlayne Woodard
Director: Valerie Curtis-Newton
Costumes: Melanie Taylor Burgess
Lighting: Chris Reay
Production Photo Credits: Chris Bennion and Matthew Smucker