Inside David Korins’ Exhibit at the Museum of Broadway

Four-time Tony Award nominee David Korins has brought some of Broadway’s most iconic stories to life, designing for Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, Beetlejuice, Here Lies Love, and more. Now, his artistry is being celebrated at the Museum of Broadway, where an entire room showcases his creative process.

Korins admitted that seeing his models and sketches displayed feels both surreal and humbling. “These objects were tools to help a creative team talk to each other and to the actors,” he said. “It is bizarre to see them preserved just blocks away from the theaters they helped bring to life.” Visitors will find process models from shows like Beetlejuice and Hamilton, tangible reminders of how sketches and ideas transform into living, breathing environments onstage.

He calls the exhibit “a messy, magical journey on the making of theater,” because design rarely works on the first try. “Designing is redesigning and redesigning,” he explained. For Korins, the most rewarding part of the exhibit is how it elevates the work of associate designers, model makers, craftspeople, and illustrators who rarely receive public recognition but are essential to the process.

Korins’ path to set design began with performing. A musician and athlete in his youth, he discovered that theater offered the same spirit of teamwork and collaboration. “You start with a blank box, it could be anything,” he said. “That is what I love about theater. It is abstract and theatrically infused.” His designs range from the hyper-realistic Dear Evan Hansen to the wild imagination of Beetlejuice, always in service of the story rather than a personal aesthetic.

Of all his productions, Here Lies Love pushed him the furthest. “The set was the theater itself,” he recalled, contrasting that with the deceptively simple staging of Dear Evan Hansen or the intellectual challenge of compressing decades of history into Hamilton. For Korins, each project poses its own kind of difficulty, and that variety keeps him inspired.

This season, he is preparing two highly anticipated Broadway returns: a revival of Ragtime at Lincoln Center Theater and the third Broadway engagement of Beetlejuice. He described Ragtime as especially urgent for today, calling it “a story of America sewn together with pain, sorrow, and beauty.” The new design for the Beaumont stage will shift between spare intimacy and lush grandeur, reflecting the show’s sweeping themes.

For theatergoers considering the Museum of Broadway, Korins offered a simple invitation: “Just get here.” The exhibit includes the original Hamilton model used off Broadway, sketches from Beetlejuice, and a step-by-step exploration of how a set moves from sketch to finished design. “Even if you are not a theater fan,” he said, “if you have ever wondered how entertainment things get made, you will understand the process here.”

For more information on The Museum of Broadway visit www.themuseumofbroadway.com.