On Broadway, Her Set Designs Get a Round of Applause
In a male-dominated field, Rachel Hauck has made a name for herself with wildly ambitious stage designs, including her huge, Tony-nominated ship at the heart of the musical “Swept Away.”
By Calum Marsh June 4, 2025
The first time she saw the shipwreck, Rachel Hauck began to cry.
It was during rehearsals at the Berkeley Repertory Theater for the premiere in 2022 of “Swept Away,” a jukebox musical based on the songs of the Avett Brothers about a 19th-century shipwreck off the coast of New Bedford, Mass. The cast and crew had assembled to stage a dry run of the show’s spectacular action centerpiece: a full-scale re-creation of the capsizing of the whaler, which overturns onstage to reveal a slender wooden lifeboat, where the remainder of the show takes place.
As a feat of conceptual ingenuity and mechanical engineering, the moment was astonishing — a scene of such extraordinary scale and intensity that, when it occurred nightly during the show’s short run on Broadway last year, the audience would break into thunderous applause. It was too much for Hauck, the set designer, who watched that California dress rehearsal with tears streaming down her face.
© Sabrina Santiago for The New York Times
The 2 Worlds Disguised in 1 Set for Broadway’s Hadestown
Tony Award-winning scenic designer Rachel Hauck reveals the secrets hiding in plain sight onstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre.
By Ruthie Fierberg
December 10, 2019
From the very beginning, Hadestown was intended to be a musical that would embrace the audience.
So when the Anaïs Mitchell musical originally premiered Off-Broadway at New York Theatre Workshop, scenic designer Rachel Hauck conceived a space in the round to convey “the generosity of that idea.”
Eva Noblezada and cast of Hadestown Photo © Matthew Murphy
Photo © Tess Mayer
An Interview with Set Designer Rachel Hauck
Written by Victoria Myers
For the musical Hadestown, Hauck had the task of figuring out a design for a show that lives in metaphor, and with the mandate from the creators, Anais Mitchell and Rachel Chavkin, that “it’s a poetry piece, not prose.” For Hadestown, Hauck earned her first Tony nomination for Best Set Design of a Musical. She also designed the set for Heidi Schreck’s Tony-nominated What the Constitution Means to Me, the most intellectually and emotionally rigorous play to be on Broadway in years. For Constitution, Hauck had to create a set that both supported the complexity of the play’s form and allowed it to breathe.
© Nina Westervelt for The New York Times
This ‘Othello’ Is Powered by Women
Sonia Weiser / The New York Times, June 6, 2018
“If it were not for four women, Iago would be standing on a dark, empty stage at the Delacorte Theater this summer, swatting away mosquitoes, with his voice drowned out by distant honks and dog howls.
Instead, thanks to the handiwork of the lighting designer Jane Cox, the scenic designer Rachel Hauck, the costume designer Toni-Leslie James and the sound designer Jessica Paz, Iago — the devilish mastermind who drives the plot of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ — is clad in leather and strikingly illuminated as he struts through stone archways and growls his soliloquies.”
‘In 1: the podcast' episode 71 with Rachel Hauck
April 30, 2017
“[Host Cory Pattak speaks] with Set Designer and current Lortel nominee Rachel Hauck! Aside from being a busy designer, Rachel is also a member of the Off-Broadway committee of designers that recently helped spearhead the first collectively bargained agreement ever for Off-Broadway.
Now that the contract has been voted on, she joins us to discuss the nuts and bolts of how it came together, some of the most exciting terms of the agreement, and how the USA membership banded together to take such an historic step. Cory and Rachel also discuss reading a script for the first time, how she talks to directors who don't yet know what they want, why "just" can be a dirty word in early design conversations and whether theatre design can be molded to fit a standard work week schedule.
And hear how Rachel went from being an LA based designer working in television, including an ill-fated TV show called WOOPS! about a group of kids who accidentally set off a nuclear bomb, to becoming a full time designer for theatre. Lastly, Rachel gives us the most fascinating answer ever to, ‘What job would you do if your profession went away.”
Feature in “Broadway Revealed: Behind the Theater Curtain” by Stephen Joseph, 2015
See the transformation process inside the New York Theatre Workshop theatre as they prepared for HADESTOWN.