The Emmy-winning Amazon comedy is spending three days shooting at Carnegie Hall this week for the fourth-season finale, the Daily News has exclusively learned.
The network is keeping mum about any plot details about the big stage, but the third season left off with Midge (Rachel Brosnahan)dumped at the airport with Susie (Alex Borstein) after accidentally outing Shy Baldwin (Leroy McClain) before they were supposed to go on tour together for six months.
“Carnegie Hall doesn’t need much help from the Maisel art department,” production designer Bill Groom told the Daily News. “It’s been one of the easier places to work because it needs so little help from us.”
Even bringing Carnegie Hall back to the late ‘50s and early ‘60s of Maisel wasn’t a difficult task, Groom said, thanks to the fastidious upkeep and devotion to its history.
Show creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and executive producer Daniel Palladino had long dreamed of shooting at the famous Manhattan venue, Groom told The News, but even he admitted that booking it was “a bit of a surprise.”
The COVID-19 pandemic worked in their favor: Carnegie Hall has sat empty since March 2020 as part of the New York shutdown. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel shoot is its grand reopening.
Decades ago, Groom helped film George Carlin at Carnegie Hall, during which the production had three hours to get in, set up, shoot and get out. That’s the typical time frame allotted to those allowed inside, squeezed between legendary performances.
But the Amazon Prime hit got three days, a luxury Groom could hardly imagine.
“All of Maisel, from the very beginning, is about performance spaces,” he told The News.
“One of our grips actually told me that his mother gets very weepy because she grew up on the Upper West Side and she sees it as it was when she was a girl. We want to capture parts of New York that mean something to people.”
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel began in Manhattan as Midge launched, accidentally, her stand-up career. From there, it and she branched out, to Miami, the Catskills and Paris. Groom has a list of dream locations in his mind, some for Maisel and others, like a specific spot on the Long Island Expressway, that he envisions for other projects. Every place has to make sense for the characters and their world.
No date has been announced for the fourth season, which will see the returns of Brosnahan, Tony Shalhoub, Alex Borstein, Marin Hinkle, Michael Zegen, Kevin Pollak and Caroline Aaron, as well as the arrival of guest star Milo Ventimiglia, reuniting with the Palladinos from Gilmore Girls.
(New York Daily News/TNS)