Production designer
Who he is
Eugenio Caballero is a production designer from Mexico City. He won the Academy Award for Art Direction for Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, and was nominated again for Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma. Alongside film his work extends into live performance, including Cirque du Soleil.
Production design is the job of building the world a story happens in — what gets constructed, what gets lit, what texture everything has. It is the discipline audiences feel constantly and rarely name.
What he changes about your evening
The obvious way to stage a show in a jungle is to clear a space, build a stage and point lights at it. ALMA does not do that, and the difference is Caballero’s.
The set is built into the hillside rather than placed on it. The existing vegetation is treated as part of the design rather than a backdrop to hide, and much of the lighting is firelight and warm sources at low level rather than stage wash from above. The effect is that the venue reads as a place that exists, which the performance then occupies — not a set that was trucked in.
It is the same instinct as his film work: build the world completely, then let the story happen inside it.
What to look for
- Where the built set ends and the jungle begins. It is deliberately hard to tell, and that is the point.
- The light sources. Notice how much of the scene is lit from within rather than from a rig above it.
- The walk in. The torch-lit paths from the beach to the theatre are part of the designed experience, not just circulation. Do not rush them.
What an Oscar-winning designer is doing on a beach
It is a fair question, and the answer is that the constraints here are the kind of problem production designers find interesting. Las Caletas has no road: every panel, fixture and prop arrives by boat. The venue is open to the sky, so weather is a design input rather than an inconvenience. And the site already supplies something no studio backlot can — real jungle, real elevation, real dark.
Design under those conditions is mostly about restraint: deciding what not to build, and trusting the location to carry the rest. That is a harder brief than an unlimited one, and it is why the result does not look like a themed attraction.
The film work, and why it is relevant
Pan’s Labyrinth and Roma are very different films with the same underlying approach: build a world that feels lived in, then shoot inside it rather than dressing a frame. Caballero’s worlds tend to be tactile and slightly worn, lit warmly and from within, with the seams left where seams would really be.
Everything in that sentence describes the site at Las Caletas after dark. If you have seen either film, you will recognise the sensibility long before you recognise a specific design.
Design and choreography together
Caballero decides what the space is; Mukhtar Mukhtar decides how bodies move through it. Neither decision works alone — a hillside only reads as depth if it is lit to read that way, and an aerial sequence needs a structure to hang from that also has to look like it belongs there. The strongest moments in ALMA are the ones where both jobs are solving the same problem.
Production design, briefly
It is the least understood job on a credits list. A production designer is responsible for the physical world a story happens in — what gets built, what gets dressed, what gets left alone, what colour and texture everything is, and how light will fall on it. Not the costumes, not the camera, not the lighting rig itself, but the world all three are working on.
Audiences never notice it directly and always feel it. When a place on screen seems to have existed before the story arrived, that is production design working. When it looks like a set, that is production design failing.
The venue itself has its own history worth knowing before you go — see Las Caletas.