The chief architect of the arena run breaks down what it takes to build a stage that breathes, moves, and feels with one of Gen-Z’s most electric showmen.
Seven hours before American pop phenomenon Benson Boone backflips onto the stage for the second of three consecutive sold-out shows at London’s O2 Arena, design director Ray Winkler was backstage, cracking jokes with the crew as he patrolled through the maze-like corridors. Jokes aside, Winkler — also the CEO of Stufish Entertainment Architects — was there as one of the many masterminds behind the stage that would catapult Boone and his band before an 18,500-strong audience each night for the ongoing American Heart World Tour.
The stage in question features a multi-level main platform that houses the live band, and a red acrylic catwalk that extends deep into the arena floor, connecting to a heart-shaped secondary stage that visually echoes the album that gives the tour its name. On it, the initials of the artist’s conveniently alliterative name glow symmetrically under the lights.
The catwalk lights up, responding to the pulse of the music and the momentum of the artist. Collectively, the stages come together as a shimmering geometric ribbon, or an infinity symbol, designed to channel both Boone’s kinetic energy and the intimacy he radiates despite the scale of the production.
“He was very adamant that he wanted to be close to his audience,” said Winkler. Fans at the far end of the arena could see an athletic Boone sprinting toward them. At the centre of the main stage, two carved-out pits physically embrace the crowd. The pits sit so close to the stage that, as Winkler joked, the bass is loud enough to cure any digestion problem. More importantly, the proximity lets fans high-five and hold hands with Boone as he makes his way onto the catwalk.
And for those seated near the rafters, rest assured as Boone soon hops onto a blue, lacquered chandelier that soars above the audience along a ceiling rail, before lowering him onto a matching piano at the heart-shaped stage.
“The idea came out of the fact that he wants to get from A to B in as many different ways as possible and within the confines of the physical world that we live in,” explained Winkler, who first showed Boone a quick, scruffy sketch of the chandelier in a Los Angeles hotel elevator earlier this year. After the short conversation, the singer-songwriter came back with his own sketches of what he envisioned the chandelier to look like.
“Interestingly enough, Benson was a student of architecture, so not only could he understand drawings, he could actually draw himself.”
This isn’t a one-off instance: Boone and the Stufish team have been communicating visually since their first joint project at Coachella this April. “Interestingly enough, Benson was a student of architecture, so not only could he understand drawings, he could actually draw himself,” said Winkler. “He chose a better career path than mine, but it’s very seldom that an artist has the visual dexterity to be able to express himself in the form of drawings,” the show architect of thirty years added.
The American Heart stage resembles Boone’s Coachella stage, with similar rectangular screen panels, pyramid-like vertical steps that hosted live instrumentalists, and the ramped runway that extended beyond the barricades into the crowd.
“He did amazing back flips from 10 feet up, from the upper level down to the lower level,” remembered Winkler, who started conceptualising designs for the American Heart World Tour almost right after Coachella. “He had this great trick that he performed, sliding down the ramp. He loved that so much, so we incorporated the ramp into the new set design.”
Unlike many of Stufish’s past clients — The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, and Beyoncé, to name a few — the 23-year-old newcomer had little history to draw from. So Winkler and his team relied on instinct once Boone shared the tour’s theme.
The heart-shaped stage became the core of the new design. “The idea that it might be a heart, something that is embracing and feels very warm and curvaceous, all flowed into the design language.” Winkler worked with Stufish’s senior designer Zarya Vrabcheva early on to turn the sketches into something more concrete. Beyond serving as a literal nod to American Heart and creating a sense of physical intimacy with the audience, it spatializes Boone’s soft masculinity and raw confessionalism in the album’s Springsteen-esque, anecdotal catharsis.
However, the design process is never a linear one. Much like Boone’s stage presence, “it flips backwards and forwards and sideways and goes around in circles a bit,” Winkler said. “The further you move away from concept into reality, the more of the daily pressures come in.” It’s also not hard to imagine that the artist’s first worldwide arena tour presents an entirely different beast than a one-off festival performance at Coachella. “It has to be constructed differently because it has to withstand being built, taken down, and put in a truck fifty times,” Winkler said. “If you do a big thrust and a big heart, you also have to consider that you can’t sell tickets in that area.”
“It has to be constructed differently because it has to withstand being built, taken down, and put in a truck fifty times.”
The list goes on — months of endless trials and errors, filled with challenges you’d never think about unless you worked behind the scenes. The modular stages must be disassembled and reassembled in ways that allow for easy storage, access, and transportation. The slope’s angle is carefully calculated and tailored to Boone’s body. Glow tape lines the runway to choreograph safe movement, especially crucial when singing from a platform elevated eighteen feet in the air with strobe lights flashing everywhere.
One can only imagine the engineering behind a human-carrying chandelier gliding across the dome. Not to mention adjusting the stage dimensions to meet the size and fire safety regulations of forty-three different arenas. “Nobody in the audience is gonna say, terrible show, but the safety aspect was brilliant,” Winkler joked.
“He’s very approachable, clever, clued-in, understands the ecosystem, and appreciates the value of teamwork, which is a great testimony to any artist who very easily could distance themselves from the people that surround them.”
“Artists rely on you to think of things they might not be thinking of; that’s why the team is so important — there’s a huge amount of respect, trust, courtesy, and understanding where your role starts and ends.” Boone also immersed himself in the process. He curated the colours, graphics, and screen content. That’s followed by an intensive two-week rehearsal in a Pennsylvania warehouse that familiarized him with every corner of the stage. “He’s very approachable, clever, clued-in, understands the ecosystem, and appreciates the value of teamwork, which is a great testimony to any artist who very easily could distance themselves from the people that surround them,” Winkler said.
The American Heart World Tour offers a glimpse into Stufish’s creative process and why the studio remains a leader in the industry. Founded thirty-two years ago by the late stage architecture pioneer Mark Fisher, the team has grown out of a spare bedroom into a multidisciplinary studio of architects, animators, and a diverse pool of other creatives.
Winkler noted that Stufish doesn’t follow a house style. Eighty percent of all stages are the same, and Stufish is the twenty percent that builds identity, writes narratives, renders visuals, and “makes the difference between this being a Benson Boone show and not a Sabrina Carpenter show,” as he put it.
Stufish wields both ideas and technologies, but there is never a video screen just because they can. “We always say technology is only an aid to an idea, and an idea is there to implement the technology,” Winkler said. “We’re not in the business of trying to reinvent the wheel for the sake of reinventing the wheel.”
Many Ideas began on Winkler’s notepad, before moving through rounds of testing and modeling powered by the studio’s diverse creatives. Every technical adjustment is supported by numerous external teams — another reason Winkler resists taking ownership of any single idea.
Instead, he credits touring manager Adam Carr, lighting programmer Ryan King, production director Paul English, and many others as part of the project’s collective brainpower. “It might say Stufish on the bottom of the drawing,” he said, “but that’s never Stufish alone — that’s Stufish plus every other fish in the pond.” After all, without these teams, great ideas might never make it out of his sketchbook.
“What we’re interested in at Stufish is turning ideas into realities and realities into spectacles.“
“What we’re interested in at Stufish is turning ideas into realities and realities into spectacles.” And together with the wider production team, Winkler and Stufish did just that. For three nights, the capital witnessed a magnetic Benson Boone emerging through pyrotechnic sparks in between giant, self-splitting kaleidoscopic screens.
He dragged the mic stand across the thrust, made airborne entrances, and bounded up and down the vertical steps — all accompanied by a generous, but never gratuitous, number of backflips made possible by the precision of the design. After thunderous cheers for his viral track Beautiful Things, Boone closed his second London show by welcoming a full choir and Queen’s Brian May for a surprise performance of Bohemian Rhapsody — fittingly, on the week the song turned fifty.
The remainder of the tour will take the production across the European continent.
Above black and white sketches by STUFISH Entertainment Architects. All images and video clip courtesy of STUFISH Entertainment Architects/ Benson Boone.
