Making magic: Set designer Collette Pollard and her colleagues set the stage for Marriott’s ‘Frozen’

Sitting at the back of a theater, watching the stage magic she and her fellow artists create, is Collette Pollard’s happy place.

Presently it’s the Marriott Theatre, where the Joseph Jefferson Award-winning scenic designer has conjured the fairy tale world of Disney’s “Frozen — The Musical.”

Among the show’s biggest challenges: transitioning from summer to winter without relying on large-scale scenery that the Lincolnshire theater’s 360-degree stage cannot accommodate. Then again, the California native is accustomed to resolving theatrical quandaries. She’s been doing it since high school.

Pollard, a lifelong artist and classically trained pianist, was disappointed that her high school didn’t offer an advanced placement art class. As it turned out, not taking AP art inspired her life’s work.

Walking by the high school’s all-purpose cafetorium one afternoon, she noticed fellow students painting a set and offered to help.

“They handed me a paintbrush and said, ‘You could start right now,’” she recalled.

After the student designer quit the show, Pollard took over.

“It was a good introduction to how theater works,” she said.

The collaborative spirit and do-it-yourself attitude she developed as a teenager remain with her today. It’s what enables her and her fellow artists — director Ashley Rodbro, lighting designer Jesse Klug, media designer Anthony Churchill, sound designer Michael Daly, costume designer Mara Blumenfeld and others — to meet the challenges “Frozen” poses. (Exactly how they accomplish that will remain unspoiled here.)

Good design serves the narrative, as Pollard well knows, having created memorable sets for Marriott’s “Titanic,” Writers Theatre’s “Hamlet” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” TimeLine Theatre’s “The Lehman Trilogy,” and “The Sparrow,” produced by her onetime artistic home, the shuttered House Theatre of Chicago.

She arrived in Chicago in 1996 to study scenic design at The Theatre School at DePaul University. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts from Northwestern University.

“I fell in love with Chicago,” said Pollard, a longtime artistic associate with TimeLine, who also serves as an associate professor of design at the School of Theatre and Music at the University of Illinois — Chicago.

Her resume shows more than 150 design credits for local theaters, including those previously mentioned, along with Steppenwolf, Goodman and others. Nationally, her credits include The Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, Seattle Repertory Theatre, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and The Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, among others.

Before she creates a design, the self-described “excavator of text” does extensive research involving deep dramaturgical dives that she says lead her down “amazing paths.”

In the case of “Frozen,” Pollard studied Scandinavian folk art and architecture for inspiration. The result, as depicted in her renderings, is a pretty, whimsical design incorporating floral patterns, latticework and snowflakes, among other elements.

Pollard conceived her design for “Frozen” as a metaphor for sisters Elsa and Anna discovering their individual powers.

“It’s easy to be seduced by beautiful things,” she said, but good design must do more. It must serve the story.

While Marriott presents challenges, the proximity of audience members to the stage offers opportunities.

“The audience isn’t sitting back. They’re more immersed in the experience,” Pollard said. “What’s exciting is the relationship between the audience and the space where the story is being told. … How do we want the audience to feel? How does the audience experience the story?”

Ever the collaborator, Pollard credits her studio assistants: Lucie Greene, who helped create “Frozen’s” lovely floor pattern, and Adriana Andreolas.

“It takes a team beyond the creative team to tell a story,” she said.

As for future projects, Pollard increasingly finds herself drawn to commissions for shows she would want to see, specifically shows that incorporate the kind of high-concept theatricality that shuttered ensembles like House Theatre, Redmoon and Plasticene produced.

“I will jump at any chance to design in that kind of way,” she said. “I’m passionate about the form. It’s ephemeral. It’s there before your eyes and it’s gone.”

Like magic.

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Disney’s “Frozen — The Musical”

Showtimes: 7 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday; 7:30 p.m. Friday; 4 and 8 p.m. Saturday; 1 and 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 4 through Jan. 3, 2027

Where: Marriott Theatre, 10 Marriott Drive, Lincolnshire, 847-634-0200 or MarriottTheatre.com

Tickets: Tickets start at $80; dinner and theater packages available