Franco Dragone is one of the most significant directors in large-scale live entertainment — the creative force behind Cirque du Soleil's most celebrated shows, and the founder of Dragone Productions, which has produced theatrical spectacles across Las Vegas, Asia, and the Middle East. Patrick Larsen and Studio Bound have worked with Dragone three times: on Amystika in Las Vegas in 2022, and on Terhal and Souk Wonders, both in Riyadh in 2025. Each of the three commissions was a different design problem, demanding a different kind of response.
What makes the Dragone trilogy significant in Studio Bound's portfolio is not simply the scale of the productions or the prestige of the director. It is what the three commissions reveal about how a production design relationship develops over time — how shared creative language deepens, how trust changes what is possible, and how each commission builds on what the previous one taught.
Amystika: Building the World Where Magic Lives
Amystika: The Secret Revealed opened at Planet Hollywood in Las Vegas in 2022. The production was a collaboration between Criss Angel and Dragone — a theatrical magic show conceived as a prequel to Angel's MINDFREAK, framed as a euphoric nightmare rooted in a vintage carnival aesthetic. Dark. Surreal. Fantastical. A world where the physics of ordinary reality genuinely do not apply.
For Studio Bound, the Amystika brief was fundamentally about atmosphere. The environment had to be more than a stage for illusions. It had to be the reason the illusions were credible — a world with its own internal logic, in which the impossible was the natural condition. Patrick Larsen designed the Amystika scenic environment as a vintage carnival world of LED panels, projection surfaces, and layered atmospheric complexity, anchored by the production's most striking image: a mock-tornado that makes the visceral sense of physical reality coming apart feel, in that space, entirely appropriate.
The Amystika commission taught Studio Bound what it means to build a world rather than a set. A set is a container for action. A world is the reason the action makes sense.
Terhal: The Transformation Machine
Terhal came three years after Amystika, in a radically different context. Where Amystika was a Las Vegas theatrical magic show with a known artistic vocabulary, Terhal was a new kind of production in a new kind of venue — a cylindrical projection theatre in Riyadh, designed as an immersive environment in which the entire surround becomes the visual field.
The cylindrical format meant that conventional stage design was irrelevant. There was no proscenium, no front-of-house sightline, no fixed relationship between audience and performance. The design had to work in 360 degrees, at all heights simultaneously, for an audience standing within the space rather than watching it from outside. Patrick Larsen's design for Terhal worked with the cylindrical architecture to create what the production needed to be: a transformation machine — an environment in which the transition from one state of reality to another could be made to feel like the logical and inevitable next step.
Souk Wonders: The Activated Marketplace
Souk Wonders, also in Riyadh, was the third Dragone commission and the most spatially complex of the three. Where Amystika was a theatrical environment for a seated audience and Terhal was a projection dome for a standing one, Souk Wonders was a fully navigable immersive environment — a labyrinthine Arabian marketplace through which the audience moved freely, and in which performance activated the space from within rather than being presented to the audience from outside.
The design challenge was to create a space that felt genuinely discovered rather than designed — that had the quality of an actual marketplace with its own history and use, rather than a themed environment built for a performance. Every corridor, archway, and open space had to invite exploration while controlling the audience journey. Performers appeared, disappeared, and reappeared within a space that never resolved into a simple read.
Across three productions on two continents with the same director, the Dragone trilogy shows what sustained creative collaboration actually produces: not a style applied to successive briefs, but a deepening capacity to solve the problem that is actually in front of you, with full confidence in the creative relationship that makes the most ambitious solutions possible.
Further reading: How Ideas Actually Happen | Input, Processing, Output: The Creative Cycle That Actually Works
About Patrick Larsen
Patrick Larsen is an Emmy Award-winning production designer and the founder of Studio Bound, based in Singapore. Over two decades, he has designed environments for global audiences — from the Expo 2020 Dubai ceremonies and Olympic broadcast environments to Las Vegas residencies, Broadway-scale theatrical productions, and permanent installations across Asia and the Middle East. Studio Bound takes projects from concept to build with one fully integrated team of designers, concept artists, technical drafters, and production managers. Visit studiobound.sg or read more at patricklarsen.studio
