Meet the former Chicago ‘theater kid' who stages Kendrick Lamar

Chicago Tribune

06-06-2025

Mike Carson made the backdrops for school plays.
Mountains, villages, flat and colorful, that sort of thing. He also ran the lights. He was a tech guy in school theater. He played football at Plainfield North High School, but at heart, he was a theater kid. Even now, living in Los Angeles, he heads to the theater whenever he can. As a child, his parents often took him to Chicago theater. That stuck in surprising ways. So much so, you are familiar with Mike Carson's work even if you don't know him by name, or thought of that work as theatrical.
Carson, now the creative director at pgLang in Los Angeles, is one of Kendrick Lamar's longtime production designers and creative partners. If you're headed to Solider Field this week to see 'The Grand National Tour' featuring Lamar and SZA, know this: a lot of what you'll see is Mike Carson's ongoing collaboration with Lamar and Dave Free, childhood friends who cofounded pgLang in 2020 as an arts incubator that, according to its mission statement, speaks in music, podcasts, film, theater, books, TV, visual arts — 'because sometimes we have to use different languages to get the point of our stories across.' Next spring, they have a movie co-starring Lamar, made with Matt Stone and Trey Parker of 'South Park,' about a Black intern who plays a slave in a living history museum.
But so far, their best-known production is the Super Bowl halftime show from February, the most watched halftime show in NFL history, a furious, petty, startling satire of American dreams, joys and contradictions. If its stage kind of looked like a PlayStation controller to you — that was the idea.
Nothing about a Lamar performance is phoned in.
Carson thinks of them as quasi-theatrical musicals. 'The music becomes the script and gives us an intention of how the show will flow the way it does,' he says. 'When we're conceptualizing, you might imagine us just throwing songs onto a board or images up on a board, then going from there, but there's a reason, or a narrative, or something underlying everything on that stage. Myself, I like some tension in there, but everything gets crafted, from the setlist to the color of the lights at one moment to why there are (dancers) on stage another moment. I definitely took that approach from going to plays.'
Take the backdrops.
Your average stadium concert is going to blow up the performer's image to Godzilla proportions, blending in bits of video and a lot of CGI surrealism — the DNA comes directly from the churning swirls of late 1960s concert psychedelia. With Lamar, not so much. Yes, he's gargantuan on those video screens; it is a stadium. But he also mingles with images reminiscent of 'The Last Supper' and sculptor Augusta Savage, Los Angeles car culture and the great contemporary collagist Lauren Halsey; the tour uses seven of her assemblages of Black archival images, street advertising and neon colors, blowing them up big enough to stretch across Soldier Field and superimposing Lamar into the mix. A few years ago, when Lamar headlined Lollapalooza, he performed against large lo-fi backdrops of Black friends and family, made by the contemporary painter Henry Taylor.
Lamar's shows are big on motifs.
For this tour, it's a 1987 Buick Grand National GNX, the same one that was the focus of the half-time performance. 'We've been rolling with that car since the Super Bowl,' Carson said, 'only now its retooled from that, where it was basically a clown car.' Car collectors may flinch. The GNX, counted as one of the last American muscle cars, was so limited edition that only 547 were manufactured by General Motors; each of the top 500 Buick dealers in the nation received just one or two to sell. After a countrywide search, Carson and Co. landed one — then gutted it for the Super Bowl, allowing an improbable number of dancers to appear to stream out of it. The Grand National Tour opens with laser-drawn interpretations of Latino-inspired car window fonts, backed by a swooning serenade from Mexican American mariachi Deyra Barrera. Then the GNX rises out of the stage with Lamar in the driver's seat.
Lamar's previous 'Big Steppers' tour was even more outwardly theatrical: It opened with Lamar at a piano, playing to a puppet of Lamar. Dancers moved mechanically, separated out exactly. At one point in the show, when Lamar bent over, his shadow was cast huge against a backdrop, except on the backdrop, a row of arrows appeared to be stuck in his back.
'Doing that kind of thing in arenas is a little easier,' Carson said. 'You can get more abstract, or you can be a little more theatrical. In a stadium, the expectation is for a spectacle and you think in terms of how three corners of a stadium are getting the same thing. But we can be subtle, we can — Kendrick's always willing to push things past a normal show.' One of the tour's indelible images involves Lamar simply sitting on steps, tens of thousands before him.
Carson knows pop ambitions.
He grew up in the western suburbs of Berkeley and Bellwood, then later moved to the Chicago neighborhood of Pilsen. He attended Columbia College for a time until meeting legendary Chicago fashion designer and Kanye West collaborator Virgil Abloh, who died in 2021. 'I basically dropped out after my first semester sophomore year and began working with Virgil and went on the whole 'Watch the Throne' thing with Kanye and Jay-Z, the album and the tour. I was documenting Kanye and Jay-Z. Virgil took a chance on me. For a few years, that was my college experience.'
He remembers Abloh, no matter how any assistants were around him, often doing the work himself. Indeed, you could argue that Abloh's creative spirit is in 'The Grand National Tour,' in the blend of street clothing and stark minimalist staging, and in the way Lamar, Carson and Free make the familiar feel fresh, and how they somehow come off bold without forgetting to remain accessible.
'You want to be always forging a new way of doing this,' Carson said. 'That could mean our version of what concert choreography could look like. Or our version of what stage design can look like. Or Kendrick's interpretation of what a stadium concert could look like right now. How do you get your own distinctive visual language out? And how do you do it at the scale of a football stadium?'