The quintessential backstage musical is "extra fun" to design because the show-within- a-show is Shakespeare, so you're designing a musical about a musical based on "The Taming of the Shrew" and it's scenery would be designed in a style of the time "Kiss Me Kate" was written 1948. Research for this production centered on Giotto (Early Renaissance Artist  1267-1337) and Josef Albers (German-American Absrtract Artist ( 1888-1976)