Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest. The lighting designer is using an assortment of lights to frame the stage for the audience to kind of know what's going on in the show. Giving the audience a sense of where they are.
Is it daytime, nighttime? Is it weather? Are we in a foggy pond?
We tell the audience where to look. We give them a sense of mood, of atmosphere, of time of day. We help establish an emotional undercurrent, and we're also storytellers.
It's really trying to dig deep into the heart of what the characters are doing. It's trying to dig deep into what the story that's being told is. So Matt, he's just washed up on shore.
Let's do the background. We'll start with the idea that it's the sky. Could one best boy light this hike?
Yeah. Absolutely good idea. I must say, the actor is the most important thing on the stage. Let's warm up the diagonal a little bit.
A little amber in there. Very often as lighting designers we want to kind of rim the actor and kind of pop them out from the set so that we have a foreground and a background because the actor is the one that's telling the story and then we're helping to tell that story. What else do we have up here we could throw a little bit of texture of like a kind of a cloudy thing anything you could do with that? We've got the other best boy. Yeah, got some templates in it.
What's great about that howl is that it feels like reflective light hitting Sebastian. I think that's beautiful. Exactly. Actually, it's so beautiful, I wonder if we could get more of that.
I see myself as a dual fold lighting. designer, half sculptor, half painter. I might be in ancient days going doot doot, doot doot, and I just cut away a little of the blue and then you see how the costume looks and it looks a little flat. So you take out one light and then put on another one, and all of a sudden the costume and the character becomes three-dimensional. And then behind them, there might be a background, and that is when I take out my paintbrush and put a little blue behind them.
You know what? I'd love to see how, Matt, is it going from daytime to nighttime in 20 counts. Sure.
So, restore this as Q104, I guess. Yep. And then why don't you go back to cue 100, yeah. You got a 20 count on the next cue. Sculpting with light is really a major part of our job.
Especially the body. You know, the body needs to be sculpted from the side, you know, from the back. I want the audience to feel like they could hear the story being told. I pride myself in being able to light the story well. Being able to really have the audience focus on where the action is taking place and to be able to follow that thoroughly.
Are you ready, sir? So we're going to go to dark here. And stand up.
Let's go. This is the air. That is the glorious moon. This pearl she gave me. I do feel it and see it.
Going into designing the show is, I kind of use this word called formatting. And it's a process of hours and days and weeks with the director, set designer, costume designer, kind of formatting our way through the production. We'll have a rough set model and we'll kind of start on page one of the script and kind of work our way through it, you know, one scene at a time. Where is this scene going to be and what scenery is going to be in it, what part of the stage it's going to be on, and how we transition from getting out of the scene into the fields of hay and things like that. Where you comfortably are able to get up.
And Stan. Once I'm hired, I read the script. And I read the script without thinking about the light the first time through, so that I can just get a sense of what the script means to me.
And then I read it again, and I mark it up with thoughts about the lighting. But. Sometimes those thoughts are very simple thoughts, like what time of day is it, where does it take place? And the next step is very often meeting with the director and talking about the director's feelings about the piece. Because I do believe strongly that my job is really to help the director with the director's vision.
The director is very specific about what he's going to want in this certain scene. You know, whether the scene's in a kitchen or in a basement or how he feels about how it should be lit. Whether it's just a little light coming through the window and, you know, it's a very dark and gloomy scene with just one lamp over the table.
That's a chemistry to me. That kind of tells me, as a designer, how to layer into his vision of the scene. Good. Thank you.
Good job. One of the biggest challenges is making sure that we're able to get lights where we want them. Because if we don't, we really can't make the show look good.
Another challenge is that everybody else who's working on the project is set designer, the costume designer. the choreographer, they all have done their work beforehand. So the choreographer has done the work in the rehearsal hall, the director's done the work in the rehearsal hall. When we walk into the theater, we are the only ones who sit down with a completely blank, white piece of paper, a completely empty, nothing is done yet.
All the lighting equipment, the cabling, the dimmers. All the headsets, I mean it's really down to the ironing boards. There's, you know, I mean everything has to go in for a production.
We established a shop order which is sent out to vendors to get a bid back and sometimes we have to change equipment that we kind of wanted or we have to substitute this or that but then after that's all approved by the general managers we start finalization of all the paperwork that's necessary for the show to go into a lighting shop. That's where the electricians take our paperwork and they get all the equipment that's on the plot and they mount it. The entire package is rented. That would be Jules and Peggy's world's largest mirror ball. All right.
We've since taken the light designer's specifications in shop order. Now we take it from... paper, turn it into life where we give them all their gear, lay it out, we prep it.
They mark it, location, dimmer, and then they put it in the box, then they'll put it on the truck and load it into the theater floors. And what we have that no one else in the world, which we own the patent for, is how we prep our moving lights to take out human error. I'll show you how we do that. How many things are stored in here, Valerie? More than I can say.
Millions. Four for me. bring it down. Color chips?
Color chips. Alright, let's see. That is...
He's finding it. Just found us. Wow. That is incredible. Color chips.
If you want, you can hold it up to the light and see. The queen. Millions of choices.
That is incredible. Is that incredible? No.
Wow. Fascinating. First of all, we go to the ERG to look at new equipment. But if there are things that we want to do in a show that have never been done before, a demo room is an amazing place to do that. Can you speed up and slow down the rain?
Yes. So how about that driving rain that you have, but maybe slower? I had just been there two weeks before working on a ballet where we needed to see if different kinds of material, how they took light, because we were going to project some snow on three different surfaces. We wanted to make sure that you could see through one surface to the next surface to the next. So if you didn't go to the demo room and then you had all the scenery built for thousands and thousands of dollars and then found out that you actually couldn't see through each level, then you're screwed.
It saves the producers a lot of money and it saves us the anxiety because we know that it's going to work. Costumes deeply affect the lighting design of the show because what I have to make sure is that I make the costumes look the color that the costume designer wants them to look. Sometimes I'll even take the fabric back with me and pick different colors based on the color of the fabric or how the fabric takes light just so that I know that I can give the purity of what the costume looks like in terms of color and feel. You know, we're always experimenting. We're exploring new layers, new elements, new types of light, new types of sound.
So there is a great collaboration between all departments throughout the course of putting a show together. That lighting has to be more spectacular on Broadway, I think the most important thing really is the show and the storytelling. But I guess, OK, I'll admit it.
Yes, we push it a little bit and try to make it a little more spectacular. I'm like learning a few things right now. You mean right this second? Right this second, yes.
You mean about what that drop looks like? The consistency of it? Yeah. The blue and the blue? Yeah.
Well, here we go. Well, I was just learning that I don't know what that was, but just the color of that yellow was so pretty on that. Oh, we should go to one of the yellow cubes. We can't forget that Aladdin is a fairy tale, and there's a lot of color in the scenery, and there is a lot of color in the lighting.
It was all about sort of heightening reality into a kind of fantasy world. So the hope was to really make the audience feel like they were living in a fantasy. There is something about the adrenaline of working on Broadway.
Because money is so tight, then you have to work quickly and fast and hard. And it's kind of, it's almost like working. It's almost like playing a sport.
Let's see what you think of this. Yeah, there's romance right there. Okay. So you feel like that's romantic? Oh, absolutely.
That's really what I was hoping, that you would find that it would be romantic. So you do feel that way. It's gorgeous.
So you're going from the energy and the hot feeling of this wildly crazy energetic number to just this beautiful romance and it's perfect. Yeah. I love it.
And it's also, I wanted to feel a little bit like her too because he's... It does. Great. Okay.
He's the orange and she's the pink. There you go. Okay, good. I'm glad you thought of that. No, it's great.
And it's very often we're responding so much to what the other people are doing that I forget myself sometimes because there's... There are so many people that are in the room that you want to make sure that, as a lighting designer, that they're all being taken care of. That the set looks good, the costumes look good, the dance looks good, but sometimes we just have to let ourselves go and go with our heart and gut and emotion. I'd love to look at the buildings lit up.
Okay, sure. And then... We can do that. If you do that, that'd be great. Can you bring up the ground roll lights, please?
I can do that. in many ways. I do believe that my job is to respond to the rest of the collaborative team. So I think as the years have gone on, there might be something that I do that makes me Natasha Katz.
I don't know what those words would be, and I don't even know how to look back and think about what my style is, because I believe my style is the style of a chameleon and working with other people. And go to cue next. Oh, but that's kind of... That's kind of pretty. And go to cue next.
I was not born with the dream of wanting to be a lighting designer. I was born with the dream of wanting to work in the theater. I was definitely born with the dream of wanting to work on Broadway, and I was definitely born with the dream of wanting to work on musicals and plays.
So when I went to Oberlin College, I worked in all sorts of backstage in the theater, and then I got a full semester's credit to work with somebody in New York City. So I worked with a lighting designer because I just... I just started to do a little bit of lighting in college, and it started to appeal to me. And I worked on a show called I Remember Mama at the Majestic Theater right across the street from here.
And the minute I walked into the theater and walked through the stage. I was hooked. And go to cue next. It was really on the job training for me. Go to cue next.
Go to cue next. I had met so many people working on the show that a lot of people asked me to work with them. So I just continued to work and work and work.
I was 25 years old. I grew up in North Carolina and at a young age I was began working at the roadhouse where all the road shows would come in and took a big interest in just watching how all the lighting packages came off the trucks and were set up in the theater and just as a young kid I was like 10, 11 years old and this was very fascinating to me how this lighting package could just come off a truck and get set up and then the performers would come in that afternoon and the show that night and then we took it all down packed it on the truck and they left and we were back to Bayer Theaters. I've been told that people say that I that Howell Binkley has a signature in his lighting.
The more I think about it, I think I do kind of light things that have a Binkley signature to it. I kind of use a high side angle that I find myself using in a lot of shows and it's a sculpting technique which works very well for me. You see how this changes colors too?
A and B, check one, two, one, two, one, two. A and B, check one, two, one, two, one, two. Check one, two, three.
It's a simple set, you know, and here we have a whole entire show done on this. It's one set. It's not like a lot of drops flying in and out.
You know, it's just one area. And my job in this show is really to dissect this whole show, to really frame it in a way that there's many locations throughout the course of the 50 songs that are in the show. Each song kind of has a new location, a new time of day, a different feel. Whether it's this song is a memory song from the actor, to convey to the audience what's going on during the lyrics of the song. In our transfer from Off-Broadway up to Broadway for Hamilton, the major change that I had to do was that Off-Broadway, the ceiling from the stage floor to the grid was only like 16 feet.
In moving to Broadway, we had 28 feet. And so that meant that I had to change lighting fixtures. We had to incorporate some fixtures into the move that weren't really a theatrical lighting fixture. They were more kind of a rock and roll light that I knew that would kind of like the only source that was going to work for the show. I think the success of the show is just from how different the show actually is.
It's a historical show and it's really, you know, depicting our history and I just think the technique of the show is quite different and it's just generating a new type of theater. It's introducing that to the audiences. You keep going through some templates.
The technology has changed lighting over the last 20 years incredibly. A lot of the old conventional units were a fixed unit. It would just, you hung it and it focused and it really had one job.
You know, it would take, you know, a hundred fixed lights to do what one automated lighting fixture can do now. A huge change was moving lights where you don't have to get up on a ladder to focus the light. The programmers, and we say to them, I'd like a blue light on that piece of scenery, and it's done remotely through a computer.
In the old days, when I started, you had to roll a ladder out, you had to go to the light, you had to move the light, you had to put a gel in the light. If you wanted a new color, you had to get the ladder out, roll it out, go back up the ladder. change the color of the light, which would take time in the middle of rehearsal and time in the morning.
And now we don't have to do that anymore because we have these lights that are remote controlled. That's an enormous change in our business. I'm going to just bring it where we were to the front house. So let's just go back where we were on stage. The short version of the history of lighting design is that the greatest lighting designer, I guess, is nature, Mother Nature, or whoever, whatever, whoever you want to call it, because it was all done in the outside by sunlight, and then it was all done by firelight.
And then as we started to move indoors after Shakespeare's time, then we were able to start to control the light. On Broadway when it started, there was no credit for a lighting designer. The set designer did it with the electrician. As the years went on, it became its own profession.
And for many years actually it was a profession that was really sort of done. There was somebody called Jean Rosenthal who really changed lighting in the sense that she figured out a way to do paperwork so that lighting could be repeated over and over again, because how do you record lighting? So Jean Rosenthal is sort of the grandmother of us all. I don't want the audiences to feel like it's just a light show. It's a juggling act to balance between the knowledge of the mechanics and the creativity as well.
Art has to drive the technical. We have to use all this technology as tools for what our vision is. Stand inside of that light and make it feel like the rain is pouring against you.
Yeah, and I like what you did when you did, yeah. So the rain is, it is torrentially pouring against you. And when it flashes, you're worried that you better get inside. Okay. Or you could die.
Okay. Okay, and go for it. Start running.
Now move forward and go stage right a little bit. You're going against the wind. It pushes you back stage left. Oh my God. But your daughter is waiting for you.
The wind pushes you back away from her. So far back stage left. You're never going to see her again!
You're never going to see her again! Go get her! Get her!
Get her! Stay dry! Go!
Go! Go! Fantastic!