Quick and dirty on a budget for NYMTF
Think your plate is full? Try being Herrick Goldman for a week. A veteran LD with two decades experience, he recently designed three shows at the New York Musical Theatre Festival — he’s done 16 shows for them in four years — while also handling gigs for the Grammys and Emmys that same week. His company, HG Lighting Design Inc., handles “any live events,” although the company’s focus is on theatre and larger corporate events. And they are constantly working.
During the aforementioned week, Goldman was the lighting director for the 28th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards, which were hosted by Tim Russert and Katie Couric and aired on C-SPAN. Then at the NYMTF, his company opened Bernice Bobs Her Mullet, followed three days later by Sympathy Jones, then The Last Starfighter. At the same time, the company tackled the Grammys — honoring Bon Jovi, Alicia Keys, Donnie McClurkin and the creators of West Side Story with performances by Melissa Etheridge, Oleta Adams and the cast of the current West Side Story tour.
Balancing Act
The busy LD says the key to keeping control of this balancing act is having reliable assistants. He uses two or three main people; his primary assistant is Susan Nicholson, whom he strongly praises. “She ended up executing more than half of Sympathy Jones while I was working on one of the corporate projects,” Goldman remarks. “The Musical Theatre Festival has a rep plot, which, depending on the venue, is adequate to good. We sup-plement the plot with our designs and special effects. You go to a few rehearsals, you do a run-through, and you make sure you do a solid paper tech with the director and the stage manager present so everyone knows the scope of the work and the goals we have for tech. Occasionally we find that we have to pare those goals back to get it all done.”
He notes that at the New York Musical Theatre Festival, he has one day to get in and do his job. The venue opens at 8:00 a.m., and the show goes up at 8:00 p.m. the same day. On your mark, get set, cue! The Last Starfighter, thankfully, got two days of tech after another show dropped out. It was a good thing, too; the show has 350 cues.
When asked if he works on the fly with the festival shows, Goldman stresses that he goes in with very specific ideas. It’s not simply winging it. “You make sure that you see maybe two run-throughs of the show you’re lighting,” he states, “then you sit down with the director and say, ‘This scene’s going to be blue, this scene’s going to be morning and this scene’s going to be on another planet.’”
Although the Grammys had more prep time — several weeks of discussion starting in early August and a production date of Wednesday, Sept. 26 — Goldman only got into the hall on Tuesday morning at 9:00 a.m., with doors opening at 6:30 p.m. the next day. For his corporate events, Goldman usually runs the shows because of the rapid-fire pace.
“A lot of these corporate shows are distilled down to anywhere from five to twenty cues; the Grammys, of course, had many more,” he says. “Those are the one-offs. For the more complicated weeklong events, you want somebody in there programming with you. On shows with the (MA Lighting) grandMA (console), I have a programmer named Michael Lee, and we work really well together. He’s a really good grandMA programmer, and he’s also a good lighting designer. I can trust his eye. Susan does the same thing. She programs and designs for me while I walk away and take a call about the next thing.”
The Calm Before the Storm
The tight production schedules for the one-off corporate events certainly honed his chops and prepared Goldman for the frenzied pace of the New York Musical Theatre Festival. “Due to the nature of the festival and the contracts that the producers have with Equity, they only get about two-and-a-half weeks of rehearsal time,” reveals the LD. “At the end of that, you walk into the rehearsals and meet with the directors. In a lot of cases, when the shows are ambitious, like The Last Starfighter, you distill it down. You would like to have 50 cues in one scene, but you’ll do 10. You find ways to be creative because you’re not putting on a $2 million off-Broadway musical or an $8 million Broadway musical. You’re being crafty and coming up with creative ways to solve things.”
The three shows he designed for NYMTF were very different. Bernice Bobs Her Mullet, which is based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story called “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” is a “nice, moral tale” about “a young redneck girl who goes to the big city, that city being Little Rock, and tries to make friends.” The spy musical Sympathy Jones finds the titular character, a bored receptionist at a spy agency, spicing up her life by stealing a secret file, acting like a special agent and solving a case. And The Last Starfighter: the Musical is based on the 1980s sci-fi movie of the same name, in which a young man, feeling trapped in his trailer park environment, embarks on an intergalactic adventure.
“All of these had very different needs,” remarks Goldman. “The most simple was Bernice Bobs Her Mullet.” That show required a mirror ball and a couple of special gobos that they brought in. Goldman and his crew simply put them into the rep plot the festival had provided, which included two (ETC) Source Four spots and front light, back light and side light.
“The back light and the box booms in both of the theatres have Wybron’s new CXI IT (dual scroll color mixers with RDM),” says Goldman. “The CXIs work great, and they really add flexibility to these festival plots. I can have a different color palette for each of the shows. Even though the F. Scott Fitzgerald musical and the spy musical were on the same stage for about the same amount of time, they looked completely different because of the ability to go to any color you can imagine with the CXIs. What I like about the CXIs is that they shift in a very subtle fashion. You can shift from blues and greens and purples back into a nice bastard amber. If you treat it with a sort of tracking mind when you cue it, you can get there, and the audience doesn’t see the live moves. I like the Wybron CXIs a lot for that.”
“For Sympathy Jones, we had some good friends at Rosco who loaned us a bunch of Vortex gobo rotators,” continues Goldman. “We did very spe-cific down light for Sympathy Jones. We hung four down lights in specific places on the stage with rotating circular gear gobos that were very ef-fective in the haze. It sort of looked like she was being beamed up or in a special place.”
From Spys to Spaceships
Goldman remarks that the director of Sympathy Jones had a specific concept for interstitial scenes and scene changes. “We designed something called ‘spy mode,’ which involved two more lekos that had Vortexes in them,” he says. “These had Rosco’s prismatic glass gobos that are deep blue and lavender, so that would be all we saw in the haze during transitions, the spinning hot beams of light; the company had dark sunglasses on with trench coats. If you took Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy and made in into a 2000 spy show, that would be the concept. It was a really fun look. We used 32 pinspots, and they would flash on and off as lasers. It was a very scrappy way to create gunfire on stage without having a huge budget.
”The Last Starfighter also benefited from help from Goldman’s friends, including Andrew Nikel at City Theatrical. “We used Color Blasts and floodlights for The Last Starfighter,” says Goldman. “We needed a wireless DMX system for seven performances over 10 days, and Andrew very graciously loaned us their rechargeable battery and the wireless transmitter and receiver, which goes to a PDF-50, a two-outlet LED power supply. This took mere moments to set up and incorporate into the video game that wheeled around the stage and was actively played during musical num-bers. The wireless system is really great.”
Rosco let them borrow a pencil fogger, which ended up getting cut from the show, and their new LitePad, which is a slim profile light source with white LEDs. “They’re little soft lights where, if you’re doing a car scene in movie, you could tape it to the dashboard to illuminate someone,” he clarifies. They received two LitePads that were 3 inches by 3 inches, one that was 6 by 12, and one that was 12 by 12. “They’re really great.
There’s a scene where the two lead characters in The Last Starfighter are in the spaceship, and the video game transforms into that spaceship. Centauri, who’s the alien navigator, sits with a LitePad on his lap, and it uplights him in the most dramatic, eerie way. We ended up plugging the Lite-Pads into 12V batteries, and they worked great. They’re the brightest things on stage during some of the battle scenes.”
The budgets for the shows at the New York Musical Theatre Festival vary radically. Some of them have whatever small personal budget a producer can afford, even just $50, to The Last Starfighter, which reportedly had a lighting budget of about $1,000. “According to the Equity contract, they’re supposed to produce within a $20,000 budget,” explains Goldman. “It’s really hard. Where the New York Musical Theatre Festival comes in is, they provide them with the venue, publicity, box office staff and front of house staff. The rep plot just helps get the shows off the ground, along with the sound package.”
It's a Proving Ground
Goldman does not work on the NYMTF for financial gain. For him, it is the chance to work with new directors, collaborate with new artists and meet new theatre people he has yet to work with, such as stage managers or up-and-coming choreographers. He adds that Elizabeth Lucas, a good friend and the director of The Last Starfighter, currently is directing two small feature films. “This was the first time I got to work with Elizabeth, and it was a lot of fun,” he says.
Through the NYMTF, Goldman has also worked with Scott Schwartz, the original director of Bat Boy, and Stephen Yuhasz, who he now collaborates with frequently. “You’re working for very little money, but you’re getting your work seen,” says Goldman. “Directors and producers are well aware that you only have eight hours to put this on, and while you may be putting a very good picture on stage, it’s certainly nothing that you would present after two weeks of tech. It’s about meeting new people and seeing if you can work with them if the show goes off-Broadway or Broadway or on another show. It’s a proving ground for a lot of things, and I have a lot of friends who are doing it for the same reasons. Nobody’s getting rich off of this.”
The festival allows him to sharpen his skills, and his past experience allows him to work well for his up-and-coming clients. The corporate gigs, on the other hand, give him bigger toys to play with. All-in-all, the experiences have continually broadened his horizons and also earned him an un-usual nickname.
“There’s a general manager, who calls me the kamikaze lighting designer,” remarks Goldman. “I used to take offense at that, but not anymore. Now it’s a marketable skill.”
