He’s worked with such theatre legends as Stephen Sondheim (writer, Sweeney Todd), Hal Prince (director, Guys ‘n Dolls) and Arthur Laurent (writer/director, Gypsy). His resume reads like the Who’s Who of Broadway productions. His gallery of Broadway show posters, many of them signed, spans three rows on three walls. His three-story New York City brownstone is filled with Broadway me-mentos and pictures from show openings. Displayed on top his bookshelf is an array of honors: an Olivier Award (Kiss of the Spiderwoman), a Dora Award, five Helen Hayes Awards, a Tony Award (Jersey Boys) and a Tony nomination for In the Heights. With an extraordinary lineup of six shows currently running on the “Big Street” (Xanadu, Avenue Q, Jersey Boys, In the Heights, Cry Baby, Gypsy) Broadway lighting designer Howell Binkley is at the top of his game.
So how does a kid from North Carolina end up among the Broadway elite? Binkley was introduced to the entertainment business at the ripe old age of 10. His neighbor was the IATSE local business agent and took Binkley along to unload trucks at the nearby 2000-seat roadhouse on weekends. Recalls Binkley, “I’d look forward to every weekend because there’d be a symphony coming in or Alvin Ailey Dance Company or The Merchant of Venice. I loved it. At the end of the day he’d give me 50 bucks, which was a lot of money for a kid, but I was just having fun.
“The North Carolina School of the Arts was in town and they had summer tours. I got to meet a bunch of techies and thought, ‘Wow, these guys are cool.’ I just wanted to be a roadie. I did a lot of rock ‘n’ roll but the big theatre tour that I did was with the John Houseman Acting Company out of New York. We would go out on the road with five shows in rep. It was a great marketing tool because you could go to one theatre for a week and do five different shows. We didn’t carry our own lighting equipment. We had a rep plot that I could turn around in one day. Dennis Parasheet was the LD and he was fantastic. He got me to New York.”
When asked what sets his designs apart from other LDs, Binkley replies, “I’d say it’s the style in which I marry conventional lights and automated lights to keep it in the same palette. It’s all about layering. You need layers to really make a statement. Once you’ve established your foundation, you can always go to the automated light and make it more saturated or a lighter color. For example, if we’re in a forest and it’s all blue and green and turquoise, we need a nice light across the scrim to open it up and make purple sift through the scrim to feel like there’s a source of light coming from behind a rock.
“Sometimes during sequences like a club or disco, I’ll get saturated, but I prefer a lot of clear focused light. I like to have enough color on the cyc to give me flexibility to go cool or warm with a lot of clear color, which I love. For transitional purposes I can totally silhouette a stage in a heartbeat. It’s important to have those tools in my pocket for the director.”
Binkley has become a specialist at transforming smaller Off Broadway shows like Avenue Q and Golda’s Balcony into visual fiestas when they move to more elaborate Broadway venues. One of his most recent projects is In the Heights, a musical story about urban Hispanic culture in New York City’s Washington Heights, set to Latin rhythms and a Hip Hop beat.
Comments Binkley, “Heights is very layered and stylized. When you walk in, you see a grown up Avenue Q. There are four buildings depicting a block in Washington Heights, two that are attached with scrim walls, so I can make them opaque or translucent. The George Washington Bridge is on the cyc. There’s very little automation. They didn’t have the budget.”
Tony Award-winning set designer Anna Louizos’ attention to detail is evident in the replication of an uptown neighborhood. From the subway entrance to the detail in storefronts and bodega interiors, her set is a visual marvel. “Anna gave me an incredible playground,” says Binkley. “She established a community that gave me a wonderful palette to layer. There’s a rack and a half of practicals in the show just covering the detail in the salon. Her in-depth, layered design is phenomenal, with all the air conditioners, the fans, the limousine dispatch.
“We could front light the set pieces in many different variations, which would opaque the buildings, but then layer the other buildings in behind that were even further upstage, making them look even further in the distance. Also, the whole façade really worked as a template for me because I had designed a lot of template units and window backs to slice through. I found myself pulling the template out and letting the light shoot through scrim or a staircase or a fire escape. It would create its own template just from the shadow. I said, ‘My gosh, this is beautiful. Pull the temp.”
Though the set never changes throughout the show, the characters move through various geographic locations. Binkley gives some insight as to how he approaches such a project. “I treat it like a dance show. It’s a mystery ride of what people want in their lives. I had to have my plot ready so it would be able to travel. It lights across the street in the middle of the summer. They also go into a club, there’s a blackout in the city. It’s a stunning piece. It’s about where the story takes you. That’s the way I look at everything I do. It’s not about the lighting. It’s about the story you have to tell.”
Successfully lighting a musical may require an aptitude for music itself, only so much of which can be taught. “The lighting has got to work with the music. How do you teach someone how to write a poem? You can learn all the mechanics, whether it’s going to rhyme or whether it’s iambic pentameter, but then you’ve got to put those parts together. I’m sure every designer has their own formula that they always keep with them. You have to develop a cuing formula. I just love the music. The music calls upon me — bumps, cut offs, going into things; it’s how you shift during that time.
“I’ve been a designer 25 years and I learn something new with every show,” Binkley adds. “If you don’t, you might as well stop. You’ve got to take the newness that you want and try to get rid of what you don’t want. Usually I have a lot planned before I get to the theatre because I’ve seen the set, models and gone through several meetings with the director and set designer about their visions. You’ve got to put all that together into your own vision. A script has certain demands as to where the scene’s played, what they’re doing, location, time, day. There are a lot of big things there that start you off in your dissecting of how you’re going to light it. I like to start the journey chronologically from page one to 100. I like to know where I came from to know where I’m going.”
Binkley’s style is painterly in the quality of its angles and colors. “Through the course of the show you’re visually telling the audience what kind of day it is and I think the colors you use lend a rich-ness in value to the choices you’re going to make. I tried to enhance that visual with Heights by being a little bit richer with the color tones and hues than I normally would be.”
He admits it was a challenge that took him a little bit out of his comfort zone. “Instead of clear white I went with a richer amber, the blues are a bit more rich. Then I found that I could slice through that with clear light to accent the area. So I could establish a surround with the color choices that I made, being able to pull out those areas where I wanted to focus on the characters. The background was totally layered, but our focus went to where the scene was being played. It was something I hadn’t done before. I enjoy using color but this was a risk and I felt our results were pleasing.”
Binkley’s color palette starts with a warmth to reflect the summer heat on a city street, then moves on toward a citywide blackout, and culminates in a four-minute Fourth of July fireworks dis-play. For budgetary reasons, there were no video or LED screens in the show.
“I knew this would have to be an entire moving light spectacle, so I placed this on David Arch, my programmer, and Mark Simpson, my associate, to start building it,” Binkley says. “When we laid out the plot we made sure that we had ample coverage of the scrim, which we were going to shoot on, giving David the tools that he needed to make this work. We created a surround where the fireworks had to happen. It wasn’t just one area because when the fireworks actually start, the whole cast is looking out front so it needed to reflect on the actors and on the front of the façade of the building and echo to the scrim and over the bridge. It had to be 360°.
“It was great working with Acme Sound to SMPTE that whole sequence. Sound and lighting together execute all the bursts, rumbles, rockets and explosions. Mark and David executed this with the grandMA [from MA Lighting], and I used an Obsession [from ETC] with the conventional system to keep the ground and the buildings alive where people were throughout the songs. There’s a lot of activity still occurring during the course of this whole fireworks sequence. It’s at the end of Act I where we see that the two leads are going to fall in love.”
Because of the intricacies of the programming and the effect they desired, Binkley and his team worked on this sequence every day for four weeks. They needed to get the timing just right so as to not take focus away from the actors or the text. They timed the bursts between dialogue and then followed back into the scene. Recalls Binkley, “It was a whole arcing of layering, and the exe-cution of it all had to be very precise. Once we had a nice foundation laid in, that’s when we really started to pick it apart even more and really accentuate certain areas and colors, rumbles and explo-sions that would continuously happen. It’s a busy little four minutes and it was well worth the time.”
Moments like that are among the reasons that Broadway audiences are willing to spend $100 per seat to take part in a journey together to a place based on neighborhoods just a $2 subway ride away, yet transformed by Broadway’s music, set and lighting designs — a magical world all its own.
