Lighting designer Kevin Adams always wanted to put a Hitchcock film on stage, particularly Psycho with its infamous shower sequence. So when he was told that The 39 Steps, which began life in London a few years ago, was being brought to the Great White Way nearly scene for scene, he was ecstatic. Of course, the catch was that this was not a straight-on rendition of that famous thriller from the master of suspense, but rather a low-budget parody of the film. Or more specifically, it’s a parody whose premise was that a tiny theatre company with a cast of four was attempting to play out the whole film onstage without the proper resources. Adams loved the concept and eagerly jumped onboard. Little did he know that the Broadway incarnation of The 39 Steps would win him the 2008 Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Play and the 2008 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lighting Design — not bad work if you can get it.
Warm Tents of White Light
“I remember that part of what appealed to me about The 39 Steps is that for the last couple of years I had been doing Spring Awakening, Passing Strange, and these large, deeply saturated, colorful pop shows,” recalls Adams, “and I wanted to do something completely opposite of that. I like trying to put a black and white film onstage. I like how rigorously monochromatic The 39 Steps is. There’s very little saturated color in the show. There is a lot of cool light and warm tents of white light.”
Director Maria Aitken and set designer Peter McKintosh kept telling Adams that they wanted film noir elements, which was “fine with me, even though the film was a mid-1930s film. I think we were all interested in using elements of film noir vocabulary, which is actually late 1940s and 1950s. I’ve done a lot of shows based in that period of cinema vocabulary, so I was very eager to merge that mid-1930s English film sensibility with early 1950s American film noir vocabulary.”
Lighting a show to look like a low-budget rendition of a famous black-and-white film is not easy. The 39 Steps includes minimalist settings in an apartment, house and country inn, but it also includes a train chase sequence using trunks as the tops of train cars, a showdown in a private study outside of which a dance is taking place, an on-foot chase across foggy moors and the famous plane chase sequence across the moors hilariously portrayed with puppets and models in shadow play. Ironically, it required a lot of modern technology to make this piece look like it was done on a shoestring.
“I call this the mixture of an American plot and a European plot or a German plot, in that the front of house is all Lekos with well-controlled areas, and then on stage is all ETC PARs,” explains Adams. “It’s all specials on stage. There are very little area systems. It’s all specials for almost all of the scenes and beats.” While he saw the recent British production, Adams did not use their light plot.
Setting the Tone
The tone for the Broadway show is set right from the get-go, when a strobe light effect is used to mimic a flickering film screen, before we close in on Richard Hannay, the protagonist, whose desire for mindless activity (“I know, the theatre!”) leads him to meet a young woman who involves him in a plot of international intrigue and murder. When Hannay goes to the theatre to see Mr. Memory and his amazing ability to remember famous and obscure facts, a red curtain acts as a full backdrop, and two elevated box seats, placed on either end of the stage for Hannay and his doomed date, are used for maximum effect and widen the perspective of the show.
For the theatre within the theatre, the well-placed footlights at the front of the stage adorn the set nicely. “I think they were 60-watt clear light bulbs inside those footlights,” recalls Adams. “I like using light bulbs for really warm, very general wash, a little tent of warmth. They’re mostly used for the little shows within a show, when the red curtain comes in.”
From that point on, the show’s first act maintains a breakneck pace in terms of witty wordplay, accelerated action and frantic scene changes. The second act slows down a little, but the dialogue and action still maintains a fairly rapid trajectory. In fact, the manic energy from the four-person ensemble, with all but the actor portraying Hannay playing multiple parts, generates plenty of laughter through slapstick comedy, verbal jousting, and purposely misplaced cues (not to mention name-checking many other Hitchcock films.)
“This production had existed for years, and I think the set designer had been with it for many years,” elucidates Adams. “The director came to it later, then I came to it later than she, so some of these things had been in the production for a very long time. I think a lot of the shadow play was in there before she got involved, and when I came into it we developed it more. A lot of the things I lit, the beats of the show, were already set in previous productions.”
Shadow Dancing
Interestingly enough, two of the more striking sequences, the plane chase and the showdown in the study, with silhouettes of people dancing in a party in the next room, required very simple lighting. For the backlit shadow play in the plane sequence, a 50° Source Four was used. For the darkened dancers through the study door, he employed an 8-inch 1K Fresnel. “We removed the lens to get a nice, hard shadow,” adds Adams. “There are little shadow cutouts that dance in front of the light.”
Despite those simple lighting effects, Adams feels that this version of the show is more detailed than its overseas cousin. “I tried to play more with using the light as a framing device so you can get a close-up, medium shot or long shot. So at times, just like a camera does, it pulls you into a small detail, like someone looking through a window. You get little details of a place or a close-up of a place, or the camera pulls back and you see an entire place.” The imitation of cinematographic framing works well in scenes with the minimalist “sets,” and they help draw away from the fact that they have little dressing.
“I like that scene where Hannay takes that woman that he meets back to his place because it’s very film noir and high contrast and has shafts of light,” remarks Adams. “It’s full of intrigue. That scene is not as humorous as the other scenes, so it’s not as brightly lit and is a little more mysterious. It was all fun to do. I hadn’t had much experience with as many different kinds of smoke as the show needs, so at times during those train sections there are seven different kinds of smoke machines going, from tiny little machines that you can hold in your hand to a big thing the size of a VW. I just don’t have the patience for that kind of thing, getting all those things to work the way they should and at the times they should. That was a lot of tech.”
Adams says he learned a lot more about smoke on this show. It began at the Huntington Theatre in Boston, moved to the Roundabout Theatre in New York, then soon transferred to the Cort Theatre, where it now resides. “Doing that at the Roundabout was tricky because they have a complicated air system in their renovated theatre,” the lighting designer remarks. “It’s one of those contemporary theatres where the air intake is above the stage, so you’re trying to have smoke flow down beneath the air handlers, but it just gets sucked right up. It’s really hard to get smoke into that stage area because you have to force it down, and it clears out very, very quickly. So it was a delight to go to the Cort Theatre, which doesn’t have that kind of an air system.”
Low-Budget Illusion
In terms of set adjustments, Adams notes that the Roundabout and the Cort are similar in size. “We had to get a little larger with our show with the Roundabout, which probably didn’t help too much, so we were able to go back to the less wide production at the Cort that we had done at the Huntington. At the Roundabout I had three Vari*Lites that I used for all these different specials. I cut those VLs for the Cort because I had more room for specials, and I just wanted to keep the front of house as simple as possible because I was hoping we would be in there for a while.”
Ultimately a lot of time and effort went into creating the illusion that The 39 Steps was a low-budget production. It’s not like Adams just put up a couple of lights. He sums up his philosophy on the show: “It’s building out of different kinds of effects and constantly, in that three-walled empty set, finding different ways to tell stories or to keep the audience on their toes just to keep the production moving along.”
Anyone who has seen The 39 Steps on Broadway will not soon forget its frenetic comic energy, intense lighting, effects and lively performances.
