It’s very rare when an off-Broadway production arouses international controversy and sets the stage for a highly anticipated Broadway run, but in the case of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, that is exactly what happened. Composing legend Stephen Sondheim wrote a letter to The New York Times that was like the musical “shot heard ‘round the world,” condemning the Boston-based production by director Diane Paulus at the ART last fall before he had even seen it. While that is negative attention, that’s still a lot of free publicity, and people’s ears perked up. Sondheim’s issue was with the fact that the show, being transferred from operatic to musical theater form, was going to include some modern revisions that were actually approved by the Gershwin estate.
No matter. The ART show, despite some media criticism, was a success, and after landing on the Great White Way in January, the Broadway transfer to the Richard Rodgers Theater has been performing very well. Lighting designer Christopher Akerlind notes that some critics found the ART production visually wanting, but he disagrees with their perspective.
“From the beginning, we were essentially committed to our basic architecture,” he recalls, of the stylized, wooden, semicircular surround that wraps around the stage. “When the show came to New York, the cladding was changed to be something that felt more like material found in urban architecture of the time, and there were windows, shutters and wrought iron added to pull it a little bit more closely towards the quintessential Catfish Row.”
Lean on Scenery
That being said, there is not a plethora of those elements, just enough to help define the set a bit more. In the end, the hodgepodge of wooden panel elements over a steel frame and the wooden wharf set help give a sense of the dilapidated area of Catfish Row without literally defining it, so a lot of it is still invented in the mind of the audience. The focus is on the acting, singing and dancing, and the lighting helps sculpt everything from intimate romantic scenes to a thunderous hurricane at the climax of the show. And that approach suits Akerlind just fine — he prefers that the audience use their imagination to fill in the cracks rather than have everything literally laid out in front of them.
“There is an aesthetic [that] I happen to enjoy as a spectator and also as a lighting designer,” explains Akerlind. “It’s more expressive. It’s counterintuitive to me to go to the theater to see some contrived sense of realism. I go to the theater to get away from reality on some level and access these stories in a more poetic way, which is why I admire the essential poetry of our production. Now some people come out of it and say, ‘I don’t know where I am.’ They talk about where they are.”
The LD has distinct thoughts about this idea. He says that the two periods that are arguably the peak of Western playwriting — specifically the times of the Elizabethans and the Greeks — managed to create “some of the best theater that the world has ever seen” without using realistic scenery. Shakespeare could give a character a line that said where they were without the environment onstage actually reflecting that, and the audience simply accepted and believed it.
“On some level, we’re slaves to the ability to have scenery,” believes Akerlind, of modern audiences. “This is a gross generalization, but I find scenery is generally too literal. I like my scenery on the lean side, which I think puts more focus on what is essential to the theatergoing experience, the blood-and-guts human being, which is what I tend to be more excited about. I think that’s why I was happy where we started and not unhappy where we left off in New York. It gave me a great opportunity to play very expressively inside an empty space to create spaces for each scene, as opposed to relying on scenery to do the work.”
Abundant Lighting
Akerlind had plenty of lights to work with on both productions, although he had a few more toys on Broadway. He says there were very high trims used on the ART production. “Given the semicircular surrounds, any good set narrows the positions on some level, but we did it in Cambridge with half a dozen 1K incandescent movers, and on Broadway we’re using 50 or so moving lights,” he says. “It’s a bit of a hodgepodge. With everything upstage and outside of the semicircle, all the light gets filtered through the various openings and the slates and the slots. Those are all VLXs. There are about 18 of them, nine or so on either side. Overhead is a combination of two 3500Qs and four 3500 Washes, which are outrageously bright and amazing units. Then there are 10 or 11 3000s — one or two front of house, one or two on each ladder, and then the rest of them overhead.”
The big visual showcase in Porgy and Bess is the hurricane that becomes the dramatic focal point for Act Two. The lightning flashes and thunder claps needed to be powerful to represent the earth-shattering nature of the story. Akerlind notes that in the ART production, the stage tilted to the left, and there was actually falling water onstage to help create the storm. But he felt that that scenario was too literal for the context of the show.
“The big adjustment, scenery-wise that we made in New York was that it [the walls] portaled in for the funeral scene so that the characters felt isolated inside as opposed to being stranded outside,” says Akerlind. “Just by accident. We were always going to project a sense of storm on the circular surround, and then as we started to work on it there was one moment where we portaled in and the projections stayed on the portal, so we decided to do that. So the portal space became the outside, and the interior, deeper space was the inside. And the outside portal space became a good place to flash lightning flashes as well.”
Casting Shadows
According to Akerlind, the hurricane sequence relies strongly on LED footlights and low Lekos with key changes that light up and in. There are many points in the show that have a motif of casting character shadows, and that aspect is exaggerated to “make the hurricane feel very extreme in the landscape.” Some front of house low fills with diagonal light come in underneath the portal, but “the sense of the storm itself comes from overhead, from upstage through the cracks again, and then there is a downlight ‘entrance’ into the interior space that we push a lot of light in from the downlit side. Generally speaking it’s kind of an overhead show. There is not a lot of onstage sidelight availability in that space intrinsically.”
A challenge on a lesser level was dealing with the large tarp that is hung as the backdrop for the Kittiwah Island scenes at the opening of the second act. For Akerlind, “the top of Act Two is like a first draft. Those goods arrived about a week before we froze the show; one version of them arrived in a white version. Then it was decided that it needed to be bluer, so they built another one, and the last one came in and was hung the morning of the freeze. So I basically had four or five hours just to make the Kittiwah Island sequence from the top of Act Two through to Crown and Bess [fighting]. We had tech’ed the whole thing with no drop, then it was decided that we needed a drop. That was very tricky for me, because I had to be sit patiently and await a new piece of scenery [and] nobody knew how it was going to work. That was a little agonizing, but I think that in the end we basically made some good out of it.”
Even though there are 50 moving lights used on the latest Broadway incarnation of Porgy and Bess, Akerlind does not really use them as moving lights per se. “I think one of the thing that’s unique about my use of moving lights is that I use each unit as a diverse paintbrush,” he states. “There are one or two funky live color moves, but I folded them into the fabric of the look. I don’t want people to notice moving lights, particularly in an environmental piece like Porgy and Bess. I used 50 so that the depth and ability to paint that space was increased, that I had a deeper range of color. The scene where Bess comes back from Kittiwah Island, and she’s in the tub and women are washing her and singing a hymn, that’s all shaped moving lights. There is very little overhead space. That semi-circular space really cut things down so that profile movements do a lot of double, triple and quadruple duty, and I use them in very specific ways that aren’t necessarily evident.”
A Creative Assist
Akerlind says that he likes to work with directors who are not very specific with him, and he also feels that the best designers are akin to being associate directors. Diane Paulus let him have creative reign on Porgy and Bess. “I’m happy to kind of throw a draft of something up on stage, and I like when directors respond to it,” he explains, adding that he makes an analogy between LDs and actors. He notes that there are many actors who do not want to do line readings and do not want directors to tell them how to say a line. They would rather have a direction that offers them different ways to contextualize it. He feels the same about his job.
“I don’t do a lot of work with directors who say ‘turn that one on, turn that one off.’ I’m not quite interested in that, and I also work fast enough, do things quick enough and am intuitive enough so that that’s not a problem. I’m usually in the ballpark. Twenty-three years and 650 productions later, I go into the rehearsal, get a sense of the music, the rhythm and the space, and I’m working with people of similar tastes. It’s not so difficult to be in the ballpark. It’s not to say that there wasn’t interaction with Diane, but she largely likes working with designers and likes to see what they will give her. I like directors who are open to conversations. Diane tends to be that kind of director, which is why I enjoyed the collaboration.”
When asked if there was something new that he learned working on Porgy and Bess, Akerlind says he would have asked for more time. “What I’ve learned about myself over the last 20 years is that I’m not always aggressive enough in protecting the amount of time [needed] because, as an artist, I’m not thinking about the parameters,” he reveals. “I’m a terrible business person, I’m a terrible manager of my own life, but I think I’m a good lighting designer because my head goes towards the creative and imaginative rather than the parameters. What I wish I had done in the Porgy situation is to have insisted that I got the time that I needed to have left it in a slightly more finished state. I don’t think what I’m talking about is apparent to anybody but me. Every particular show like that has hundreds of details of edge, cut, shape and intensity and hundreds of details in every single cue. That’s what a lighting designer does, controls all the various details, so for me many things aren’t finished. I had six or seven pages of notes that I never got to that had accumulated over the three or four weeks when we first got to the freeze of the show. I’m proud of the outcome, but I would’ve liked some more time.”
The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess
Crew
Lighting Designer: Christopher Akerlind
Scenic Designer: Riccardo Hernandez
Associate LD: Caroline Chao
Production Electrician: Jimmy Maloney
Gear
1 ETC EOS console
1 ETC ION console
3 Vari*Lite 3500Q Spots
5 Vari*Lite 3500 Wash fixtures
24 Vari*Lite 3000Q Spots
21 Vari*Lite VLX Wash fixtures
10 Philips Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12 TRX 23°
14 Philips Color Kinetics ColorBlast 12 (3 color), 22°
25 Selador Vivid-R 11” fixtures
279 ETC Source Four 750W fixtures (14°-70°)
56 ETC Source Four NSPs
32 ETC Source Four MFLs
15 Martin Atomic strobes
1 Lycian 1293 x3K followspot
2 Lycian M2 Short Throw followspot
72 Wybron Coloram II scrollers
44 Ocean Optics Sea Changer tungsten
2 MDG Atmosphere haze machine
2 Martin JEM fans
