Unlike the typical Broadway show, director Bartlett Sher’s new revival of the iconic musical, Fiddler On The Roof, takes place in a white box setting with a highly reflective back wall, which allowed Tony Award-winning lighting designer Donald Holder the chance to play and sculpt with light in fun ways. “I got a lot of the responsibility for changing the space, of transforming it from one location to the other, one season to the next,” he tells PLSN. “It was real, pure storytelling through light. You don’t always get that opportunity. It was a challenge, but also a joy.”
Holder has worked with Sher on many shows in the past, and the LD says the director’s process is to treat each show like a new one, with a lot of hard work and refinement going into each production. “Obviously, there were no rewrites, but a lot of restaging and re-conceiving in terms of what scenes look like,” explains Holder, of Fiddler. “I think part of the reason it is successful is because it received a lot of care. A lot of thought and a lot of work went into it.”
A Stark Tone Prevails
An early Sher request that surprised Holder was the director’s directive to only use tungsten light sources, which intrigued the LD because he says Sher is not one to discuss technology very often. But to Holder, it sent a clear message that the director wanted “a spare vocabulary, an unadorned beauty that was reflective of the world of the shtetl, that place that they live in,” he says. “It was a bleak, miserable place to be, and he wanted the piece to be truthful and not sugarcoated, [in contrast to] the original production, which was kind of whimsical. This is more brooding and more real. That was a conscious choice, so tungsten sources made sense for that. He didn’t want production numbers to look like production numbers.”
While the show does not have only tungsten light sources, it is very quiet, which Holder found appropriate, because he feels that Fiddler is a play with music, particularly during the second act, which has many emotionally moving moments. The story chronicles the lives of a poor Jewish family whose patriarch, Tevye, must cope with five daughters who seek to escape societal marital expectations, and in some cases go against a repressive Soviet society at the turn of the 20th century. Such intense material required the right atmosphere.
“There are so few fans in the rig, and it’s basically quite quiet because it is mainly tungsten, [so] you can really hear the silence,” notes Holder. “You can almost hear a pin drop in Act II with 1,700 people in the theater, and I think it’s important for that production. I think Bart’s request was a good one, but it was more global than just an equipment choice. It’s funny how sometimes doing something simple is considered innovative, when actually that’s the way we used to do it.”
Sher wanted to use every inch of the space in the Broadway Theatre, which is one of the largest in New York. A passerelle that extends at least four rows into the audience allows for a few intimate moments closer to the audience. The white box concept came from the director wanting an “an overly theatrical surround,” says Holder. “In theater, the term white space is often referred to as the space between objects, sounds, movements and illustration. It is the opposite of a traditional black box stage. If you look into the wings, there is actually a few trappings of stage rigging hanging on the side masking. Having a white box that’s vast in terms of real estate and basically an operatic space, with some pieces flying and tracking on, requires that the lighting does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of storytelling.” Holder adds that he, Sher, scenic designer Michael Yeargan and sound designer Scott Lehrer worked for a long time on the stage setup and how things would function within it.
Hidden Staircase
An important scenic element is a 32-foot wide hole in the floor upstage. It has a staircase leading down into the trap room under stage level. At the beginning of the show, “the entire ensemble emerges out of the mist of those stairs, and they use it quite often for entrances and exits,” says Holder. “It’s pretty dramatic, I think. It allows people to just appear as opposed to trucking on and offstage from the wings. It’s a really interesting entrance.”
He explains that the stairs descend about nine feet into the trap room, which is approximately 32 feet wide by about eight feet deep. That means the stairs are steep, and the actors have a little 18-inch wide landing to step off. “Right in that area is a lighting trough where we have fixtures to light the back wall for most of the show and do some other things. It’s a very tight space, which we used a lot,” says Holder.
Overall, the white box environment created a welcome challenge for Holder, and it certainly required a lot of forethought and tweaking to make each scene work. “In a pale space like that, you have to be careful about giving each moment its focus,” explains Holder. “With a pale environment, it activates very quickly with few very lights on and can get over-lit very quickly in a way that’s not particularly productive or useful, so it just requires a lot more careful sculpting than perhaps a space that’s all black [where] the light disappears. In this space you see everything because it’s white and kind of open. There are a lot of scenic elements like the inn unit and Tevye’s house, but at other times there’s this completely open space.”
For the dramatic procession of characters ascending from the trap room onto the stage at the show’s beginning, the lighting shapes the space and creates the transitions from beat to beat. Holder notes that it was very challenging to start tech with a scene like that because, on the first day, an LD is trying to figure out the vocabulary of the piece, what works in the space and what doesn’t. “He is working his way around the lighting rig and hoping that you don’t have the most difficult, challenging part of the show right from the get-go,” he remarks. “I would say this was, so that was kind of terrifying.”
Sunrise, Sunset…
Fiddler On The Roof had a very short tech process that lasted seven or eight days, so Holder and the production team added a lot of layering and detail throughout the preview period, including in the opening number. During previews, he added the new GLP impression X4 bars in a small, 10-inch-wide lighting trough. These LED lighting strips have zoom optics and tilt capabilities, which he used to backlight the cast as they emerged through the mist as they came up the stairs. Holder is proud that the X4 bars made their Broadway debut with Fiddler. He’d seen the bars at LDI and knew they could do what he wanted, accomplish several different lighting tasks.
Side lighting was another important element to consider for the show. “Because they decided to open up the space right to the edges of the frame, it was very difficult to mask or completely conceal lighting positions, but I think in this production that was okay because this was really a theatrical space,” says Holder. “We tried to get them as far out of view as we could. Lighting positions and sidelight were all quite critical. Because it was operatic in terms of scale and so much of the time the entire space was exposed, I used a lot of broad brush strokes, a lot of operatic gestures — large swaths of diagonal backlight, or long shafts of backlight. I really took advantage of carving out the whole space rather than cutting it up into small pieces. I didn’t do that as much because it was open all the time and there was something about the staging and the tone of the piece that felt like it could get that kind of treatment.”
Holder states that the show has a progression from beginning to end. Act I one goes through summer, spring, and fall, “and it was more colorful and impressionistic,” and with the second act, which begins in late fall and shifts into winter, “it became consciously and intentionally more stark, stripped down, and drained of color because the play was moving toward that sad conclusion. They’re all thrown out of their homes and have to move. There was a conscious attempt to give the piece an emotional arc in terms of the light that paralleled the seasonal changes. At the end of the first act is when we get our first taste of the kind of world that we’re moving toward. When the wedding is broken up, we move into a very dark, spare and gloomy space, and we revisit that later in the play.”
One sequence that stands out is Tevye’s fabricated dream sequence, which he “recounts” when he is trying to convince his wife, Golde, that her grandmother returned from the grave to demand that their daughter Tzeitel marry the man she loves, rather than the husband they have picked for her. Holder purposely stressed the distinctness of that scene visually in relation to the rest of the musical. “I used kinetic effects, ground fog, a lot of color, a lot of movement, ballyhoos — it was all going on there,” he says. “You have bizarre angles, everything I could to give the piece energy, excitement, and mystery and separate it from the rest of the show, give it a sense of fantasy, but also fun.”
The Lighting Rig
The lighting rig consists of close to 350 Source Fours of various lenses. Holder says a lot of the moving lights are in the front of house and fan-less (CTI AutoYokes and ETC Revolutions) to keep the show as quiet as possible. A small number of moving lights onstage have fans in the rig. On stage, there are Revolutions, Vari-Lite VL3500Q spots and Martin Mac 2000 Performance Profiles.
“There are a few interesting fixtures, like the Clay Paky Sharpy Wash 330, that we are using, and these new GLP impression X4 bars,” adds Holder. “It’s pretty standard stuff, mainly tungsten sources. I also used the [Martin] MAC TW1 wash light. It’s created an uproar, particularly among the British designers, because they’re very distraught that Martin was discontinuing the TW1. It’s basically a 2000-watt wash light with a tungsten bulb. I said, ‘It’s just a light, what’s the big deal?’ Then I used about a dozen of them on Fiddler, and now I understand. It’s really beautiful. I’ll join the community.”
The idea of using moving lights with no fans in a show this quiet might have been cause for concern, but Holder points out that sound designer Scott Lehrer wanted the sound to feel very natural, hence one reason why diminished or minimal fan noise was really important.
“He and I had a lot of conversations about the dBA, the ambient noise level coming out of each fixture — what was an acceptable level and what wasn’t — way early in the planning phases,” recalls Holder. “I was a little nervous about going into a huge Broadway musical in that massive theater with underpowered sources. You go to most Broadway musicals [today] and take a look at the front of house, and the trusses are just loaded with 1200 W HMI short arc units with big fans and hundreds of moving lights with fans. This was very simple and a little scary, because I think that the audiences and everybody else have certain expectations. I felt like I was going out on a limb a little bit, but sometimes you have to take risks.”
Working on Fiddler On The Roof was very special for Holder, who says it was the first show he remembers seeing as a kid. “I was really young at the time, but I remember crying through most of the second act because I was so saddened by what I was seeing,” says the LD. “So to work on the 50th anniversary production was like a dream come true for me. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. It was special working with actors like Danny Burstein, Jessica Hecht and that company and my collaborators. I really admire Bart Sher’s aesthetic and the way he approaches work.”
