LD Natasha Katz talks about lighting the musical as it makes its way back to Broadway.
The Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, Cats, is both a beloved and satirized show. The original production lasted 18 years and ended its original run in 2000, but it has been revived in a new production directed by Trevor Nunn and co-starring pop singer Leona Lewis as the melancholy kitty Grizabella, whose signature song, “Memories,” is an iconic Broadway theme.
What makes the show entertaining is not so much its simple storyline but the look and feel of the junkyard setting where colorfully costumed cats prance and dance about. Naturally the wild attire and characters, inspired by poems by T.S. Eliot, have lent themselves to good natured ribbing as well. It’s simply fluffy fun.
Lighting the Junkyard
Narrative-wise, the Jellicle cats meet under the Jellicle moon once a year to pick which feline gets to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and be reborn. The show is a series of musical vignettes in which the various cats make their case for being the top pick. The whole narrative takes place in a junkyard, and for this version, scenic/costume designer John Napier extended the collage of discarded bric-à-brac which surrounds the set, everything from tarps to auto parts to an oven to an upside down poster of Felix the Cat, into the box seats, literally thrusting much of the audience onto the Jellicle stage.
Lighting designer Natasha Katz declares she had plenty of fun working on the show, particularly with its choreographer. “It was extremely exciting to work with Andy Blankenbuehler because he has a lighting designer’s eye,” Katz tells PLSN. “We married the choreography and the lighting together in a way that, for me as a lighting designer, is extraordinarily exciting.” Indeed, the various stage movements and key moments are pinpointed by Katz’s lighting being in sync with Blankenbuehler’s choreography. “It’s like movie editing,” she observes. “We tell you where to look. “
Naturally working in tandem with the show’s choreographer meant that Katz had to keep making changes to her lighting throughout the rehearsal process, and the show has a lot of lighting cues — 700 in total. While not the most she has had on a show, that dwarfs the 300-to-400 she has been averaging on shows lately. “There is a lot of lighting in Cats,” confirms the LD. “The lighting is bringing the emotion of the evening across, but a lot of it has to do with being hand-in-glove with the choreography. If they move to stage right, the lights change. If there’s a key change, the lights change. If the dancers are doing a lift, the lights change. A lot of it also has to do with certain storytelling ideas, and each cat and each number has its own signature look.”
A good example of a striking character is Rum Tum Tugger, who cavorts narcissistically during his Act One number. “Andy thought that he was so vain in that he thinks he’s in his own rock concert,” notes Katz. “He has that kind of feeling about himself. He’s playing air guitar all night long in an odd way. All the lights feel very rock ‘n’ roll.” She utilized ten Sharpys with their thin beams to follow him around the stage. On the flipside, the melancholy Grizabella gets bathed in sad lighting “because she’s looking back on her life with so much regret,” says Katz. “So very cool, very stark [colors].”
Since the show transpires at night, most of the lighting comes from the grid overhead and the stage wings, with a modest amount coming from the balcony, to give the effect of moonlight and to track the movement of the moon over the course of the single night documented by the story. “Mostly of it is an interplay of cool colors coming from a lot of different angles, and part of it is that they do get together under the Jellicle moon for the Jellicle ball at night,” says Katz.
Moving with the Story
Over the course of the show, Katz and her lighting help tell smaller stories in the larger whole. “I do feel that way,” she concurs. “I think it helps not only with variety for the audience but it helps them understand the world of each of these cats.”
One example is The Gumbie Cat (a.k.a. Jennyanydots) who gets all her work done at night when people are asleep. “There’s a daytime look, and she’s fast asleep on a window, then there’s the nighttime look when she’s scurried and hurried and doing all the work. That’s in the blues of night. We do depart often to warmer colors [at other times], but it’s usually within a song so that it is just kind of helping to push the emotion of the song or the music or the feel or the tone. But then it always goes back to a nighttime feel.”
The costumes were not difficult to light, especially considering the variance in their color schemes and the dark tone of many musical numbers. “You’d think looking at it that the white cat would be a problem or the darker cats would be a problem,” muses Katz. “But he [John Napier] did such a beautiful job with the costumes that I felt it all sort of melded together.”
The floor and junkyard surfaces are not very reflective, and the floor is raked to allow the audience to see more of it. Katz says that Napier wanted the set design to be as immersive as possible, hence the extension out into the theater, to make the experience more visceral and have audience members feel submerged in that world. “All the junk from the junkyard that comes out into the auditorium is lit 90 percent of the time so that we know that it’s there and feel it around us all the time,” she says. Much of that lighting is subtle. “Yes, the important thing is to look at the cats.”
Layered Looks
Even so, the lighting in the show has many different elements. Little LED “cat eyes” sprout up around the stage when the lights go down, prefacing the feline parade to come. Other LEDs act like stars and dot the proscenium arch and the back wall. Strings of normal looking light bulbs (specifically RGB LEDs) are hung from the stage out across the theater, serving as a canopy over both the balcony and orchestra seats to help immerse spectators in the Jellicle world.
“There are different kinds of lights in order to layer it,” explains Katz. “There are different positions and angles in order to layer it, because there’s a lot of dancing in the show, but also the show is two hours of cats in the same place. There are a lot of different feelings to get across to the audience, so there are definitely a lot of different layers. Sometimes they work on their own and sometimes they work together.”
While this approach is not new for Katz (but perhaps for Cats), she believes it is more evident here because of the highly visual nature of the show, and not just in terms of the lighting. “There’s so little talk compared with most shows that we see and so few songs compared with most shows that we see that a lot of that seems more apparent,” she says.
The main lights in Katz’s Cats rig are Martin MAC Vipers. She likes that they are quiet, as are the VL500s and 1000s, Source Fours, and various LED sources utilized in the show. Perhaps the “loudest” lights, from a visual standpoint, comprise an oval array that she estimates is eight feet wide by two feet deep that rises from the floor into the air during the opening overture before the cats command the stage. Made up of GLP LEDs, it is a puzzling holdover from the original production since it does not exactly have a set purpose other than to dazzle people at the outset.
“I would say that it’s a metaphor for whatever an audience member wants it to be a metaphor for, because so many people have different ideas about what it is,” says Katz. “It’s interesting because it makes no sense, but people often ask me about that. For some reason, it’s extremely compelling. It does rise to the music, it does work with the music, and it transforms from those lights into little starry dots. There are all sorts of things in your mind that you could project on that. It makes no sense, which is what makes it so exciting.”
Katz enjoyed the layered approach she took for Cats and instilling the production with emotional warmth, and she found that the musical served as an interesting reminder about her craft. “There are some shows where the power of light becomes extremely apparent to me — in a fun way, if the creative team knows how to use it,” she says. “I think on Cats there are times where the lighting subliminally helps a feeling of elation.”
Cats Gear List
- 1 ETC EOS TI 8000 Lighting Console
- 60 ETC Source Four LED LUSTR Series 2
- 145 ETC Source Fours
- 100 ETC Source Four PARs
- 40 Martin MAC Viper Performances
- 20 Martin MAC Viper Wash DX fixtures
- 7 Martin Atomic 3000 strobes
- 20 Vari*Lite VL500 Washes
- 10 Vari*Lite VL1000s
- 15 GLP impression X4S fixtures
- 8 GLP impression X4s
- 16 Claypaky Sharpy Wash 330s
- 120 PAR16 birdies (w/MR-16 EYC 12V, 75W lamps)
- 30 Wybron CXI 7 scrollers
- 3 MDG Atmospheres hazes w/ DMX
- 3 Lycian 1295 Xenon followspots
- 3 96 x 2.4kw ETC Sensor AF dimmer racks
- 1 48 x 2.4kw ETC Sensor AF dimmer racks
