The Tony Award-nominated musical Bandstand is not quite what it appears to be. While it has been promoted as a peppy post-WWII musical, it is not simply extolling the big band virtues of that era. Underneath its dazzling veneer is the tale of a WWII veteran (Corey Cott) who returns home with few job prospects. He desires to form a jazz band with veterans to enter a television competition geared towards finding a great song dedicated to the service of American soldiers. Not only does he corral a spunky, talented group, but the wife (Laura Osnes) of his late best friend, who died in combat, becomes their charming singer.
Emotional Depth
Ultimately, Bandstand is not just about the music they make but the painful emotions the group copes with as they perform together. Clearly many of its members are suffering from PTSD, a condition not identified as such at the time.
“I ran into a neighbor who said she saw it last night,” says lighting designer Jeff Croiter. “She was emotional from the very beginning because her father served in World War II. I think it resonates with people in very different ways, but it especially resonates for people who are relatives of veterans or people who are veterans themselves coming back from more recent wars.”
Croiter relished working on this brisk two-act production, which keeps the quips, exuberant dancing, and scene changes coming fast and furious. “The lighting does so much for the show,” he asserts. “This was such a joy to work on, because at every turn, there was a lighting opportunity.” The LD says that Bandstand director/choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler not only understands lighting but relies on it in his work, staging scenes knowing that they will not work until they are lit the right way.
“I would watch something in a rehearsal room with no lighting, and it was clear that lighting would play a very important role in pulling the audience through the show, physically and emotionally,” recalls Croiter. “That’s what I love about it. I was incredibly fulfilled by the show, more than many. Not that I need to show off, but it’s more exciting to do something where lighting is important and it matters.”
The musical takes place in two areas: Cleveland throughout the first act and New York throughout much of the second act. The color palettes are quite different: Earth tones for the clubs and other Ohio settings in the former location, and more metallic and blue tones for the bigger urban environs of the latter. Additionally, Croiter describes the Cleveland set and scenes as more confined and gritty, while the New York scenes are airy and have a wider scope with a bolder use of color and a richer feel. “Cleveland is more specific in its stylization,” he adds. “Cleveland is fine strokes with a brush and New York is a much broader stroke.”
A Flash of Inspiration
Croiter and set designer David Korins did a lot of research into the American nightclubs of the time, and the results showed up on the stage. “What is evident from everything we looked at is that these clubs were alive and vibrant,” says Croiter. While reading the script, he looked up at his wall to see a print from “jazz age” painter R.J. Hohimer that he had bought while doing research for another show years ago. “I bought a packet of postcards because I thought he was perfect for this one show. As I was reading Bandstand, I looked up at this print on the wall and thought, ‘My God, that’s it. That’s the look.’ So, I was able to go back to something I had found a long time ago.”
For Croiter, this musical cried out for a bold use of color. “There’s no subtlety in the colorization of this, and I think that’s important to the storytelling,” he says. “The set doesn’t change through Cleveland, and we’re in so many different places. One of the many ways we help tell that story is by using color.” The reds and yellows used in Bandstand mirror the club atmosphere of the ‘40s, not to mention Hohimer’s work (from which Croiter’s New York blue palette also sprung). “It’s a fun, hot, sexy atmosphere [in the clubs], and we were going for that. People after the war were ready to let their hair down a little bit and have a nice time.”
The main lights used on the show are the Vari-Lite VL3500s which light a majority of the production. There are a fair number of ETC Source Four Lustr 2s used as well. “I used a lot of VL3500s and a lot of different LED equipment just to have color variety at our fingertips,” says Croiter, “and to have the dynamic of being able to shift from one thing into another in a snap.” He says he loves the color temperature and look of the VL3500s and liked them better than any other moving lights that were available for him to rent for the show.
“There are tons of moving lights on the market, but they’re not all readily available in the New York rental market,” reveals the Bandstand LD. “Of the instruments that I knew that I could get, the VL3500 is my favorite. I think it is a beautiful light. The color is better than any other light. Even when there’s no color and it’s being itself, it has a certain warmth to it. That white light has more warmth and red in it than any other moving lights on the market that are much greener. I like the way it mixes color. I like that it has shutters, which was a necessity for this show. We used every single one of the gobos in those lights. There were other lights that were available that were efficient, had shutters, and looked nice, but didn’t have enough gobo slots, and we needed that.”
Prop Light Accents
There about 60 prop lights all over the set, including on the sub-grid that hangs below the main lighting trusses and hovers above the set, which has three distinct areas that form a W-like shape. Croiter says that even though they work, they do not actually light up anything because they are not that powerful. They are there for the atmosphere and to give each location in act one a different look. The majority of them are 6-inch Fresnels that were retrofitted with a color changeable source.
“That is one of the ways we defined space, by changing the color in those lights,” says Croiter, adding that the lights change height. “They do change positions for certain clubs as well. It’s not obvious [but they do].” There is also RGBW LED tape along the top of the Cleveland set that is used for a variety of colors but not as often as the retrofitted Fresnels.
“We tried many things over the course of the development of the show,” explains Croiter. “We did this show a year before at Paper Mill [Playhouse in New Jersey] and couldn’t really get that light. For Broadway, we developed a different technology in order to make these vintage [lamps] into LED color changeable Fresnels. In some cases, they were purchased on eBay just because we wanted that look and you can’t really rent that.”
Another set of lights that are added more for atmosphere are 10-inch scoops placed behind the band when they finally get to do their television performance in act two. The scoops come from a variety of manufacturers and were pulled from “whatever the shop had lying around,” says Croiter. “I’m not sure people make them anymore. I don’t know why anyone would use them anymore. They work for the show, but we’re using them in a way that I don’t think they were originally intended to be used, as a backdrop for a TV set.”
Close to 650 Cues
The number of cues for Bandstand hit close to 650, one of the highest tallies that Croiter has seen on a show. He stresses how the lighting was intertwined with the staging, choreography, and the movement of the show.
“As everything moves on stage, so does the lighting,” notes Croiter. “Nobody walks more than a few steps without the lighting shifting and adjusting with them. It is all incredibly specific and custom-designed to this staging. There were times during tech as we were building the cues that Andy would be on stage working with the dancers and I would be lighting something. He would come out and say, ‘It looks great but I don’t want to see them, them, or them. I want to see that, that, and that.’ It was not just about specificity over the whole picture. There could be 30 people on stage, but the focus had to be on six of those people. That was [my] responsibility to make those six pop out and make everybody else into scenery basically.”
When asked about something new he learned working on this show, Croiter replies that it was a constant process of evolution. He feels that as a lighting designer he can definitively say that no two situations are the same. When he left Bandstand to work on another show, it was like starting over.
“The rules are different for each show, the scenery is different, the colors are different,” says Croiter. “I did the Something Rotten national tour right before Bandstand, and we preprogrammed a lot of the colors for the VL3500. We took these color palettes to the Bandstand set to look at them and see which ones worked, and none of them did. You have to invent that with each show. You have to re-learn things every show, re-learn the rules of the show. For me, the first day in the theatre is about figuring out what those rules are and what colors will work, and then you get better at it throughout the process.”
