Lighting Designer Lap Chi Chu is back in Los Angeles after the successful Broadway opening of Suffs. Short for suffragists, the musical was first produced at The Public Theater in 2022 and traces the later years of the struggle for women’s right to vote. “It’s a period piece with a modern feel,” he says. Chu’s lighting conveyed the strength of these women as well as how separated from each other they all were, with tightly shuttered playing areas, clean lines, and judicious use of pink. He sat down with ETC to discuss Suffs, his thriving design career (he also designed Lincoln Center’s Uncle Vanya this spring), his teaching career, and how he balances it all.
Broadway, famously, is not in California, but Chu is. He works as Head of Lighting Design at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film, and Television while designing for Broadway and everywhere. “Zoom has really helped me be in two places at once,” he notes. “But I have had to turn down design jobs because of my UCLA commitment.”
Teaching a post-grad lighting class is a hefty responsibility. “I have to look into the future of a fast-changing industry. We teach console programming, lighting for live game shows, and on-camera lighting for film and TV,” says Chu. He laughs at the memory of swatch books with color numbers and plastic fixture templates compared to constantly updating drafting software, 3D visualization tools, and the explosion of social media video. “We teach students to prepare for something that does not exist yet.”
A Thirty-Year Career
A quick survey of his impressive 30-year resume gives new meaning to the word bi-coastal. A career in regional and Off-Broadway productions led to his first Broadway production and Tony nomination for Camelot in 2023. Chu was previously honored with the 2018 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Lighting Design as well as a Lucille Lortel Award for Best Lighting, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Angstrom Award for Career Achievement in Lighting Design, an Ovation Award for lighting (Los Angeles), multiple Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards, and a Drammy (Portland) for Best Lighting.
Born in Boston to Chinese parents, a theater career was never on the cards. “My parents moved me to Hong Kong after I was born, and the expectation was for me to be a doctor or lawyer—English was my second language.” That all changed in high school when he started reading plays and shifted his major from chemistry to theater arts. As a teenager, seeing Andrew Bridge’s lighting for Phantom of The Opera was the turning point. He adds, “When I started out, I picked up the technical side of theater very quickly – because of the language, the literary side came more slowly.”
The ETC Influence
Chu fondly remembers the thrill of first seeing the ETC Microvision console as an undergraduate; “Compared to the consoles that came before, it looked so cool with that stone-age wheel and funky color—and it had the friendly programming syntax we still use today.” He then goes on to list sequentially every ETC console from Expression via Obsession to the current Eos Apex he just used on Uncle Vanya. “To be honest, I don’t know the exact console model we used on Suffs, I only know that, in the hands of my programmer Alyssa Eilbott we wrote a lot of cues quickly.”
Asked about LED fixtures, Chu points to the introduction of the Source Four LED Series 2 with the Lustr array as a milestone. “That was when we all believed that LED could work in theater. Now the Series 3 works so perfectly, we no longer have to make comparisons.” Chu has also been relying heavily on ETC moving lights for his two current Broadway shows. He used 21 Halcyon Gold fixtures for the backbone of Uncle Vanya at the Lincoln Center.
He is equally thrilled by the console upgrades he has requested and received. “I love the latest features where selected channels behave like one – I used it for sweeps on Suffs.” He describes pixel mapping as his “midlife learning curve” and has been getting hands on ETC training. He is especially impressed by “ETC’s willingness to listen and make the changes I suggest.”
Programming It All
Drawn to the collaborative nature of theater, Chu forms close bonds with his console programmers. For Suffs, he and programmer Alyssa Eilbott relied on what Chu calls their “coded language” to program the cue-heavy musical. “I can make fairly vague suggestions for a cue and Alyssa just knows how my mind works and creates it in the console.”
Console programmers have manual dexterity, people skills, mind reading capability, a tolerance for late nights in darkened rooms, and endless patience. Add to that a deep knowledge of the Eos family consoles, and you have a picture of Suffs programmer, Alyssa Eilbott. She confirms the “secret code” that is the symbiotic relationship with designers.
“Part of my job can sometimes be to turn the phrase ‘can you do that thing with the moving lights we did before’ into a fully programmed cue,” Eilbott says. By contrast, she describes other times when designers describe in detail how they want a cue created. “You are a collaborator on the designer’s team and part of the skill is interpreting what is asked of you and hopefully making it appear on stage.”
Eilbott’s roots with ETC extend back to her college years when, as a rising junior at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, she interned as a technician in control, network, and R&D. In her senior year she took her college classes by Zoom from ETC Madison. “I had to cover all the secret ETC stuff with cloths,” she laughs. After graduation she worked as a sales intern in the ETC New York office where she became a certified Eos trainer, despite her short show resume. Her big break came with the touring show Come from Away in 2018 and has since worked on all the North American versions.
Suffs is her second collaboration with Chu. “We hit it off from the beginning—our first show was small, and we developed our working pattern,” Eilbott shares. “Lap is fond of groups that have subgroups which he uses to create color gradients. More than most designers, part of his prep process is to create these subgroups, which becomes a pillar of how we communicate with each other. That allows him to make dramatic sweeping gestures from downstage to upstage in both color and intensity, and Eos handles that very well.”
The show used a wide variety of fixtures, but they all referenced ETC’s Source Four LED Series 2 with the Lustr array as their benchmark for color. In pre-production, Eilbott was tasked with matching all the colors in various moving lights to the color values of the Lustr x7 LED array. Especially important since there were more than 100 Source Fours on the show. “PRG were helpful finding that number of Source Four LED Series 2 fixtures for me,” Chu shares.
With a lot of hanging sets and drapes, space for lighting positions was at a premium. “Because of the proximity of the set pieces almost every fixture needed a shutter.” The lighting had to convey the strength of these women as well as how separated from each other they all were. The Lustrs and moving lights work together to create tightly shuttered areas, reflecting the separateness of characters in the script.
Asked about his use of color Chu says, “I use a lot of color and I also like very clean lines – for instance I’m not a big fan of pink, but I use it in Suffs, as it is appropriate for some intimate scenes.”
Lighting designers fall into two distinct groups. There are the “techie” ones who can call out the specs of every fixture and console, and the “artsy” ones who create colored pictures with light. Lap Chi Chu manages to be both. After all, you don’t get to be Professor of Lighting design at UCLA without strong technical chops, and you don’t get a Tony nomination without being an outstanding designer.
Further information from ETC: etcconnect.com
Read more about Lap Chi Chu’s lighting designs for Suffs and Uncle Vanya in the June 2024 PLSN.
