When the production staff at San Diego Opera opened the containers from the rental house — the ones that were supposed to contain the Michael Yeargan-designed set for their production of Aida — they could hardly believe what they saw. They saw nothing. The containers were empty. Their one-week production schedule did not allow for setbacks, nor could they replicate the set in their own scene shop. The automated, winch-driven scenery with its steeply raked floor had to exist somewhere, but finding it could take hours, or even days.
In the meantime, lighting designer Chris Rynne had to focus the 200-plus lights on schedule, whether or not he could stand on the raked floor to do so.
“We had emergency meetings,” recalls Rynne. “We said, ‘What if we made up some kind of set and use it for production?’ I thought, ‘I have a lot of lights up there. I’ll make it work.’ But I couldn’t put off the focus. So here I am, focusing a bunch of side lights, and I’m walking offstage about eight feet and focusing as if I had a raked stage several feet higher.”
The storage facility found the set in fairly short order, stored in containers that had been repainted and numbered incorrectly, but by the time it arrived, Rynne had finished his focus. “Luckily, I’m good at geometry,” he says. “We didn’t have to refocus a single light.”
Working on the fly with rented sets can be a typical scenario in lighting an opera, a performance medium in which specific productions become iconic and sets, directors, and casts circulate from one company to another. While some opera companies have the budgets to mount their own productions with newly designed scenery and lighting, audiences often expect to see classic interpretations of the most famous operas — so many opera companies work to give their patrons what they want: popular works with all of the lavish pomp that people associate with grand opera.
“You see a lot of collaboration between opera companies,” says Rynne. “For example, I’ve worked with the [David] Hockney Turandot set several times. The set was originally built in the 1980s, but it’s still in use to this day.”
The challenge, says Rynne, comes in doing justice to the original production through the lighting design, the one visual element that may be fresh and new.
Directors often develop a specialty in bringing specific operas to the stage, making these their bread-and-butter productions and moving from one company to another throughout their careers. These differ from touring productions that travel intact — an opera director may direct the same show on the same set at a number of different theatres, but with a different cast and chorus at each venue. In some cases, a director will mount the first production in an ideal setting and then send his or her assistant to additional venues to remount the opera exactly the way the director intended.
For lighting designers, this can mean that a director arrives with very specific ideas that may or may not be possible at each new opera house, depending on the venue’s size, equipment inventory, and the way the scenery fits on the stage. “You may be working with the original director, or one several times removed. The scenic designer doesn’t come with the set, so you do a lot of investigative forensic work,” Rynne says. “We try to stay true in a lot of ways to what the original designers meant to do.”
So how does an LD bring his own artistry to such a situation? “If it’s been done before, I don’t just copy what others did,” says Rynne. “I look for photos and drawings to see where the tricks are, what the different lighting positions are, and where I can add to that.”
For Wisconsin’s Madison Opera, for example, Rynne worked on a production of The Flying Dutchman with director Michael Scarola and studied photos and ground plans of the existing set to understand how the director would stage the production. “We don’t have that history of developing the set, so it’s a challenge,” Rynne says. “I’ve been able to play with some really neat set pieces in opera, but the capabilities of the venue affect what the set pieces can do.”
Lighting Without the Cast
Madison Opera produces three operas each season as well as Opera In The Park, a highlights show in an outdoor setting. According to production manager Ken Ferencek, the production schedule can be very aggressive. “It starts Saturday — we come in at 8 a.m. and hang the overhead electrics,” he says. “The electricians take lunch at 1 p.m., and then the carpenters come in and take over the stage while the electricians work front of house. Our goal is to spike mark the various scenes and props with the director on Sunday morning so that we can begin focusing that afternoon. We try to get the director, LD and stage manager out at the design table to begin cueing by Monday afternoon.”
With three different LDs coming through Madison every season, Ferencek — who serves as LD for Madison Ballet and has a long string of television lighting gigs to his credit — sees how each designer works within this fast turnaround. “What I’ve noticed is that a lot of them do very precise area lighting on the stage,” he says. “They’ll put down a center mark and they will have maybe seven areas along the downstage edge, and they add areas as they move upstage. The focus is very exact. Each area will get a front light, two side lights and a warm and cool back light. In a sense each light is a special, giving the LD very good control and the ability to brighten the action on stage wherever the director’s staging takes it. “
The downside to this approach, Ferencek notes, is that LDs need to stay neutral with their front and sidelight colors. “So LDs will often add some gobo washes on the set, and other find ways to bring in color,” he says. “Of course, the sets and costumes are often very colorful to begin with.”
It may sound basic for such a vibrant and dramatic medium, but in Ferencek’s experience, this method has worked well for Madison Opera productions.
“Opera LDs are very well prepared when they begin cueing,” he says. “All big scenic transitions and accompanying lighting changes are thought through in advance and are solid, keeping the director on schedule and comfortable during cueing. The great thing about cueing opera is that the lighting rides on top of beautiful music and dramatic and emotional action. It’s good to have the big cues in mind and then insert the other cues. You’re better off to have 50 good cues than 200 half-assed cues. If you don’t have the big stuff figured out in your head, you’re looking down at your paperwork instead of at the stage. That’s always a mistake.”
Rynne has found this method to be effective as well. “I’ve had as few as one rehearsal with the cast,” he says. “It’s big, fast, chunky stuff — but a lot of the traditional stand-and-sing operas, they can be in environments where they don’t need a lot of heavy cueing. In the end you might have 80 cues. I’m not going to try and write 500 cues for an opera that doesn’t need them, even if it has a lot of fantasy elements — there’s no point if I know that I will only get through writing half the show by the time it opens.”
Long before he became a designer, Rynne often served as a supernumerary in operas, standing onstage in a non-singing role in the chorus. “I always was fascinated with the scale of the world in opera and how complete the sets felt,” he says. “You feel so immersed in these grand worlds. When I started doing lighting as a professional, the big thing was HMIs. I could take an HMI and shove it through a window or a grate, and with one big light, I put a big idea onstage. With a lot of theatre, you take a bunch of lights and put them together to create a lighting idea. In opera, you can blast the whole stage with one light and have this awesome idea taken care of.”
The Conservatory Approach
It may seem that only the most established big-city opera companies have the luxury of designing their own productions from scratch, but there’s another realm that enjoys this privilege: opera conservatories.
For Nic Minetor, 28-year resident lighting designer for Eastman Opera at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, every production starts with a clean sheet of paper and a new concept. U. S. News and World Report and USCollegeRanking.org have rated Eastman the number one music college in the United States, and the school’s approach to the performance experience plays a significant role in achieving this notice.
Eastman Opera mounts three or four productions each year, using original scenic and lighting designs and building its own scenery. This format gives the department the flexibility to select productions based on the voices of the students enrolled in the conservatory that year, including a range of operas that make Eastman students’ repertoires unique — and readily employable — in the professional world. Students graduate with performance credits in operas like the Allen Ginsberg/Phillip Glass work Hydrogen Jukebox, Lee Hoiby’s This is the Rill Speaking, Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul, and Handel’s Xerxes, as well as widely known and popular operas like Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Puccini’s La Boheme or Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. “This also means there’s a lot of interesting design work for us,” says Minetor.
Even when Figaro — an opera particularly well suited for young voices — comes up on the schedule for the fifth time in Minetor’s career, Eastman opera chair and director Steven Daigle and assistant professor Stephen Carr usually take a new approach rather than renting a set. “Steve [Daigle] and I have done more than 40 shows together, and I’ve worked with Stephen [Carr] since he was a student here,” says Minetor. “Generally, if we’re doing a show again, they want to do something new. We produce operas in three different venues, and I have a rep plot for each venue based on nine acting areas — I have basic tools that I always use. But every production has something new as well.”
Minetor finds the drama of opera particularly appealing, even in comparison to theatre productions he designs for the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. “Opera tends to be larger than life,” he says. “You have a full orchestra, and the actors are singing at the top of their lungs. Most of the people involved are musicians who have been honing their craft — their sound — for decades. Even the young singers have been singing since they were small. They are a disciplined group, and they already understand things like arriving at rehearsal on time and being prepared, and practicing their music. They are very focused.”
Opera designers are very aware that the audience comes to enjoy the music, and that the rest of the production must augment the experience appropriately. “It’s a dichotomy — they come for the sound, but we’re in charge of how it looks,” says Minetor. “We designers are a small minority of people who are involved in making these singers look good. They deserve that.”
The singers in each production maintain the same rehearsal schedule they would expect to encounter in a professional setting, so each rehearsal lasts just four hours — as opposed to a theatre production, where the ten-hours-out-of-twelve format is the norm during tech rehearsals. “In tech, I focus with walkers rather than performers, and our tech rehearsals happen outside of the singers’ rehearsal schedule,” says Minetor. “I’ll only get two or three rehearsals to see the lights with the singers onstage. By the time I’m in the theatre with them, there’s a full orchestra, and I can’t ask the entire cast and orchestra to stop while I adjust a cue. So we take notes and move on, and do all of our notes outside of rehearsal.”
When Minetor designs for professional companies including the Finger Lakes Opera in upstate New York, the orchestra works on a union schedule. “If I stop the rehearsal and then we run over, it could end up costing the company overtime for all those musicians,” he says. “I can’t do that if I want to get hired again.”
Between production realities and budget considerations, lighting designers still have the opportunity to enhance the opera’s drama — and the result can be spectacular, says Minetor. “It’s all about emotion, and I have plenty of tools to express the emotion the director and the singers want to portray. I don’t care if it’s a classic or a new piece — I’m interested in doing all of it. Why do I like doing opera? Because it’s so big.”
Stephanie Cameron is a freelance writer based in upstate New York.
