Veteran lighting designer Peter Kaczorowski certainly had many challenges to deal with in designing for this colorful production, and he relished them. With most of the action taking place on the main boat set, creating variety was important, particularly keeping people brighter than the very white and omnipresent set. He embraced the idea that the boat was another aspect of a 3D cyclorama and treated it as such.
“I treated it with a lot of color, tried to make it a color and the people in front of it different so that they had architecture, depth and edges on them,” explains Kaczorowski. “After awhile, a white boat with lots of people in white costumes can get hard, so there’s a lot of wattage up there, no question about that.” With the boat being static and a lot of room up in the flies, he was able to hang many lights, a majority of them conventional Source Fours, particularly very narrow spot PAR cans and numerous Lekos. (He rounded out the number of conventional fixtures at 1,000. Moving lights include a few Vari*Lite VL3500s and Martin MAC 2000 Performances, MAC 2000 Profiles and MAC 2000 Wash fixtures.)
“I made a lot of systems that were about getting people lit away from the boat — lots of backlight systems, lots of strong, powerful, beamy types of backlights to really get people away from the boat and make it seem like beautiful, crystalline, sunny days on a boat crossing,” recalls the LD.
A Changeable Sky
A critical aspect of the high-energy production was that it takes place “in musical theater time.” At the start of the story, the boat departs at 10 a.m., but after the cast sings their first big number, the purser announces the last seating for a 9:30 p.m. supper. Kaczorowski had to open the boat reveal with a beautiful sunny morning, and within the last minute and fifteen seconds of that song, he had to create a sunset look for the show-stopping number “You’re The Top” — bear in mind that the sun sets officially around 10 PM in many European countries during summertime — followed by a moonlit scene.
“I embraced the idea of times changing all the time,” says Kaczorowski. “In the middle of a number, like the duration of ‘You’re The Top,’ the sky changes constantly. There is the cueing that happens for the two people on the forestage, but there are also multiple parts to the cue, some of those parts devoted simply to moving the sky along in time so that the whole number feels transitional; not so much on the people but in the surround and the sky and suggesting that we’re heading toward the end of the day. So the transition to the moonlight thing was logical, pleasing and a natural resolution of what I had going in the previous number.”
The Omnipresent Boat
Another pivotal sequence occurs near the top of Act Two. Sutton Foster and the cast perform “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” in a sexy nightclub environment, with some set pieces obscuring the boat and a starry backdrop to cover the ever-present white RP, although it was still hard “because it had to stay saturated. It couldn’t get too naturally bright like a lot of the exteriors on the boat are. It had to remain incandescent feeling, sexy, nightclub-y and saturated. That’s a little difficult to do in front of the remnants of the white boat. Plus, the number is a Gospel revival number” with many big builds to respond to.
Some scenes, like those in the brig and in the apartment of Lord Evelyn Oakley, took place in smaller, more controlled environments. “That was the perfect example of the boat as a living, dimensional cyclorama, because there were no people up on the boat during the stateroom scenes,” he states. “I could really just color it over and not have it be in any way washed out by other area light that I had to deal with. The first two staterooms scenes continue the moonlight [look], so the boat can remain quite saturated and dark blue, and Evelyn’s stateroom is a day-ish time scene. Again, I could deal with lighting the inside quite specifically, because it is a small amount of space, but then the boat got quite an unvarnished afternoon feeling to it. The boat was never not part of the look. It’s a big, white boat that is always going to be there, so it wasn’t like I could decide not to put anything on it. It always had to be dealt with.”
The smaller set pieces gave the LD room to plant some smaller lights. “The brig has a little jelly jar worklight in it, and the staterooms all have sconces and sidetable lights. That was all done with RF dimming. There were no cables in the deck; at least no electric cables. So there were sconces and table lights in everybody’s staterooms and the brig had one little worklight. All RF.” And the larger bar scene at the top of the show allowed him to create a moodier set piece that contrasted dramatically with the brightly-lit boat reveal.
Wing Lighting and Backdrops
During production, Kaczorowski worked closely with scenic designer Derek McLane to address any concerns that affected the lighting design. There were two major ones, the first being wing lights.
“We did have to deal with a very deep In One, and then the boat begins,” says Kaczorowski, “so we had to make sure that I had a good way to have wing lights in that first 10 or 12 feet of flat floor, because that’s where everyone is going to do long, involved tap dance numbers with a bright, sunny blue sky, so we had to have wing lights. Derek started off with a portal system that closed off the wings In One and Two down left and down right, so I immediately knew that I had to have some lights in there. We had to work out how to figure out those spaces so that staterooms could come on and off, and In One and Two could be a traffic pattern for both scenery and people and still allow some light, still achieve masking and still have it look like the boat. We worked hard together on that subject to make sure that everybody’s interests were protected there.”
Another major concern was the backdrop. Would it be an RP or a drop? Would it be a painted piece? Kaczorowski felt that if it were to be painted that the static image would offer no variety, so he felt that it would be better to have an RP and that he would create everything himself. “Every element on that — every color band, every color wash, every cloud or moon or whatever — is produced by light. It’s an absolutely blank, white RP screen, and one of the biggest difficulties was that the Stephen Sondheim Theatre has sort of a garage upstage where it a recesses a little bit further back; but it’s low, there’s a ceiling. So I could put a lot of gear back there that was 10 to 12 feet lens to projection surface, but at about midway up the smokestacks there’s a big architectural wall there, and at that point the RP is about a foot and a half away from the back wall of the theater. I had to sort out how to get into that very narrow place to keep that architectural shadow from appearing, to keep that upper half of the sky looking lively and to keep things interesting as far up as the eye could see, even though there was a serious architectural light blocker going on. That was tricky. If you really walk back there and see what’s there and see how close that RP is to that back wall, I think it’s a fairly impressive resolution to it because [out front] it feels like it’s as high as you can see.”
Convincing Cloudscapes
Because of the issues with the RP and the back wall, Kaczorowski learned that he can front-project on an RP more successfully than he had previously. He says he has done it in the past “gently and carefully,” but often the visual result was akin to lighting a garbage bag. Because of the architectural problem he faced, he had to tackle this problem head on for Anything Goes.
“I had loads of realistic, high definition cloudscapes going on as far as I could get to them from the back, but then I had to feather that up further from the front. I was nervous that that was just going to look kind of crappy, but I think possibly because of how white the boat is and how much light there is on stage generally and how some of that light bounces off the boat up onto the RP anyway, I added some of that same high definition cloudscape stuff to the front of the RP screen. I thought it was actually quite convincing.”
Another important lighting element were the LED surfaces placed in the portholes to change colors throughout the show. “The ones on the doors were a specially made up arrangement of LEDs by Dave Rosenfeld and Hudson Scenic,” explains Kaczorowski. “They were taken care of beautifully with a very specifically made LED arrangement, but the portholes on the portals, on the side things, were going to be expensive to do the same solution for every single portal porthole. On the doors there were 12 or 14 of them. Because doors opened and had to be perfectly low profile and you could not see the gear of the mechanism, it was all very thin and beautifully sealed and put together to look like a thick door, yet those portals lit up. On the side, we basically built a giant lightbox onto the back of those things and did it low-key. This was Steve Beers’ idea — we built a big lightbox and stuck in those Color Kinetics color blasts fixtures… We basically made a bounce box, a big white thing on the inside. We put two of those fixtures, one high and one low, and banged them onto the back of this box so that the light in the portal collected the luminescence of that bounce.”
A Team Effort
Making Anything Goes a success required a team effort, and Kaczorowski offers praise to his associate designer Paul Toben and to his assistant Jenna Scherr. “They’re two terrific young people who were a fabulous team. They’re kind, invested, committed, pleasant and professional. Josh Weitzman, who is the house electrician at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, is a longtime colleague and friend who has programmed all of the moving lights for all of the musicals I’ve done, starting with Steel Pier and The Producers. Any big musical that I’ve done on Broadway, Josh has programmed the moving lights for. It turns out that he is also the house electrician at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, so he was both production electrician and moving light programmer on this show. He was pretty busy, but he has a great staff that all move around to keep him covered. And [thanks also to] Steve Beers for the terrific lightbox idea and for being the best tech in town.”
Gear
Automated Lighting
24 Martin Mac 2000 Performance (1200W) fixtures
14 Martin Mac 2000 Profile (1200W) fixtures
19 Martin Mac 2000 Wash (1200W) fixtures
6 Vari*Lite VL3500 Spot (1200W) fixtures
Color Scrollers, Effects and LEDs:
44 Wybron Coloram II 4”
95 Wybron Coloram II 7.5”
60 Color Kinetics Colorblast 12 TR
6 GAM S4X with DMX Loop Tray
3 Look Solutions Viper NT Fog Machine
1 Bowens Fan w/ DMX Control
Dimming & Power
1 ETC Sensor 96×2.4kW Touring Rack
Conventional Lighting
21 ETC Source Four 5° (750W)
3 ETC Source Four 10° (750W)
18 ETC Source Four 14° (750W)
75 ETC Source Four 19° (750W)
1 ETC Source Four 19° EDLT (750W)
17 ETC Source Four 36° (750W)
41 ETC Source Four 50° (750W)
27 ETC Source Four PAR VNSP (750W)
20 ETC Source Four PAR NSP (750W)
61 ETC Source Four PAR MFL (750W)
90 ETC Source Four PAR WFL (750W)
2 8’ 4-Circuit MR-16 Ministrips
5 6’3” 3-Circuit MR-16 Ministrips
3 Lycian 1293 followspot (3000W)
1 Spare Ballast for Lycian 1293
