One of the highlights of this past summer’s New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) was Deep Love, a “ghostly rock opera” that chronicled a romantic quartet between a young woman named Constance, the ghost of her deceased lover (identified as Old Bones), and a young man named Friedrich, who has a dangerously possessive ex-lover named Florence.
The five-show run at NYMF drew a lot of acclaim for its entirely sung-through tragic romantic tale set against the backdrop of a mausoleum and a graveyard. Using minimal set pieces and lighting, music, and costumes to set the mood, the production weaved a tangled web of romantic love, loss, longing, guilt, betrayal, and frustration as Constance, trying to ward off the literal specter of her deceased lover, became entangled with a man whose living betrothed would also not let him go.
Staged Out West
Lighting designer Braden Howard worked on the production before when it was first done at Brigham Young University-Idaho, where co-star/co-writer/co-director Jon Peter Lewis (a recording artist, finalist on American Idol, and subsequent contestant on The Voice) decided to return to college. Howard is the lighting designer and programmer there, and Lewis worked in the sound studio of their audiovisual department. They had collaborated on other shows together before Lewis approached Howard about the original staging of Deep Love, whose co-creators include co-writer/co-composer Ryan J. Hayes (who appeared on The Voice in 2013) and co-writer/co-composer/co-star Garrett Sherwood.
“I helped them out with a couple of smaller concert versions of the show,” says Howard. “They did it twice in two different falls, and they took it on a small tour throughout Utah, Idaho, and Washington.” While he did not work on the tour, Howard did some performances with them in Provo and Salt Lake City, Utah. When the NYMF opportunity ultimately came up, the LD jumped at the chance to work on it.
Unlike shows where Howard has had at least one and a half to two weeks of tech, he was in NYC for all of a week and a half. Luckily, he already knew the show. “I was pretty familiar with the music and the dynamic of the whole thing,” he recalls. “They rehearsed in Pearl Studios for a few days when I first got there. I went through and built my cue list, and then we loaded it in as fast as we could in the venue.”
On the day it opened, the NYMF production of Deep Love loaded in at 8:30 a.m. Howard began writing cues while they loaded in scenic. “We did a cue through at 10:30, the dress at 1, and the show opened at 8:30,” he says. It was the fastest theatrical production he has ever put up, but he is already experienced at his craft. Although still in his 20s, Howard has been doing lighting for 10 years. He first worked for Voyager Productions in Logan, Utah when he was 16, then got his bachelor’s from Utah State University before jumping headlong into his career.
A Minimalist Set
David Goldstein created a simple and effective set for Deep Love, with a mausoleum gate at stage right, behind which the onstage rock band in skeleton masks could be seen performing. Upstage center was a ground row model that showed a cemetery gate, lampposts, and a village backdrop with houses that looked farther away in the distance. A bench was used in many scenes, doubling as a gravestone at one point when set upright.
“My desire for the ground row cutout was trying to create a simple storytelling device that sets us in the world of a Victorian cemetery, while making the visual image unique to our production,” Goldstein tells PLSN. “I wanted to shake up the normal NYMF look and make our show stand out with a different shape and imagery.”
The cemetery backdrop actually had some special lighting to subtly enhance the show. “The lamps for the posts were C9 globes, and the [village house] windows were covered in vellum, but just reflected the light from the cyclorama behind it,” explains Howard. “They were originally lit with mini-Christmas lights, but we cut them. There was a black sharktooth scrim downstage of the ground row and a white muslin cyc behind it.”
The locations for the rest of the show were basically imaginary. “I needed to set location with the lighting basically,” says Howard. “The model and gate never went away, so I needed to establish where we were. There were hard-focused specials on the floor to help designate Constance’s room and Friedrich’s room.”
Lighting Sets the Scenes
Beyond the limited timeframe he had to work on the NYMF show, Howard had “the burden of creating the different areas for the show. There are roughly 15 locations” — including Constance’s room, Friedrich’s room, the graveyard, and various places in and around town. “They didn’t necessarily need to be unique to each other, but they needed to look like a different place. That was a challenge in the short amount of time we had to look at that stage to see how it would turn out. There was just enough detail to give you a context, but not much other than that.”
Howard’s general color palette consisted of red, amber, cyan, purple, and blue. “I used a lot of cyan and teal for the more out-of-reality kinds of places, if that makes sense — so basically, as people get more dead,” he remarks. “I tried to really build on the surrealism. I tried to put in a progression. As much as it’s a rock opera, we started with realism, and as Constance goes crazier, we don’t lose location so much as her state of mind. She gets a little more nuts all the time. Then there’s the [question of], ‘are we inside or outside,’ that sort of thing.”
The ominous character of Old Bones was a tough character to light, given his garish, death-like make-up. Howard admits he did not get to see that actor’s look until the dress rehearsal, and then many little tweaks were made. “Originally, it was much more dark and was going to be a little more skeletal, and they decided it was a little too much, which I tended to agree with,” he recalls. “So it became more light, which was good because we could see his face, but it also picked up a lot of color on stage, and you didn’t want him walking around with a purple face all the time. That was the challenge there.”
The solution? “Except for when he lurked in the shadows, he was front-lit by a follow spot in a head shot,” says Howard. “Many kudos to the spot op that dealt with that.”
Working on the NMYF production at the Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theater, Braden ran seven electrics on what was essentially a rep plot, and they allowed him to make a few changes. The fixture count was around 140. “It was not crazy big, but it was a reasonable rig,” he says. The lights were mainly Source Fours (108 in total) along with 18 Source Four PAR EAs, three Rosco I-Cues, three Rosco Autoiris, six practicals, 10 Altman Ministrips and two City Theatrical Source Four followspot kits. He had 60 Wybron CXI scrollers at his disposal, which made Howard happy, as it been a while since he had worked with some. The lighting console was an ETC Eon, and the stage manager called the cues during the show.
Howard says that the total lighting cues for the 105-minute show clocked in at around 105 total. “I feel like the lighting was dynamic, like you would see in a rock ‘n’ roll show, but it wasn’t flash and trash the whole time,” he says. “There are not really any movers to speak of in a rep plot.”
For Deep Love, the LD tried a different method of writing cues in the scripts beforehand. He prioritized them into three different levels. The top level consisted of cues that were essential to the production. The second level was cues that would benefit the show if they were included. The third level of cues fell into “nice, pretty things that I would like to happen,” he says. “I made sure I set all of my primary cues first. I didn’t necessarily program the show in order. I did three passes and almost got all of my cues. A lot of those third level ones, which are music cues and flashes and buttons, didn’t necessarily happen. I felt like we got a lot of them in there.”
Now that Deep Love has made it to NYC, one wonders if there are plans to take it elsewhere. “It’s been interesting to talk to Jon and the guys since,” reports Howard. “Originally, Jon wanted this show to be as big as The Lion King, where they would have platforms come out of the stage. I think at NYMF he discovered the intimate quality of the show as well. It doesn’t struggle being on a small stage. They are doing a couple of tours in the Northwest and going into a little bit of the Midwest. Last I heard, he is meeting with producers out there to see what direction it takes.”
Howard has enjoyed working on the various productions of Deep Love, and he gives props to its creators. “Most of these guys are coming more from the music industry, so the theater experience is very new to them as far as [how] the process goes,” he says. “I think they’ve done very well.”
This dark show about love and death certainly has plenty of life left in it.
