Those stepping into the Marquis Theatre on Broadway to see the current revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies are immediately consumed by a theatre draped in tattered gray tarps that extend into the sides of the venue and above the stage. Sounds of wind moaning in the background waft out of the speakers, conjuring a ghostly atmosphere. These elements help to set the stage, so to speak, for a set spotlighting a dilapidated theater where members of an old follies group meet for one last time to reunite and reminisce before the structure will be torn down.
Dark and Spooky
Within this dark and spooky environment, a multigenerational cast of characters — former dancers, their spouses and friends — revisit the past, examine their present and ponder their future. Many of the characters are haunted by regrets and are coming to terms with the choices they have made in life. Two main couples (Bernadette Peters and Danny Burstein, Jan Maxwell and Ron Raines) must also cope with unrequited love between two of them, which opens up a Pandora’s box of emotions. Intense in its introspection, Follies seems like the kind of show that one can get more out of it every time they see it, especially as one gets older.
“There’s something very interesting about that piece when it comes to that, and I only realized it by working on it,” says Tony Award-winning lighting designer Natasha Katz. “There are so many different age groups within the piece that we all relate to something that’s going on in our lives at the time, from our past to our future. I found this kind of fascinating: the younger actors were talking about how, as they watched the older actors rehearse and listened to the piece, they thought to themselves, ‘Who am I going to be when I grow up? Will I have a dance studio down in Florida? Am I going to be Bernadette Peters? Am I going to be Ron Raines, having gone into soap operas?’ They are seeing their future ahead of them and wondering which person they are going to end up being. That’s fascinating to me.”
The lighting design for Follies is dark and atmospheric, which reflects the emotional world of the central characters, and the lights only pop for the gaudy “Loveland” sequence of production numbers, each tying in with the protagonists’ personal follies, which arrives in the second act. Katz went into the project without the desire to imitate the original production, which she never actually saw. But she did see the last Broadway revival 10 years ago and lit a version of it in her 20s at the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera.
Layered Hauntings
“I never saw the original, but I’ve read plenty of books about Follies,” she states. “There’s plenty to read about the show, know about the show and listen to people in the theater about the show, so it is haunted with its own ghosts. It is also haunted by what is considered to be one of the greatest designs ever by all three of those designers, [scenic designer] Boris Aronson, [costume designer] Florence Klotz and [lighting designer] Tharon Musser. Everybody’s breath stops when they start talking about it. I’m sure it was beautiful. I’ve seen a lot of pictures of it.” But the LD did not feel intimidated by the original production and its 40-year legacy. “This was our version and our way of dealing with it.”
Katz says that scenic designer Derek McLane created a set for the show that is “almost a blank piece of paper” that allowed her to play with different lighting ideas based on the different temporal viewpoints within the story — moments in the present, moments where characters are in the present thinking about the past and moments occurring in the past. Scenes in the past have a “cyan feeling” to them, while the present moments have a dreary feeling emphasized by pure white light. Thus when an earlier version of a character appears on stage with the present, they are separated by color. And the ghosts of follies girls wandering the stage throughout are “usually in a broken up light” from gobos in “templates of a cool blue.”
According to Katz, there was no specific edict from director Eric Schaeffer about the lighting design. As often happens on any show, “the vocabulary is found once you’re in the theater,” she explains. “We did a lot of talking about what the piece meant, what it meant to the director and what he was trying to convey. That all informs what you end up doing. On top of it all, there are physical limitations for a lighting designer about where lights come from. They can only do certain things. You have to work the vocabulary, in a way, around the physical production.”
The biggest visual contrast in Follies comes during the five numbers for individual characters that occur during the “Loveland” sequence in Act Two, in which brightly-lit song and dance numbers representing different personal dilemmas take place in front of a vaudeville-like set piece. Even though this part of the show is brighter and more dramatic, it still presented its own challenges.
“We started at the Kennedy Center about six months ago,” recalls Katz. “I think that one thing in the first part of the piece before ‘Loveland’ is that, in my mind and in the director’s mind, we always thought that there would be shadows, that there would be the shadows which metaphorically equal the past, equal ghosts, equal regret, equal what’s not spoken. I guess you could say that equals atmospheric.”
Light and Shadow
The LD admits that she never really thought about the word “atmospheric” for the production before, but she always thought of it as having light and shadow, “and ghosts coming in and out of the shadows, peering into your consciousness for a minute and then disappearing. You might use the word chiaroscuro for all of that. It definitely was an idea from the very beginning. It’s all a challenge because ‘Loveland’ takes place in the exact same set for all five of those different numbers — except the one piece that flies in with the bulbs on it — and for me, each of those moments needed to look different because each was trying to convey something different.”
“One thing about ‘Loveland’ was that it flies inside of this box, so it’s very hard to get light in between the portals, in between each piece of scenery,” continues Katz, “so a lot of light came up out of the floor to light all those roses. We had [Philips Color Kinetics] strip lights in all different colors, and they uplit those arches.” A majority of the lights used for the show were Source Four PAR cans and ellipsoidals, with some moving lights, specifically Vari*Lite VL3000 washes and Martin MAC 2000s, which were used “to get an edge and a contemporary feel.”
Side Slits
The biggest challenge for Katz was the fact that the set is a box, “which meant that the lights had to be trimmed way high out, about 35 feet. It’s hard to sculpt people that way. Eventually Derek built slits into the side of the stage so that I could get some side light in. That’s imperceptible to the audience. It’s not supposed to look like a broken wall. It’s supposed to look like a wall, but there are lights in the slits so I could do that lighting.”
Katz is very proud of the production, which has garnered plenty of critical acclaim and which gave her freedom to try something new. “I don’t even know if I have ever worked on a musical where we were able to really use white light in the way that we were able to use it because it’s almost like a play,” she says. “You could almost say it’s a play with music.”
