In this cheeky modern retelling, peppy college cheerleaders (Greeks of a different feather) are frustrated by their constantly-losing basketball team, and decide to not give it up to their athlete/frat boy boyfriends until they win a game and gain some pride and self-respect.
Lighting designer Michael Gottlieb loved working on the show, and not just because he liked the story and found it to be a lot of fun. This was his graduation to being a Broadway lighting designer after years of being an assistant and an associate (as he was on A Tale of Two Cities), and that is a different type of fun.
The Big Chair
“It’s quite different sitting in the big chair,” declares Gottlieb. “For one thing, if you look to your left and look to your right, you realize that you’re the person who’s going to make that decision — so you’re the final arbiter of what the lighting could be or should be or what you’d like it to be, at least — and you have the responsibility of having a team below you, managing them and making sure that they’re all working in the same direction and as efficiently as they can. With so many details, you have to give people a responsibility and let them go off and do it for a while, then revisit it and make sure they’re going in the right direction. It’s not quite the same as being hands-on and doing it all yourself.”
Lysistrata Jones was often bright and perky in terms of its lighting (big musical numbers and basketball-playing), but it was balanced by moodier moments (romance and introspection), and it also had a band in the background looming over the cast. In terms of striking the right visual balance, Gottlieb feels that the show did a lot of the work for him. His first experience with the material was hearing the music on a demo CD, which he listened to repeatedly before getting a script.
“I really thought that the music did its own lighting,” he says. “The dynamics in the music tell you what to do. I couldn’t wait to get started, because it seemed like it was going to be so easy. I wouldn’t necessarily call the show presentational, but as contemporary as it is, it’s still a piece of musical theater, so when you go from a book scene to a song, there’s going to be a heightened reality. Within the vocabulary of the heightened reality, and of knowing that you’re in a musical or seeing a musical, then you have the privilege or right or responsibility to introduce color and pull the mood down or up or go wherever the rest of the company is going.”
Gottlieb says that the presence of the band was deemed to be very important by everyone involved, including acclaimed sound designer Tony Meola, rather than being more anonymous players in the pit. The seven-piece group jams on a platform upstage and above the stage, playing a wide variety of musical styles, everything from pop ballads to rockers.
Silhouetting the Band
When it came to lighting this musical ensemble, Gottlieb says he had a wonderful wall texture to work with. The band plays in front of a wall of white bricks that form the actual back wall of the theater, and the side walls of the gym were designed in the same style for the production. “I knew that I wanted to light that wall, and then I could silhouette the band and silhouette them in any color that would go with whatever else is happening. Immediately, then, you have their presence, without highlighting them. They’re just always there, and, in fact, the lights behind the band are always on, to a greater or lesser extent. They never go out.”
Front-lighting the band is only done a few times throughout the show. Every member of the band has a lighting special, but the entire band is only front lit for the bow. “Other than that, they’re more felt than seen, literally. It’s a very bright stage, and it’s also a very reflective stage, so there is a lot of light that is lighting the actors below that is bouncing up to the band that we embraced. It’s a very reflective environment, so there’s no hiding anything.”
To light Lysistrata Jones, Gottlieb used “your standard ETC Source Four variety of Leko in every angle,” and Source Four PARS and PAR 64s, for conventional lighting. His backlights were predominately Source Four PARS. Then he utilized a complement of moving lights: Martin MAC 2000 Performance Spots from the front, Vari*Lite VL1000 Arcs overhead, Elation Impression 120 RZ LED wash lights (“which were really helpful in toning the floor”) and VL5 Arcs and MAC 700 spots on the side ladders.
“All the walls were lit with LEDs, and then there was this radiant band of color — the LED strip lights that were at the level of the band platform that went around the stage in a U shape,” explains Gottlieb. “We called that the zipper, kind of like a zipper sign in Times Square,” he says, referring to the news ticker display for moving dot-matrix headlines. “I think if you were to look at the stage, it’s a very pronounced statement. It never goes away. It’s an architectural statement of a lighting fixture as well as something that actually does lighting.”
Revealing the Wall
The most dramatic lighting in the show comes with the “Dreamgirls wall” that was used at the end of the Act One and during the dramatic basketball climax of Act Two. “We knew that we are being referential and reverential in our use of that vocabulary. It does take it to a totally different place, and it gets a little more abstract.” The wall was comprised of 490 clip lights with half silver bulbs in them; it ran 40 feet wide and 8 to 9 feet high.
“We talked about how long we would go in the evening before revealing the wall, because once you reveal it, you need to make the wall one-up itself every time you use it,” says Gottlieb. “We went through almost the entire first act without using it at all. It was the right choice. It is revealed briefly and only partially when the women come out in their protest outfits and come on with the signs that show the sex positions with the big Xs through them. The end of Act One is the big reveal when Lysistrata does her ballad (‘Where Am I Now’), and she is downstage and the silhouettes of all these people with whom she cannot connect are revealed. The curtain opens and reveals this wonderful, glowing thing, and the whole space changes. You can feel the heat off the stage. The light wall is not even coming up to full, and it’s a truly different quality of light than we have up until that point. It’s such a wonderful thing to be able to do.”
The LD says that the half silver bulbs were very helpful, because even when the wall was bright, it was somewhat diffuse. “If it’s all lit up, it’s a little easier to look at than if you have one or two points that are glaring you in the face. In the final basketball game, which we call the ‘basketball ballet,’ the gym curtain opens and they’re playing basketball in front of this light wall, so it gets pulled into more of a dream space there. It’s not only a basketball game, it’s the basketball game that defines everything that’s happened so far, and the future of all of these people fighting their own apathy.”
380 Cues
The lights were run on an EOS console with approximately 380 cues. Gottlieb feels that it is easy to write cues these days with the new consoles, especially with a “wonderful programmer” like David Arch. “If someone moves out of their light or even slightly out of their light, you can actually follow them,” states the LD. “If you’ve built a cue that works like that, then you have to set yourself up to follow through and either follow the actors around or change the colors with every mood. It depends on the song.”
He notes that some songs were full of internal cues, and others had a cue at the beginning and a cue at an end. “The pace of that came out of the play and the direction, and not by an arbitrary choice. The song, ‘Don’t Judge a Book By Its Cover,’ has no internal cues, and it works very well. This is a contemporary show, but it is also a real old-fashioned book musical, and it’s a lovely combination of those things, because you know how to react as an audience when you’re confronted by that structure.”
Sculpted Sequences
Lysistrata Jones created challenges for Gottlieb since the show takes place entirely in the gymnasium setting with other places implied, like the hallways and the school quad. The motel scenes benefited from a long couch that slid onto, and a motel sign that dropped down above, the stage. So lighting was key to help sculpt each sequence.
“In this very bright, reflective, shiny, light wood-and-white space, the biggest challenge was drawing focus and pulling your eye to wherever it needed to go,” explains Gottlieb. “Because the floor was so white and shiny, things you would do under normal circumstances in a more absorbent space really needed to be tightened and tightened and tightened.”
As an example, if an actor was standing downstage left, and just the downstage left areas were turned out, he found that he would light up half of the stage “just because of the way the light would spread across the reflective surfaces,” he recalls. “Drawing focus took quite a long time. You get to first preview, and that’s really your first sketch. You’ve gotten through the show once, writing all the cues, and only then do you really start to refine it and carve it away. I would say the process of previews for the large part was turning things off, really paring down and see how little you could use and still have it be acceptably bright, be the right mood and draw your eye in the right direction.
“There are many possibilities of ‘bright’ in our show’s context,” Gottlieb continues. “We invariably used comedic frontlight when acknowledging our gym space, more modeled side-lighting for basketball play and other choreography, and other moments of more focused isolation that might still constitute a high level of light, but with more contrast. Part of the challenge of lighting this show brightly was to keep the composition appropriately focused and bright without letting the envelope of the stage overwhelm the performers. Low sidelight — head highs and shinbusters — was the most helpful tool in carving the people out of the environment.”
Keeping it Simple
What Gottlieb liked about Lysistrata Jones, including the set and the way it was approached, was that, unlike so many shows with lots of automated scenery, this production was very organic. He said that moving uptown after its off-Broadway run, there was a danger that the show could become over-inflated. “The risk would be great, because the show is this scrappy, intimate, fun thing, and I think the more machines you add into it, the farther away you push the audience. For example, I think it’s very difficult to do a show now that doesn’t have a big video background projection somewhere, and I guess our scoreboards qualify as a video element, but there’s no projection per se in the show. It’s nice to not have that. If you believe everything you read in all the trade magazines, it’s impossible to do a show now without projection.”
Yet they did it here. “I think this show benefited from simplicity,” stresses Gottlieb. “It’s a musical comedy. You can paint it however you want, but you start with the script, and that’s what the show is.”
