Lighting designer and theatrical consultant Richard Pilbrow has seen it all. Today he has 50 years in the business under his belt — not quite all the way back to the age of gas lights, perhaps — but a different world from today’s automated lights and LEDs.
He wrote the seminal book Stage Lighting, which has been in print for nearly 40 years. He worked with Sir Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre in London. He is also a video designer and a theatrical consultant who has worked on the construction of buildings like the New Amsterdam Theater for Disney on 42nd Street, the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
Speaking to Pilbrow about his career and the evolution of theatrical lighting, one appreciates just how far we have come. While the upcoming show Mary Stuart may have a 20-minute rainstorm onstage, it is not the first time that has happened, but it will benefit from heated water and safer technology. The designer recalls doing the first production of Singin’ in the Rain in London at the Palladium. “God, that was a mess,” he quips. “We all got very wet. Water and electricity is a very bad mix.”
Pilbrow’s theatre career began with studies at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in the 1950s, where he had “the great good fortune to go straight from school into a West End run,” he recalls. A two-year gig as the assistant stage manager on Teahouse of the August Moon led to another gig on No Time for Sergeants. Although as a child he aspired to be a stage manager and director, he found that lighting design held more promise because he could face new challenges regularly rather than repeat certain shows over and over. So he founded Theater Projects in the late 1950s as a budget lighting rental company, and then landed a couple of successful gigs that established him as a lighting designer.
Working with scenic designer Tony Walton on One Over The Eight in 1960 led their producer to ask them to repeat their performance, and he convinced them to do a show with projection, about which Pilbrow was very enthusiastic. The show went over well, and Walton, based in Manhattan with his then-wife Julie Andrews, brought the young lighting designer across the Atlantic to meet legendary Broadway producer Hal Prince and do the projection for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way on the Forum. It became a big success.
“That was my first ever time in America and on Broadway, and two things came of that,” explains Pilbrow. “One was that I did more Broadway shows, first as a projection designer, then as a lighting designer, and at the same time, Hal invited me to be his partner in London producing his shows. So the three of us together produced A Funny Thing… in London, which was a big, big hit that ran a couple of years, and then for years we did most of Hal’s shows in London, the main one being Fiddler On The Roof, which was an enormous hit that ran for five years. So I found myself a lighting designer in London and New York and a producer in London. I did about 30 shows in my career as a producer over the years; many with Hal and quite a lot of other shows as well.”
In 1963, Pilbrow went on to work with Sir Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre on shows like Othello and The Three Sisters and was also appointed its theatre consultant. By then, Theater Projects had begun consulting, expanding internationally into places like Hong Kong, Nigeria, Iceland and the Middle East. While Pilbrow lit shows in his spare time, theatre consulting became his focus, and his company branched out into sound design as well as visual, video, and support services for the theatre.
By the early 1980s his company began consulting with theatres in North America, beginning with the Performing Arts Center in Portland, Ore. Finding himself spending most of the year in the States, he relocated his wife and daughter here, and Theater Projects Consultants, as his company then became known, evolved into “probably the biggest theatre consultant in the country.”
Pilbrow takes his job as a theatrical consultant very seriously, aware of how it differs from his work on stage productions. “When you get into theatre buildings it's a very different process,” he says. “Theatre productions will often [last for] two months, while theatre buildings will stand for a hundred years. It's a whole different level of responsibility. In each situation, you try to do whatever is best for the situation and for the people and community you’re working for. What do they really need, and how can you help? What could you add to this situation? One thing feeds another. That's why I’ve been lucky in doing all of these different things. From being a producer, I learned how to save money and make money, so now when we do a regional theatre, you’re thinking not only about the technical stuff and artistic stuff, but also the financial stuff. Everything has to balance.”
In consulting, Pilbrow and his company work with the community, such as in Orlando, Fla., where a new $400 million performing arts center is being built. TPC is employed by the city but works with the architect. “It's our responsibility to make sure the building is the best it possibly can be as a theatre,” he says, “so we represent the theatre — the artists, technicians, and administrators — and try to translate the needs of the theatre into architectural and engineering terms. It's a teamwork thing.”
TPC employs approximately 50 people, half of them in the U.S. and half in the U.K. The company has a mix of people — including production managers, engineers, and architects — who work together. “We’re constantly working with the architect, trying to make them realize what actors need and what technicians need and try to help the building develop so it's one people like to work in,” says Pilbrow. “The architects want them to be great buildings; we want them to be great theatres. Those two things don't always come together easily. And that’s from every point of view — the ushers, the restrooms, the dressing rooms, the security, sidelines, seating, lighting, sound — all that stuff.”
When asked about technology and innovations that have occurred over the last 50 years in the theatre world, Pilbrow replies, “It’s mind-blowing. The first show I ever did I actually had water dimmers, which were pipes with water in them that made the lights go up and down. I love it all. Doing A Tale of Two Cities in 2008 was a great experience because I was able to use all sorts of state-of-the-art gear.”
He specifically loved the Vari*Lite VL3500s, which he deems extraordinary. “They're very powerful and incredibly accurate, so you can put a sliver of light wherever you want it, anywhere on stage, in any shape,” he says. “I also used a prototype of what I think will be the lighting control system of the future, some software that a friend of mine has developed with the Strand Light Palette, and that allows you work incredibly quickly and to control a lot of resources very, very speedily. So apart from the excitement of doing the show — it’s always wonderful to work with Tony [Walton], and we both had a great time on the show with a lovely company — I had the opportunity to try a lot of this new technology. I'm a technical nut in my spare time. I've always enjoyed that.”
Beyond the VL3500s, Pilbrow has some other favorite lights and accessories. He loves ETC Source Fours because they are “the brilliantly versatile workhorse;” digital light curtains because they create “a wall of light wherever you want it, in any color;” and his original favorite, 24V 500W Reiche & Vogel Beamlights — “A shaft of sunlight on stage, a mini-searchlight. I've never found another beam light with equally powerful beam characteristics.”
Always the forward thinker, Pilbrow is also pleased with other lighting innovations that have cropped up. “Memory control is astonishing, if you remember what it was like when you didn't have it, and I do,” he says, adding that he also likes the development of automated lights. “Between those two, lighting is very different. You used to have to climb up a ladder and move lots of huge, old handles. In the old days you seldom got the lighting the same two nights running because even the good lighting operators could make mistakes. Nowadays, computers generally don't make mistakes, and you tend to get back what you put in. If you have lit it competently it tends to repeat itself every night, which is always a relief for an old man like me.”
When it comes to advances in video, he believes that huge scale video projections are an enormous step forward for the use of projection. “A limitation that has always vexed the projected image was lack of brightness,” Pilbrow says. “High-power video is just great. A word of caution, however; in the theatre, the challenge remains achieving the correct balance between projection and performer. Brightness is one element. Lighting the performer in balance and harmony with the projected image is another. Overall is the issue of scale. Too often the size of the projected image diminishes the scale of the human performer.”
Despite those words of caution, the veteran designer and consultant does not see the use of hi-tech gear on shows as intrusive if they are serving the story and the director. “Essentially lighting and sound and all technology is about telling the story to the audience, and provided that you keep that as your goal I think it's a wonderful thing,” believes Pilbrow. “It's made theatre much richer than it used to be.”
With all the roles Pilbrow has assumed behind the scenes, mastering both the art and science of stage lighting, stage design and for the design of the building itself, Pilbrow can be called, without hyperbole, a Renaissance man. While not disputing the label, Pilbrow replies, in typically modest fashion, “Well, I've been busy.”
