It seems like the concept of the original musical, and particularly one that is not self-reflexive, has been harder to find on Broadway lately, especially in an era where movies are being turned into musicals and old movies are being turned into musicals then back into movies again. Frankly, the trend is tired, which is why Billy Elliot: the Musical stands out.
It’s not the kind of show you’d think you would enjoy, yet you do. Many moviegoers know about the tale of a young boy born into a mining family who wants to dance his heart out but battles familial constraints, societal attitudes towards straight male dancers, and has to deal with a bitter clash between miners and cops. Now Broadway fans are being engaged by the story.
Lighting it Old School
The success of the show on stage is undoubtedly aided by the fact that the lead we saw, Kiril Kulish, can really dance. And the cast put their heart and soul into an energetic and occasionally complexly choreographed show, particularly one sequence involving a musical showdown between ballet students, miners, and police officers. The man who designed the lighting for the show, West End and Broadway veteran Rick Fisher — who studied at Dickinson College, lives in the U.K., and has worked on plays, musicals, and operas for 30 years — tackled a show with set pieces that roll on to the stage from the wings and a two-story bedroom set that rises from beneath the stage.
While Billy Elliot is a show that relies heavily on technology, Fisher has taken an old school approach. “In the lighting world I think a lot of people have gotten used to very active lighting, that if there’s not something happening on every other beat of the music you’re not doing your job,” says Fisher. “I don’t think Billy is that kind of show. It’s much more of an old-fashioned story or book musical, and we tried to keep that predominant in our design concept of the show, that it has technology that is supporting all of this stuff that’s moving, and there is an entirely automated lighting rig over stage. There are only half a dozen fixed, pre-focused flights on flying bars and another ten lights that are literally scraped down the back wall [fixed on ladders]. Other than that, everything is automated, but you very rarely see a light move. You rarely see a light just come up in one place and be one thing and then morph into something else. Hopefully, when it does that, it does that more for an emotional reason than to mark a beat with music.”
One of the standout moments of Billy Elliot is the “Angry Dance” at the end of act one, which symbolizes Billy’s anger towards his life and the swelling tension between his coal mining family and friends and the local authorities. “It engages the audience in a way by using their imagination,” says Fisher. “It largely happens on an empty stage. What scenery there is goes away at that point, and we conjure up Billy’s mind and his angst and his anger and the environment that he’s in by just moving the performers around with very, very little support other than good choreography, good storytelling, and hopefully, some good lighting.”
Grit and Realism
The set design for Billy Elliot created obstacles for Fisher in the way that set pieces moved on and off the stage at different intervals during the show do. “Like a lot of my colleagues I was very fond of sidelights, and trying to be able to pick people out from the scenery in a way that could light them rather brightly but keep the overall feeling that we were in a gritty, realistic world,” states Fisher. “So when I first saw the set design, I was aware that there were these walls in the way for an awful lot of the show. But I also knew that there would be times when the walls would go away and we wanted to have a much more traditional dance look about the show — some of the dance numbers for the finale, for the dream sequence, and indeed for ‘Solidarity,’ where the walls just sashay off at various points.”
For Fisher, the big challenge was figuring out how to deliver traditional dance lighting, normally done on booms, on a set in which the walls were in the way. The solution was creating “flying lighting ladders on either side, which in London are a little more visible than they are in New York,” he says. “We’ve been able to mask them a bit more successfully. They do an awful lot of work, particularly in the empty stage numbers, by giving us a traditional dance stage, which is great because it delivers a good, quality sidelight. There would be no room for lighting booms because the scenery is literally packed into that theatre.” The lighting designer credits scenic designer Ian MacNeil with a set that looks big but does not tower over the child leads onstage.
Cherry Picking
In choosing the lights for Billy Elliot, Fisher says he cherry-picked the most suitable units from major suppliers that offered plenty of quiet, which was an even greater concern than their performance. Given that this is a book show with children talking onstage, he did not want white noise interfering with their performance. He also gives credit to Victoria Smerdon, “a brilliant programmer who did everything” and was his right hand person both in New York and London. On the latter show, changes were coming fast and furious. “The old adage that musicals aren’t written they’re rewritten was very true,” Fisher recalls of the West End experience.
The main workhorses for the NYC show are Vari*Lite VL3500Q Spots, of which they have approximately 17 over the stage. “We do some live framing of different moments, and they can do that beautifully,” Fisher says. “For washes we have some VL 3000Q Wash lights, but probably only six overstage. I like everything to be doubled up with a tungsten source as well. Again, it’s a gritty, old-fashioned look. Most of the lighting on people is tungsten, so we have 50 Source Four Revolutions by ETC, which I like to use as refocusable lights. They’re all over the place, including on the lighting ladders when they come down so they become the shin lights, and when the ladders are up in the air they can shoot over the walls of the room to give us some high sidelight.” For the New York show, Fisher brought in Martin MAC TW1 Tungsten Wash lights for what used to be done with PAR cans in London. “We don’t move them a huge amount but we can get them to shape those different scenes a bit better. That’s been an improvement.”
The New York production uses numerous VL1000s, which replaced the MAC 600 wash lights used in the London and Australia productions. While the MAC 600 wash lights were considered “good old workhorses” for arc wash lighting, they are not being made any more and are “not matching up as well as they used to. Some of them start to whine because they’re old, just like some of our relatives, so we replaced them mostly with a few MAC 700s over stage and some VL1000 Arcs that we use on the lighting ladders. Being able to use the shutters to create wash light that is shaped to the funny angles of the set is really useful.”
The entire production of Billy Elliot in NYC is being run on one console. “I am a great believer that there is no reason to split up conventionals and movers, so we’re using an Avolites 500 series console to control the whole show,” explains Fisher. “We’ve only ever done that. There are over 140 moving lights on it and all the conventional stuff. It also triggers smoke guns and pops the toast. It does everything it needs to do. It is sad that these consoles are not being made anymore.”
Embracing the Light
Fisher says that the big challenge on this show was making a gritty looking story also feel like a musical. It does not have a glamorous setting or glamorous costumes to light. “They’re all wearing real clothes 75 to 90 percent of the time, but you want it to feel like a big show and particularly for a few of the musical numbers to have the support that you want a big musical number to have with lighting. So you’re trying to make it feel like it’s a play where it just so happens to be about a boy who dances.”
That grittiness was amplified by the “Angry Dance” sequence in which Billy runs into a line of riot police waving batons and highly reflective plastic shields. While such props would be a nightmare for some other lighting designers, Fisher embraced them. “We ended up enjoying the riot reflectivity, so we consciously banged light into those shields to ripple around the auditorium,” he reveals, adding that the production did have the usual problems of any big show, mainly finding space to put the lights. “There are probably more speakers on that show than there are lights, and that’s not usually the case.”
Despite the fact that Fisher has tackled Billy Elliot with aplomb, he admits that he is not that experienced in terms of big productions. Indeed, this is one of the two largest shows he has ever worked on; the other being the 1999 Disney production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in Germany, which never came to America. But it did offer him the opportunity to see whether he could work on that scale.
“It had huge challenges, and it was an early version of trying to do huge, projected scenery,” Fisher recalls. “In terms of state of the technology, it would make a projection designer laugh now because it is already so obsolete, but that by far was the largest project I’ve done.”
Telling the Story
Fisher likes to use technology to augment and enhance a show rather than dominate it. He says he has been lucky to usually be offered the kind of work that “is not about having the light sing and dance. It’s trying to sing and dance along with the performers; allowing the performer to go somewhere that they can’t normally go, but it’s not about in-your-face sort of stuff. What I love doing in the theatre is telling stories, and I like to work on projects where there is a good story to be told. A lot of the shows nowadays are not so much about telling stories but delighting the eye of the audience that already knows the story because they know the movie and the songs. They come in whistling the songs as opposed to going out whistling the songs.”
When asked what advice he would give an up and coming lighting designer, Fisher offers a practical response that underlies his philosophy about his work. “I think the most important thing is to try and do everything and find out what kind of performance you like because it really helps to like the show you’re lighting,” he replies. “Then you don’t mind watching it over [and over] again and refining your language to support what you’re doing. That’s where you get subtler and better, and sometimes you have to be quite self-effacing in this business. It’s not about seeing the lighting; it’s about seeing the show.”
