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Transforming Broadway theatres into exotic locations is not a new concept; however it is rarely done to the extent found at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, which has been converted into the tropical jungle home to Disney’s latest Broadway effort, Tarzan. Within this relatively small Broadway theatre, the untouched jungles of southern Africa come to life every night to tell the story of a boy left without his parents, taken in by a tribe of apes and raised as one of their own. To illustrate this classic tale, the production has utilized an extensive array of rigging and flying equipment to literally make the actors fly off the stage and in and out of the set with total grace. With the set designed by Bob Crowley, the production turned to Natasha Katz to light the show and capture the visual essence of this jungle adventure.
The set for the show is a unique departure for a typical Broadway musical. It consists of a back wall and two sidewalls which never move, but are covered with a number of holes draped with multicolored green vines. This not only gives the illusion of depth behind the vines, but also allows the actors to have seemingly countless entry points onto the stage. Since so much of the flying intersects with the set, all of the walls and alcoves are covered with as much as three feet of inflatable material to provide for softer impacts should the actors hit the scenery.
This extensive scenic layout created somewhat of a difficulty in terms of placing lighting equipment into usable positions. Katz explains, “We had a sidelight position in one, and we had one upstage just downstage of the back wall. What happens otherwise, because of the flying, the lights couldn’t be at a low trim because all the flying lines would hit the electrics which would be dangerous. So all of the electrics have the ability to have different trims. Whenever there is anything flying, most of the electrics are out at their high trim of 45 feet, which makes it hard to hit the actors with anything except backlight. On top of the side walls we have a permanent lighting position which is about 26-28 feet, which can add light from the sides and the back and that was really helpful.”
The show evolved from simple ideas to what it is today over a long and extensive process. Katz says. “The set designer, Bob Crowley, had been working on the show for maybe three years before they did it on Broadway. It started as an arena show, then it became theatre in the round, then they were going to do it off-Broadway. It went through so many incarnations. Then they did a flying workshop down in Buenos Aires with Pichón Baldinu, and they learned a lot down there. That’s when they decided to put it in the Richard Rodgers. The Richard Rodgers is not very deep at all, and was picked because of the sightlines. From most of the seats you can see the flying, which wouldn’t be true in most Broadway houses. Bob wanted it to feel like an enclosed rainforest and I think that’s where the box idea came from. To make it a place where no human had ever been, where light has a hard time getting into.”
In order to get the most out of the surrounding jungle walls, Katz used a huge array of LED fixtures to highlight the space around and within the walls. “Behind all the green vines in the set are inflatable mats which are there to protect the actors from dangerous scenic elements while flying. But they were light translucent, which is what allowed the set to have a certain glow, which then allowed us to have a backdrop that then means I can carve actors out. The genesis of all these issues is that it was to be set in a box, but these are the ways we collaborated to make the box a viable theatrical set. We have hundreds of Color Kinetics Color Blast strip lights, which are about two inches away from the inflatable padding surrounding the set, because they’re LEDs and they don’t give off that much heat. They are all on about nine-inch centers, so the back wall is practically covered with Color Blasts, making it essentially like a light box.”
Another noticeable issue within the acting space on-stage is that the entire set, including the floor and surrounding space is all green—not unusual for a jungle, but when trying to light a Broadway show in what looks more like a “green screen” movie set than your average musical, it gets a bit more complicated. Katz explains her new outlook, “I realized that green is the new white, which is to say that when you pick your neutral color in a show—off of which you base all of your colors—I had to really base it all on green from a color point of view, lighting-wise. So what you’d expect to see in terms of color mixing never happens on the green. Color theory is color theory, but it was a lot of re-learning and re-teaching myself all sorts of things. For instance, a warm backlight may look warm on the person but when it hits the floor it looks lavender or whatever color it ends up looking, but nothing certainly that you would expect it to. So the whole color palette is completely shifted from what I am used to. Everything mixed differently than I expected, which all became a learning process eventually. There are all types of greens and blues and shades of more red in the blue, more green in the blue and that kind of thing.”
One of the most powerful tools used in this show was the Vari*Lite VL 3000 series fixtures, both 3000s and 3500s, with custom gobos. During several of the show’s major numbers, the VLs are used not only as lights but as extremely effective static image projectors. Katz goes on to say, “Bob Crowley and his associate did all the artwork for the gobo images of life in England and they hit it pretty well the first time, avoiding having to remake any of the many detailed custom lithos. Using the 3000s, if the image needs to be smaller or larger, we know we can just use the zoom and keep the image clarity. They are really impressive fixtures. We did tests at the shop between video versus Pani projectors versus the 3000s; we looked at all of it. We decided on the 3000s as they feel more human than a digital projector.”
In a crucial moment in the opening sequence, a scrim on stage is painted with a ship on the high seas. With the rocking of the pipe holding the scrim, it gives the illusion that the ship is actually moving as it would on the ocean—brilliantly done with classic theatrical techniques. As the house lights go down, the ship is damaged and sinks, and the scrim flies away, revealing the family suspended in air, as though they are floating in the sea. When they escape to the surface, the perspective shifts so that the audience is looking down on the beach from above. This of course is Tarzan’s family, who then builds a shelter in a tree-top fort only to be attacked by a deadly leopard before a tribe of apes takes in the abandoned baby boy. This sequence, designed to give the audience the history and background on Tarzan’s origins, had no dialogue but tells an extremely powerful visual story within a very short period of time. Katz explains, “The opening was really part of Bob’s plan for years; it was always in his head about that shipwreck. We had it locked in from the day we started teching to the day we opened. Bob wasn’t really interested in a digital or video projection technique. He was more interested in the humanity of it all, and looking at it from a humane point of view, which is why it is all scrim and tactile and light as opposed to LEDs and video.”
As for dealing with the flying aspect of the show, Katz describes it as a very giving relationship. “Lighting was definitely on the other side of the railroad tracks when it came time to cue the show. The flying came first, so we were never in their way, as soon as someone was flying, the electrics would fly out to their high trim. After working the scene we would bring in an electric or two if we felt we could do it safely. We knew this would be a lengthy and complicated process before even going into the theatre, so I really think attitude is everything. We knew what to expect and we all worked together to get it done. The flying team had to figure out the flying first, which is almost like dry teching, and then we would light it. The hard part was that the actors have to stay in a position, and you can’t have them stop in mid-swing. The trick was to have a starting point and an end point for the actor and write the cues around that.”
Tarzan’s high flying antics as well as its beautiful imagery will no doubt amaze countless numbers of fans coming to see the gravity-defying stagecraft used to bring this jungle tale to life.
