Brian MacDevitt Lights Three Distinct Worlds
Fresh from the minds of South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone and Avenue Q composer/lyricist Robert Lopez, Book of Mormon is the hottest ticket on Broadway right now, and with good reason. The profane-yet-profound send-up of religious faith is ripe with hilarious humor as a naive Mormon elder seeks to get sent on a mission to Orlando, FL but ends up in Uganda, Africa — with a socially awkward and annoying peer.Once there, the troubled twosome have to find ways to convert the local villagers to their faith. But what kind of inspiration can they offer when most of the people have AIDS and a nearby warlord seeks to genitally mutilate all of the women? The shenanigans that follow are over-the-top, controversial and, ultimately, endearing in a way that only the South Park guys could deliver.
“Pure Heaven”
For five-time Tony Award-winning lighting designer Brian MacDevitt — whose diverse credits include Sweet Charity, A Behanding in Spokane and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown — being a part of Book of Mormon was “pure heaven.” He worked on the original off-Broadway and Broadway productions of Urinetown: The Musical, and at that point, it was the funniest show he had ever worked on. He thought it was great but that he would never be able to find a show like it again, because it possessed so much integrity and humor. Then Mormon happened.
“Now I’m thinking, how is anybody ever going to top this?” muses MacDevitt. “I’m a huge fan of Trey and Matt’s work, and there is something about their work where something can be so silly and sophomoric but still be deep and profound. [The movie] Team America was so outrageously funny. I feel that some of the stuff they do is really honest, because there’s no thought process that goes into what people are going to think about it. It’s really fresh and really brave. It was amazing to work with those guys.”
Parker actually surprised MacDevitt with his extensive knowledge of, and passion for, Broadway musicals. When they were working on the “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream” number, Parker asked the LD if he had seen the 1989 revival of Meet Me In St. Louis. “I was kind of shocked to hear that from somebody who I think is really cool,” confesses MacDevitt. “When my students here [at the University of Maryland] learned that I was doing the show with them, they freaked out, because those guys are iconoclastic, cool creators.”
At Home on Broadway
MacDevitt contends that he will be the first one to complain if a show’s creators do not want to try something new or stray from decades-old Broadway conventions. And while scenic design work usually helps dictate what direction the lighting can go in, the reality was that Parker and Stone’s story — and their grounding in musical theater, along with co-director/choreographer Casey Nicholaw — screamed for it to be conventional.
“This was a show that really embraced Broadway history,” says MacDevitt. “That was a great thing, because it really is a typical wing and drop show, where there are the same wings in every scene.” Indeed, the old-fashioned flat scenery pieces for the three main sets — Salt Like City, Hell and Uganda, Africa — were tightly packed within six inches of each other. However, MacDevitt stresses that, scenically, the show “is more modern and clever than that, because Scott [Pask] does some really cool perspective ideas in Salt Lake City.” An added challenge is that this musical was loaded into a regular playhouse, which has less space than a typical musical playhouse.
Utah, Africa, Hell
The contrasts in the story locations were the biggest part of the storytelling for MacDevitt. “The beginning of the play takes place in Salt Lake City, and I wanted that to be really fresh and bright and a perfect world, where there’s blue sky and shadowless light,” he explains. “My image for it was, if you were in a really brightly lit fluorescent space that had a little bit of pink gel on the fluorescent tubes, because everybody is really pretty and fresh. I think it’s successful when there’s a scene change, and the iris opens back up, and we’re in Africa, where it just looks nasty and overcast and shadowy. The sun isn’t really out, and it just has an oppressive feel to it. I feel like that was successful storytelling that I could participate in. Africa doesn’t change until the baptism scene; then it gets beautiful and the sky gets bluer. There’s more direct light, and it feels like it’s living in a filmmaker’s golden time; low sidelight and a beautiful dusk sunset look. In the opening [African] scene, you wouldn’t think anything could grow there except maybe a few weeds, and Scott’s set looks like if you bumped into it, you would need a tetanus shot. It’s a really rusty, nasty looking place.”
That said, the African set has more dimension to it than the Salt Lake City scenes (including an impressive airport set) that did not have dimension and could only take on front light. And purposefully so. There are also changes in the look and feeling of Uganda by the second act of Mormon. “By the baptism scene it is more verdant and fruitful. I tone things with a little more green light, and it’s the first time we see vegetation, because the reeds and cattails come out and make it look like a marshy place.”
Spotlit Pedestals
A further contrast comes from the opening scene, in which various Mormon elders stand on their own pedestals and deliver speeches to prospective converts. They are each bathed in their own individual spotlights, which MacDevitt points out is totally theatrical. “It’s that something that wouldn’t exist in the film world,” he observes. “You’d see these guys standing on real doorsteps [in a movie]. One of the things I love about the theater is that the sound of the doorbell tells you what the door looks like. They’re all different doorbells and different places, plus those kids speaking [different languages] — you start to picture who is opening the door. That’s so theatrical, just the pool of light and a person in a white shirt. I feel like that’s so satisfying, because the audience gets to take part in telling the story, rather than us delivering everything to them.”
Red on Red
The visual antithesis of Salt Lake City, of course, is Hell, which appears during the hilarious Act Two number, “Spooky Mormon Hell Dream,” which includes Satan, Jesus, Hitler, Genghis Khan, Jeffrey Dahmer and Johnnie Cochran. It was hard to get things to pop visually during that dazzling and frenetic dance number, because of all of the red on red. “It was probably the toughest in terms of color and space,” admits MacDevitt. “It’s the kind of scenery you don’t want to sidelight, because it literally is flat. It already is wrinkled, so you have to wash the wrinkles out of it. But then you try to carve the people out within it and find a color that pops them out without making them too bright, to stay in the world without shattering the world. That was a tricky place to live. Technically, I probably spent the most time on ‘Spooky Mormon Hell Dream.’”
But Hell was not the only location full of lively dance numbers. The spacious African set encouraged them. “Big numbers have to happen, and ‘Hasa Diga Eebowai’ is a full-on stage number,” says MacDevitt. “One of the beautiful things with what Casey did is that he wasn’t trying to do Fela dancing or Afrobeat or trying to bring something new to it. He was embracing the fact that this is a Broadway show with Broadway dancing, and the same thing with ‘Spooky Mormon Hell Dream.’ It’s Broadway doing what Broadway does best, which is big numbers, including a large kick line later on in that number.”
MacDevitt lit the show with 250 conventional lamps, 60 moving lights and two consoles, with a grandMA console for the movers and an ETC Ion for the conventionals. “I’m a fan of Vari-Lites for people and MACs for scenery, so for side light I used VL3500s,” he says. “From the balcony rail and from some ladders for the scenery, I used the MACs, because they’re the only moving lights that can do moving clouds and do those kind of effects successfully, like the effects of leaping flames in ‘Hell Dream.’”
Lean and Mean
Overall, he declares, “It’s a pretty lean and mean light package, certainly by Broadway spectacle standards. The other thing that was kind of amazing is that we did it with two followspots, and it feels like three, because of the brilliance of the spot guys. It’s great for getting it on the road, because one of the big tasks there is how to get the package smaller.”
MacDevitt admits that the biggest challenge in working on Book of Mormon was to keep pushing ahead during previews and not ride the large crest of energy coming from the initial preview audiences. “During those first previews, when we hit the finish line, we were exhausted, but it wasn’t nearly the finish line,” says the LD. “During the first performance, all of a sudden the place was erupting, and you knew that you were in the midst of something really special. The hardest part was to take a deep breath, put your head down, and keep working and make it the best you possibly could. Producer Scott Rudin was a big part of that because he said, ‘This is all great, but there’s a lot of work to be done, right?’ It was like saying, ‘Okay, take a breath, get back to work.’ It’s always like that. When you put a musical up, there’s a flurry of how much stuff you have to get done before that first performance, and then you’re exhausted but have to keep going. It’s like hitting a wall in the marathon, but you’re only halfway there.”
