Spontaneous Creations
Unlike most film-to-stage transfers, the Oscar-winning film Once was a cult hit rather than a blockbuster and tells the tale of a Czech immigrant who encourages an Irish busker to maintain his artistic dreams and to collaborate with her. The story is a musical romance that offers the feeling of music spontaneously being created, and the stage production is really a play with songs sprinkled throughout, allowing us to realistically get into the heads of the characters. The Broadway production of Once shines with an outstanding lead actress (Cristin Milioti as Girl, who deserves a Tony nod) and an ensemble cast of 12 that acts, sings and plays their instruments.
“I went to the first reading and found it extraordinary, and there was a feeling in that reading of us all being in an Irish pub, that it was going to be a fun-filled experience, and that alone is different than the movie,” explains Katz. “In terms of the look of the show, from the lighting point of view, I think parts of Dublin affected it. I think it’s the piece itself, the sets, the director and the emotional content that actually affected the lighting of the show. I wouldn’t say that I related it at all to the movie.”
A Subtle Balance
In lighting this production, Katz brought a subtle balance to it. She worked on all three incarnations of Once, from its trial run at the American Repertory Theater in Boston to its New York Theatre Workshop run in downtown Manhattan to its current Broadway home. Her choices were decidely old-school to emphasize a sense of warmth and intimacy on stage that was mirrored, no pun intended, by scenic designer Bob Crowley’s pub set, which is decorated by numerous mirrors and which wraps around the stage. The wide central mirror that hangs behind the bar is helpful to the audience, allowing alternate views on the characters and specifically allowing us to watch the Girl play the piano, which faces away from the audience.
“Isn’t that awfully good what Bob Crowley did?” muses Katz. “I find it extraordinary, and I find some new layer to that show every time I look at it. It has to do with those mirrors because, depending upon where your eye is looking, I think you wouldn’t be able to see her play the piano unless there were mirrors around. Otherwise you’d be looking at the back of the piano all night long. Then there are other moments where you can catch their faces in the mirror when their backs are to us. I find it absolutely amazing.”
An obvious and immediate concern with the set was the potential reflectivity of the mirrors on the stage. Katz reports that Crowley designed the set so that each mirror was movable if any light was hitting it, and that all of the mirrors are on an angle and pointed down. Any mirror that became an issue was either adjusted or dulled down with paint.
“The only thing that ended up being a problem was, at certain points, I wanted to use footlights, and you can’t, because they reflect into the mirror,” states Katz. “Not only do they reflect into the mirror, but the light then reflects into the audience’s eyes. We have that heater at the beginning of the show, and we had initially put lights underneath it to light Steve [Kazee, who plays the Guy] at the top of the show, and you could see the lights underneath the heater, so it broke the illusion. We wanted it to look like the light was coming from the heater, but there was no way to do that without seeing the source of the light because of that big mirror in the back. You probably can’t see it if you were sitting pretty close because of the slope of the Jacobs Theatre, but in the whole first act there is a heater downstage left.”
Static Tungstens
Given that the stage is a full surround, there was no way to get low sidelight in, so the lights overhead function as sculpting lights to the actors. The light mostly comes from the upper sides and from the back. Katz also had to keep light off of the performers that were sitting on chairs in darkness at the edges of the stage as they awaited their next cue. “There are no moving lights on the show. All the lights are tungsten. They all have a nice, warm quality on people’s faces. They’re what we’re used to seeing when we’re in our own homes, and it did mean a lot to me to use lights that had an earthy tone to them and felt Dublin, if that makes any sense.”
Many of the lighting cues are straightforward and offer a certain sense of intimacy, and Katz concurs that they are extremely specific. “When we’re full stage, there are different colors of warm and cool,” she notes, “and whenever we are outside, we light the walls of the theater. Each time we go into those rooms, in order to give an interior feeling, each room is defined by a square of light on the floor. That was definitely conscious, just to make you feel like you were somewhere else. Because he [Guy] has such a small room, it gives you some sense that the space has changed, that he’s living in this confined world.”
Consistent Colors
The biggest challenge facing Katz on Once was defining the vocabulary of the show. Since the show went through three productions, it had a chance to grow. “We did it up in Boston with about five lights at the ART in their black box space, and I think the vocabulary started there, certainly in terms of the earthiness of the piece and the color,” says Katz. “When we went downtown [in NYC], I had a few more lights, and that’s when the vocabulary really started to grow, which had to do with interior, exterior and the coloration of all of it, and the emotional content and the music. In a way, there are not a lot of lights used. Normally in a musical, in the middle of a song, if there is a key change or an emotional change in the song, I might change the lighting, but we let each song live for itself. There are no changes in the lights during a song, which is very antithetical to how musicals are usually lit, or certainly the way I light them.”
The most visually striking scene in Once occurs when the Guy and Girl leave the recording studio to look out over Dublin from an elevated point. The actors exit through the back of the set, then walk up a hidden set of stairs upstage and stand above the bar set, with the wall behind them bathed in a lush blue generated by LED strip lights that surround the back wall and the side walls of the theater. Another nice touch are small lights in the floor designed by Crowley to make it look like the characters are looking over the city of Dublin.
A Sense of Humanity
Ultimately, Once is one of those rare shows where all the right talent came together to create a magical, memorable show. Katz declares that it is one of her favorite projects ever and was a joy to work on. She remarks that she got along well with director John Tiffany, movement choreographer Steven Hoggett and scenic designer Bob Crowley, and that they all “just worked beautifully together. We were all on the same page from the first day.” She believes that people working on the show were at the top of their game and that Crowley picked a very simple setting that offered poignant moments.
“The one thing I would like to say about the show is that there’s tremendous humanity to the lighting,” Katz says. “It is a part of each of those characters, and they are each a part of the lighting. What I mean by that is that it’s not moving a lot and doesn’t have all the current lighting equipment on it. It has lighting equipment that has been used for hundreds of years. I think that adds a kind of quality to it that I guess you would call humanity — I don’t really know, you could call it all sorts of things, emotion, grittiness — but I’m very pleased with the way all that worked out.”
