Director Alex Timbers seems to have a penchant for period timepieces gone askew. He displayed this trait while directing previous productions such as Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson as well as the Tony Award-winning Peter Pan prequel, Peter Pan and the Starcatchers. He continues down this road with his latest production, the remake of the 1975 musical The Robber Bridegroom, an 18th century Southern romp inspired by a short story by Eudora Welty.
His latest musical has the off-kilter humor one has come to expect from a Timbers production along with a spirited cast, lively bluegrass score and ingenious integration of lighting into the barn set. Yes, this is a hootenanny put on in a barn, albeit one in 1700s Mississippi. It takes us into the world of Jamie Lockhart — gentleman by day, polite bandit by night, who steals with style and steals women’s virtue. But when he becomes smitten by a wealthy plantation owner’s daughter, his world view is challenged.
A Low (and Twisted) Grid
LDs Jeff Croiter and Jake DeGroot, who have worked with Timbers, together and individually prior to this project, joined forces once more to create an intriguing light plot that offered many possibilities for this rollicking production. Although the show takes place at a time when such technology did not exist, it manages to work seamlessly within the show itself. The grid, tilted at a 45° angle above the stage, injects the bric-a-brac and taxidermy found onstage within the packed lighting scheme. It is both visually striking and very functional. The wood set, which includes everything from lanterns to knives to mirrors as part of its decor, is certainly the kind of immersive environment that scenic designer Donyale Werle specializes in.
“The grid was totally constructed for the show,” says DeGroot. “Like many theaters, it’s an empty box over the stage when we walk in there, but the grid was a big part of the visual concept for the show from the beginning. Alex wanted to make the scale of the people in the space, feel really dominant. He didn’t want them to feel lost in this huge space but rather like they were exploding off the stage. One of the strategies to do that was to really compress everything around them so the whole show felt like it was bubbling over with energy that was pushing into the house and couldn’t be contained.”
A big way to achieve that goal was to have the grid hang low. DeGroot points out that the grid is actually at two angles, even if it is hard to notice. Beyond the fact that the grid slants down going upstage, the stage left side is slightly higher than the stage right side. “It all feels a little bit squeezed together and a little bit askew,” he observes. “That’s definitely something that I think resonates with Donyale a lot and makes the thing feel a little bit more natural and impromptu, like it was thrown together in this barn environment.”
As the duo was looking for different kinds of textures and a mix of surfaces to showcase, the grid helped them achieve that balance. “It kind of puts a top on the set instead of putting a ceiling, which didn’t seem right,” notes Croiter. “It also stops your eye and makes it a little jagged. It did not come easy in that space. It was not without a lot of difficult work by a lot of people. It was definitely not part of that theater, and it was a feat to get in there.”
Visible Fixtures
The plot includes 150 lights in the visible scenic grid and approximately 80 more above the grid lighting down through and around it, including Source Fours, Source Four Pars, Par 64s, 3 1/2 inch Lekos, mini strips, LED strips, Vari*Lite VL1000s, Martin MAC TW1s, MAC Auras hidden up in the grid, and 6-inch Fresnels. DeGroot says that, given the fact that lights are so readily visible to the audience, people might think there are many more used than in a typical off-Broadway musical, which is not the case here.
DeGroot believes that having the lights in a crowded grid makes it look more exciting, and it took a lot of time to determine how to “cobble it all together,” he says. “While the show is not by any means strict to a period, there is a sense of period in the show, and you didn’t want the grid to betray that by being full of LEDs or high-tech moving lights that would pull you out of any sense of hominess and any sense of authenticity. So while there are some moving lights buried in the grid, they are a little bit hidden and a little bit understated as opposed to many other shows.”
“The kind of moving lights that were chosen to go over stage had the lensing in the front where it looks like it could be a regular kind of light,” adds Croiter. “If you were to look up in the grid, you wouldn’t be able to tell where the moving lights are unless you saw them moving.”
There are some lights upstage behind the wood walls that also help flesh out scenes in a different way. Six large skypan lights that are used in television have been placed at the bottom half of the wall in two rows of three, and they are implemented early in the first act of the show for the song, “Steal With Style.”
DeGroot feels that that tune is about as rock ‘n’ roll as the show gets “when we get to meet the character of Jamie Lockhart in the woods, and we see his darker side, and he explains to the audience how he operates,” he explains. “We wanted to really use that song as an opportunity to expose a little bit of the harsher side of the show, the more edgy side of the show. Those skypans have this great warm glow to them, but also a rock ‘n’ roll edginess that is perfect for the show and that song.”
Croiter states that Timbers fell in love with the look of the skypans when he used them for a performance sequence in his Amazon television series, Mozart in the Jungle. Since then, he has been trying to find a way to use them in a theatrical production. He finally got his wish.
Above the skypans sits a row of a dozen lamps in a single R40 striplight that is mounted to the back wall of the set and “pointed downstage as a graphical gesture,” says DeGroot. “Similar to the skypans, it also has a warm, incandescent look. We knew all along we were going to want striplights built into the set to help add even more visual complexity and the sense that this group of storytellers had rigged up these lights themselves in the space. At one point we even had a moment when an actor would grab one of them and swing it around like a followspot, though that moment didn’t make it out of previews.”
Above the R40 striplight sits seven conventional Source Four Pars with color scrollers, which provide a strong backlight and one that is really low. The reason for this is that the angle of the grid rakes down as it goes upstage while the deck is raked up, thus the difference in height between the top of the deck and the bottom of the grid is minimal.
“We had to cheat the focus a little lower than we might otherwise do, so we would not totally blind the audience,” reveals
DeGroot. “It became this great graphical gesture that really treats the floor and treats the people and allows us to do lots of fun bouncing around with the music and setting color tone for different songs. It’s a great tool to giving us a nice lift going into a musical number and helps make it a little more theatrical.”
Part of the Overall Look
“The grid, and these lights in particular, also become more of a scenic background or as much a scenic background as they are a lighting background,” notes Croiter. “There’s light coming out of the front of them and they light the actors and the floor, but they also light up. It’s important what color they are, because the audience actually sees the front of the light, and that becomes as much a scenic background as a piece of scenery.”
A nice added layer to the scenic design beyond the bric-a-brac and taxidermy are the many different types of lighting fixtures found onstage. There are lamps on the wall, on some of the posts, two chandeliers with light bulbs, and a third sculptural chandelier hanging over the band comprised of several lighting components that include light bulbs in mason jars. DeGroot says that there are 60 mason jars hung all around the theatre with City Theatrical Candle Lites in them. The LDs put many fixtures in many different places, and DeGroot says that the inclusion of different practical sources was definitely something the creative team was interested in from the beginning.
“As Jeff was saying earlier, it adds layers of texture to the set that Donyale’s created, so any time we could find a place to add another sconce or another practical, we were all going for it,” notes DeGroot. “We have LED Christmas lights above the grid to create stars for a few moments in the show. There are a bunch of different surfaces upstage that we’re lighting. All that gives us different directions to go and create a very versatile world for what is a 90-minute show. We create many different locations and many different vibes using these different layers of practical fixtures. It’s something that evolves during the process. We would go into the space and say, ‘Look at that corner over there, that would be a cool place to stick a light.’ ‘Hey, if you put up a big prop over here, we’ll find some new ways to light it.’ It was a back-and-forth for the few weeks that we were in the theater.”
Beyond the lights and lanterns used in the show, some theatrical instruments are hanging in the grid merely as props, and some of them (specifically a few six-inch Fresnels downstage near the audience) are not even plugged in. “Some of them just turn on to be background,” says Croiter. ”I know people throw this word around a lot, but it was a real collaborative effort between scenic, lighting, props, and the director.”
Another clever lighting choice was placed among the footlights, which include 10 MR-16 Birdies, 7 L&E Micro-Fills, and two six-inch Fresnels at the end. The actors can pick up the Fresnels to underlight their co-stars during the song “Deeper in the Woods,” along with some battery operated hand-held flashlights and small handheld single LED points. The flashlights are also used during “Steal With Style” and “Where Oh Where.”
DeGroot states that it was always important for the cast to be able to control their environment, since they are putting on the musical. Cast members fly the chandelier in and out by lowering or raising the rope it is attached to, and members “can just pick up a light and start using it, because it’s their space, and they need to own it and feel that they inhabit it,” declares DeGroot.
Given all of the lights above, behind, and on the stage, one might not think much about the front light that is employed in the production. “The way that Donyale’s set extends out over the audience definitely creates another set of challenges, because you have these ceiling beams and windows that bring this barn structure out over the house, which is really exciting when you’re sitting in the theater, but it did make front light a lot more complicated,” admits DeGroot. “There is a fair amount of the lighting poking through gaps in the beams as needed, and we have two follow spots out front.”
“A lot of those lights are up in the back because the ceiling lights have to be lower and a little further away, so as an audience member, you might not see them,” says Croiter. “But there’s a good amount of light up there because at the end of the day it is still a comedy and there is light on stage. It’s not a dark show. There’s enough light out front to make it very bright as necessary.”
A Lighting-Savvy Director
While both men designed the show ahead of time, they agreed that DeGroot would write the lighting cues when they got to the theater. Croiter “popped in every once in a while” during tech to see how things were going, but he felt his co-designer had everything under control. As always, working with Timbers was an exciting challenge for the two LDs because “he’s so smart and pays so much attention to detail, especially when it comes to the visual world of the show and the lighting,” says DeGroot.
“He knows what lighting can do,” adds Croiter. “It is so much nicer to work with someone like that than someone who says, ‘You’re the lighting designer, I’m the director, and we’re not going to talk.’ We like to work with people, and Alex is someone who’s special, especially when it comes to lighting.”
“We also work so fast in tech with Alex,” stresses DeGroot. “We were slamming through things, and there are a lot of cues in that show that you just bust them out and keep on refining them. You always keeps drawing on your A-game to push that fast through a complicated musical with so many lights.”
