This is a continuation of the article "Magic Carpet Ride: Part One." The magic of the Broadway musical Disney's Aladdin is woven by scenic designer Bob Crowley, lighting designer Natasha Katz, costume designer Gregg Barnes, sound designer Ken Travis, and illusion designer Jim Steinmeyer.
Like the rest of the production, color from the lighting system plays an integral part in tying the whole production together. “As a lighting designer, it’s interesting because it’s essentially colored vignettes tying together a full story,” says Katz. “It’s almost like animation plates, and each animation plate is its own scene, and then they are all tied together. I think that Bob, Gregg, and I all created a kind of fantasy view of what Agrabah would be like. It does reference the movie a little bit, but the theatrical aspect of it is that there is so much color in this fantasy world. I would say that the lighting absolutely supports that because the lighting is extremely colorful, very bold. The cueing for the show is big, bold color changes. There is very little subtlety in the lighting.”
Katz created a leitmotif for each character. “In this case, each character has been stamped with a color,” Katz explains. “Jasmine has a kind of pinky surround, and when you are in the palace with the sultan, it’s got a cooler surround. Each of the different places has a different look.” In addition to color, Katz used effects to help support the story. “Whenever the Genie is there, the lighting takes on a magical quality,” she says. “That is definitely done through color and through some special effects, like strobes for his arrival and departure.”
Katz describes the source of the palette for Aladdin and how she tied it all together. “The color comes, in many ways, through the scenery, in the sense that the background changes color very often, and the people are lit in a more naturalistic way,” she says. “There was the issue of marrying all of the colors of the costumes together with the color of the scenery too, which is why a lot of the light on the people is essentially naturalistic. It’s the surround that changes color. I didn’t have to worry about changing the color of the costumes. It’s really all of one piece in the sense that the floor is also a color—a kind of a salmon. So, not only does the floor reflect light up on people, it also, when you are up in the balcony, serves as a background for the people up there. In many ways, the cyc for me—I had to work on folding the cyc into the background of the floor and coloring the floor very often.”
Lamp Light
The cyc is fully lit with LED fixtures as well as some moving lights for cloud effects on the cyc. “The cyc is surrounded with lights,” says Katz. “There are two strips on the bottom, one on the top, and a full set on each side. This really gives us good coverage on the cyc. LEDs are a game-changer—a revolution to have LEDs light the cyc, because you can go from one color to another so quickly, and there are so many colors.” The LED striplights are a mix of Philips Color Kinetics ColorBlazes and ColorBlaze TRXs. “I would have used ColorBlaze TRXs everywhere, but only the ColorBlazes would fit in the deck since the TRXs are bigger,” adds Katz.
Katz and her team, including production electrician Jimmy Maloney, associate lighting designer Aaron Spivey, and moving light programmer Sean Beach, had to work around the massive amount of gear at mid-stage that was required to make the flying carpet work magically. “The carpet operates in-three,” she says. “We have an electric that is above the carpet rig. The carpet is able to store off-stage, so the electric is able to come in. At one point, there was a debate about not having the in-three electric, but in a show that is essentially a wing and border show, to not have an electric in one of the bays would have been impossible. It’s a very big musical; there’s a lot of scenery; there are a lot of costumes, so there are plenty of challenges in a Broadway theatre with a small backstage to put a show like that together.”
Katz explains her key equipment choices were necessary for the control they allowed her. “All of the moving lights are Martin Vipers—wash lights and profiles. The wash lights are kind of extraordinary because they have the effect of a shutter, essentially. They were very helpful to us, especially because there are so many portals in the show. We were able to cut off the portals.” The conventionals are all ETC Source Four ellipsoidals and PARs, and lighting is controlled via an ETC EOS console with an EOS for backup. Production Resource Group (PRG) supplied the entire lighting package.
The production got to work out a lot of issues and challenges during its try out in Toronto prior to coming to New York. “Some pieces of scenery were added; I changed some lighting to go along with all of that,” says Katz. “We had two weeks of previews in Toronto, and we went back for two weeks to work on the show—a real out-of-town tryout in the sense that we all went back to work on it. It seems to be rare these days. I thought that it was very courageous of both Disney and Casey Nicholaw to really dive in and work on it. It definitely paid off because the audience seems to love our show.”
More to come in "Magic Carpet Ride: Part Three."
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