One of the hottest shows on Broadway this spring is Nora Ephron’s hit play Lucky Guy, starring Tom Hanks as tabloid journalist Mike McAlary. Scoring six Tony nominations including Hanks as leading actor, best play, sets by David Rockwell, and lighting by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, Lucky Guy was directed by George C. Wolfe, also getting a Tony nod.
Fisher and Eisenhauer created a film noir look for Lucky Guy, responding to the director’s brief. “The description we were given was ‘film noir,’ and ‘black and white,’ where white is a broad range of ‘seeming white’ and black is as black as black can get on a stage,” explains Eisenhauer. The lighting team includes associate designer Vivien Leone, advance electrician Jon Lawson, production electrician Christopher Kurtz, and moving light programmer Matthew Hudson.
The LDs collaborated closely with projection designers Batwin + Robin, and Rockwell, who created locales ranging from 1970s to 1990s newsrooms at the Daily News and New York Post to a neighborhood bar. “We worked toward integrating the space and the surface treatments to receive light and content, and how light would enter the space,” says Eisenhauer. “We tried to share the same color palette, making whites work together—not match necessarily, but look good in proximity—and making the blacks as black as possible.”
The lighting rig, provided by PRG, is primarily conventional, with control via a PRG Virtuoso VX console, 2.5 96x2.4kW ETC Sensor+ touring dimmer racks, and wireless DMX via a WDS system from City Theatrical. The fixtures comprise more than 200 ETC Source Fours in various sizes (59 of which have Wybron Coloram II 7.5" color scrollers), eight Ianiro 2kW Fresnels, and 10 L&E 6'x3 circuit Ministrips. One MDG Atmosphere fogger and one Look Solutions Power Tiny fogger add to the look. City Theatrical also helped create the special effect of a flickering image of a train passing, adding a spinning hexagonal sheet metal device to a Vari-Lite VLM moving mirror.
The only automated fixtures in the rig are 16 Philips Vari-Lite VL1000 ERS Arc units with shutter assembly, all used interchangeably. “Their placement was determined, as always, by the usefulness of the maximum pan/tilt rotation and by the quality of the angle to the space,” indicates Eisenhauer. “For example, we had some lights placed so they could work as high side, downlight, and frontlight. We used 1/2 CTO filters in some of the moving lights so they would blend—not match, but blend—with the unfiltered conventional fixtures.”
For color, Eisenhauer notes there is a very light gel string, with colors from Rosco, GAMProducts, and Lee Filters, in a small number of fixtures. “We also use a range of color correction blues, from 1/4 CTB to full CTB and everything in between, as well as a range of CTS [straw] and CTO,” she says. “All of these color corrections are to blend very warm to very cool, regardless of the color temperature of the fixture. Both the arc lamps [5,800K] and the conventional lamps [<3,600K] become one fluid color range. This is the widest range of ‘white’ we could express with these available types of fixtures. The black, as previously stated, is the George C. Wolfe brand of black. As black as you can get; the blacker the better.”
While the lighting was not bound to naturalism, the props were chosen to reflect the exact year of each act. “We were able to electrify the old-style computer monitors with a nice smooth cool backlight, which looked real and accurate. The desk-lamps were fitted mainly to be radio-controlled. The style is not far from what we use in our studios, still!” notes Eisenhauer.
“The show was considered to be a relatively simple, straightforward play and was structured as such in terms of resources. The director’s approach was to use a black space to create images that appear and disappear at a fast pace, cinematically,” she concludes. “That called upon technique to move and change light differently than a play with a single, static set.”
Check out more coverage of all the design elements of Lucky Guy.