The Year Of The Katz

The Iceman Cometh. Photo by Richard Termine

Four-time Tony Award-winning lighting designer Natasha Katz has previously lit four of the six shows she’s working on so far this year, continuing the prolific output of someone with more than 50 productions under her belt. “It’s an incredible year; that’s for sure,” admits Katz. Katz recently worked on Gigi in Washington DC, unaware that the revival would eventually come to Broadway when a theatre opened up. An American In Paris is also coming to the Great White Way after its out-of-town tryout in Paris during the fall. In London, she worked on the play Skylight, written by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry, and The Goodman Theatre’s incredibly successful 2012 production of The Iceman Cometh, starring Nathan Lane, will run for six weeks at the Brooklyn Academy of Music until March 15.

Gigi. Photo by Joan Marcus.

Even though Katz designed the initial productions, there was quite a bit of tweaking left to do to marry each design to its particular theatre. “Every time a show is in a new theatre, it has a different feel because theatres have their own personalities,” explains the designer. This year Katz will add two new musicals to her vast repertoire: Something Rotten, directed by Casey Nicholaw, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s School Of Rock-The Musical, an adaptation of the 2003 film starring Jack Black. 

Katz is equally excited for all six productions. “Every show really has its own special life to it,” she says. “I learn something on every show I work on because everything has a new challenge, whether it’s working with a new director or scenic designer, or there’s some technical challenge in the show. Trying to find the tone of the piece each time is really a very creative, exciting journey to take on every show.”

An American In Paris. Photo by Angela Sterling.

For Katz, her creative journey began when she was quite young. “I always wanted to work in the theatre,” she says. “I grew up in New York City. I went to shows all the time, and I didn’t know quite how to find my way.” Katz made her way to Oberlin College, where she enrolled in a program called the Great Lakes College Association, which allowed her to work for a professional for a semester’s credit. “Some people would be into biophysics, but for me, it was the theatre.” Katz worked with lighting designer and theatre consultant Roger Morgan, who was doing a show called I Remember Mama. “I was fortunate enough to start at the very beginning of the process, go all the way through the out-of-town tryout in Philadelphia with Liv Ullmann, and then we opened in New York, and that all happened to work out in that one semester,” explains Katz.

“Roger was extremely generous, and I went on to work with him for many years in his consulting firm and as his assistant lighting designer.” From that connection, Katz was able to work with other designers and gain more insight. “Somewhere along the line, I woke up and said, ‘Oh my God, I’m a lighting designer.’” Katz started out hanging her own shows and learned a few tricks along the way. “My first shows were in little theatres in New York City, where we would have those household, circular rheostat dimmers, and I’d sit there and run the show myself, and turn the dimmers,” she says. “If I needed to turn two dimmers, I would wrap a rubber band around two, and that way I could turn two lights on at once.”

A turning point in Katz’s life was when her good friend and fellow lighting designer Ruth Roberts, who used to work with Tom Skelton, got her a job at the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera where they produced Broadway-sized shows that changed each week. “I definitely really grew from being a sort of child lighting designer to really knowing how to deal with bare spaces,” she says. Katz became involved with the Broadway scene when she worked as Jules Fisher’s assistant on La Cage Aux Folles. At 25 years old, Katz lit her first show on Broadway, Pack Of Lies. “I was fortunate enough to have worked on Broadway for a while before I did my first show, so I was not daunted by the Broadway experience of it,” she confesses.

Hitting Her Stride

Aladdin. Photo by Deen Van Meer

The Coast Of Utopia. Photo by Paul Kolnik.

Katz says she’s lived “a lot of life” since then. From architectural to opera to industrial to rock ‘n’ roll, she has designed in nearly every discipline within lighting, not to mention giving birth to her daughter in Las Vegas while she was working on EFX. She also spent many years working in regional theatre and Off-Broadway, lighting the original 1985 production of The Normal Heart at the Public Theatre. “I have always done a lot of things outside of Broadway, and I would still like to continue to do so,” she says. “I think that it expands the mind of a lighting designer because it is not quite as linear as what is required on Broadway. “In the world of dance, it is so much more abstract, so it is a completely different way of looking at lighting,” Katz claims. “Very often there is not a set. Very often it is completely dependent on what the music is and what the choreographer wants and what the movement of the dancers is. You’re not telling a story all the time, as you often are on Broadway.” Katz reflects positively on her career so far. “I’m a better lighting designer today than I was when I started; that’s for sure. I’m really looking forward to getting even better than I am now,” she says. “I can certainly solve problems more easily than I could before. I think that I look at things a little more from a creative standpoint rather than just solving problems now.” Katz credits Eugene Lee, with whom she has done a number of shows, as being “hugely helpful in life.” Likewise, Katz speaks highly of set designer Bob Crowley. “He is my inspiration.” Katz has decorated her office walls with numerous pieces of Crowley’s artwork from shows they’ve done together, including Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center, Aladdin, currently on Broadway, and Aida, for which she won her first Tony Award in 2000. In fact, “Bob Crowley actually did the scenery for every single show that I’ve won a Tony Award for,” Katz declares. Their collaboration on Aida included Katz making the bottom of the cyc orange and the top yellow, which “at the time was really difficult to do. It’s much easier to do now. So that was a miracle in the making,” Katz expresses proudly.

Katz earned her second Tony Award in 2007 for The Coast Of Utopia, a three-part play written by Tom Stoppard that broke the Tony record for the most awards given to a play, and for which Katz lit the final part, Salvage. “There was one costume designer for all three plays, two set designers, Scott Pask and Bob Crowley, and there were three different lighting designers, so we each lit one of the segments,” she says. “What was interesting about that was sort of keying off the other lighting designers and trying to make it all feel of one piece.” Brian MacDevitt and Kenneth Posner lit the other parts of the play.

The Glass Menagerie. Photo by Michael J. Lutch

In 2012, Katz won her third Tony for her minimal color lighting design in Once, directed by John Tiffany, “who is a genius,” says Katz. “There was a single set that took place in a bar, and a lot of the scenes were defined by squares of light that would delineate a room, or if they were in the town, then the whole stage would be lit, or if we were interior, a lot of the lights on the back wall would come up.” Working with Tiffany (and Crowley) again, Katz earned her latest Tony for The Glass Menagerie last year. “That was a magical experience,” smiles Katz. “The set took place on a pitch black sea of water, so there’s a lot of reflection of the characters from the water, so that was its own challenge. They could see themselves, but at the same time, it was kind of this abyss that it felt like if they stepped into it, their lives would end. It was a beautiful metaphor for all sorts of things in the play.” 

With four Tony Awards and over 50 productions, Katz has not only made quite the impact on the industry, but lighting has also made a lasting impression on her. “I have devoted my entire career to the world of lighting, and I’ve just started to understand that,” she says. “The older I get, the more I realize how important it is in the theatrical process and how much it really does illuminate the storytelling. The storytelling is what people feed off of in order to either make their lives better or see themselves.”

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