For nearly 45 years, Tony Award-winning lighting designer Ken Billington has been brightening stages on Broadway, earning a total of eight Tony nominations for his work on shows such as Sunday In The Park With George (2008), The Drowsy Chaperone (2006), End Of The World (1984), Foxfire (1982), and more. Billington is currently represented on Broadway with Amazing Grace and Dames At Sea and has a pre-Broadway tryout of a musical called Waterfall at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle. His long career has been quite expansive, as he has journeyed from theatrical lighting into architectural and concert lighting, as well. From opera to dance, nightclubs to cruise ships, Billington has lit it all. In November, he became the second theatrical lighting designer ever to be inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame.
Billington had been assisting lighting designer Tharon Musser since 1967 when he got his big break in 1972. The Broadway musical Don’t Bother Me, I Can’t Cope was being produced and needed union designers, and thus, a young Billington was hired as the lighting supervisor. The show went on to do 25 road companies, completing more than 1,000 performances. The following year, Billington designed the lighting for his first play on Broadway, The Visit, for which he earned his first Tony nomination. “My career was off and running,” Billington says, “and it hasn’t really slowed down much since then.”
Throughout his career, Billington has not only witnessed and participated in various trends in technology but also helped spur some along. When he first started designing, everything was still manual control. “We were still in sort of the dark ages of Broadway lighting,” says Billington. Most theatres were direct current rather than alternating current, and therefore, only resistance dimmers could be plugged into the power supplies. “You couldn’t even plug in your hair dryer in the dressing room,” he explains. But in 1975, Musser designed A Chorus Line using a computerized lighting console rather than the manually operated piano boards. When the production went on tour, she collaborated with Century Strand—now Philips Strand Lighting—to create a multi-cue console. “It changed the American theatre,” Billington asserts, and yet, two years later, Broadway was still using manual control.
For his 1977 design of Side By Side By Sondheim, produced by Hal Prince, Billington reached out to Century Strand about the multi-cue console, which he needed to run 42 dimmers. Prince bought the console and had it installed at the Music Box Theatre, which had alternating current. “Within two years, every show on Broadway was on memory control, and almost all the theatres had converted the direct current to alternating current,” Billington states. “Tharon got it happening, and I sort of got it rolling down the hill a little faster.”
The multi-cue console consequently changed the tech process for rehearsals. With manual control, one had to carefully consider the operation of the show. “If you wanted to blink the lights between red and blue, you could put the red lights in the guy’s left hand and the blue lights in the guy’s right hand and figure out how he would do on and off,” Billington explains. The new technology streamlined the operations process, allowing a red cue and a blue cue to be programmed quickly and efficiently. Suddenly, technical rehearsals were moving along much faster.
Consequently, as technology advanced with the introduction of automated fixtures and special effects, the size and complexity of shows also increased. Once upon a time, in the 1960s, the average lighting rig for a large musical contained 350 lights, but by the 1990s, Billington was working with rigs boasting well over 1,000 conventional fixtures. “It takes longer to tech a show now than it did when it was run manually because we’ve added so many more layers to the lighting,” he says. When Sweeney Todd first opened in 1979, there were 10 days between the first tech and the preview. “That was actually a very long tech period for the time, but now if you don’t have three or four weeks to tech a big musical, everyone thinks you don’t have enough time,” the designer observes. “So it is just different. It’s not better or worse. It’s just different.”
Keeps Getting Better
Billington has also embraced LED technology, which “gets better every year,” he says. For his current 42nd Street and Annie tours, all the onstage lights are LEDs, except for the incandescent lights positioned front-of-house to light the faces of the performers, a decision similar to one he made when designing nightclub 54 Below in New York. “LEDs don’t make skin tone as pretty as incandescent. LEDs don’t necessarily do all the things that an incandescent light can do,” Billington says. “They’re getting better, and I am sure they will do it eventually.”
While technology is constantly changing, some things stand the test of time, including the 1996 production of Chicago, which is the second longest-running Broadway musical after The Phantom Of The Opera. “That is something none of us thought about when we did the show,” Billington confesses. “We didn’t even know it would be successful.” The main concern was whether or not a Broadway audience would accept the show with its 12' of performance area with a band on stage, complex lighting, and minimal scenery. “Impeccably well-directed, staged, produced, and designed by all departments,” according to Billington, the musical, for which he won the 1997 Tony Award, has been running for nearly 20 years.
Other than Chicago, one of Billington’s favorite productions is Sweeney Todd, for which he earned a Tony nomination in 1979. “It was just thrilling to go into the theatre every day to help create something that I thought from the first reading was remarkable,” he states. “But then there are other shows that people probably don’t know about that I just thought were a joy to work on and artistically fulfilling.” Among his other favorites are The Scottsboro Boys in 2010, Chaplin in 2012, and Working, which ran for about three weeks and garnered him a Tony nomination in 1978. “It was one of my favorite musicals of all time.” Billington also enjoyed designing the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, which he did for 27 years. “If you help move people and help tell the story, I always think, ‘Gee, I’ve done my job,’” says the designer.
Billington has also had quite a few memorable experiences beyond Broadway. Once, while lighting a dress rehearsal at an opera house, Liza Minnelli asked him to light her act in a nightclub. So he started lighting Minnelli, with more celebrity acts to follow, including Shirley MacLaine, Liberace, and Siegfried and Roy. The designer has never been afraid to try something new and always sets out to do the best he can. When taking a new job, such as architectural lighting, he learns as much as he can and relies on his instincts. He actually never set out to do architectural lighting, but suddenly he found himself winning awards for it. “It has been thrilling to not be pigeon-holed,” he says. Billington continues to expand his creative potential as he recently designed lighting for Magic To Do aboard Princess Cruise Lines.
One of the most important lessons he’s learned over his career is that trying to be a pleasant person goes a long way. Any production is all about collaboration, and Billington has worked with some of the best in design: scenic designers Oliver Smith, David Mitchell, Eugene Lee, and Beowulf Boritt; costume designers William Ivey Long and David C. Woolard; and entertainment designer Jeremy Railton of Entertainment Design Corporation (EDC), among others. “We have to collaborate to see how we can all make this work and fit into the same space and help each other,” states Billington. “We’re all in this together, so you need to be a team player.”
Despite his years of experience in various worlds of lighting, Billington asserts that he continues to learn something new every day. “Otherwise, what fun would it be?”
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