“Four theatres in four years, we’ve had to keep rethinking everything, especially for lighting the audience,” says lighting designer Ed McCarthy, who has worked on the Tony Awards with Bob Dickinson since 2000. “We are very happy to be back at Radio City Music Hall!”
The workhorses in the rig – supplied by PRG for the bi-coastal Full Flood design team – are the VL2600 spot fixtures and PRG 5L RGBW LED wash lights. “We work with Tony Ward and Travis Snyder at PRG, and they are very accommodating,” says McCarthy, noting that some of the gear comes from LA, where Dickinson is based, while he holds down the fort in NYC, as the only member of the team who is in New York working on the show from April to the broadcast date. Starting on the Tonys as lead lighting director, McCarthy moved into the co-designer slot this year. “Bob and the Full Flood team in LA work on the light plot, and budgeting – from rental to trucking,” he notes. I handle cueing, script, and coordination between the Broadway shows and the television broadcast, as well as screens integration.
As the 78th Tony Awards were McCarthy’s 25th year with the show, he echoes Dickinson’s concerns about venues such as The Beacon Theatre with its corner stage as one of the catalysts to go digital. “We’ve come up with a very specific system to integrate lighting and digital backgrounds. First, we have a meeting with every team from the nominated shows. Then we go into their theater and take photos of every light cue in the song they will be performing at the Tonys,” McCarthy explains. “This gives us a huge library of images for each show. I go through the images and do some reverse engineering to see how the light impacts the scenery, then the screens team maps and animates the images. When we go into the theatre, we can’t shoot video but can take photos thanks to a special arrangement between the Tonys and the unions. You can see every lighting cue in the screens.”
Some shows provide their own content. Hamilton, for example, provided their own video clip of the special performance created for the Tonys. “Then we have to decide how to light it and not fight it,” notes McCarthy, who adds, “I’ve worked on Broadway for over 30 years, and I’ve worked with many major designers, so they have a certain amount of trust that we will make the show look as good as possible, with as much layering and nuance as we can create in the 90 minutes we have to rehearse their show. I work with the designers or their assistants to make their work shine on television.”
“We want to make it look as much as we can like the actual Broadway production. The digital images set the color palette. We start with clean shots of the scenery for the background and, on-site, working with our screens producers and our media server programmer Jason Rudolph, we create a flow of still imagery to mimic the actual lighting transitions. Then we layer in the atmosphere in the foreground with haze and beams of light. The show’s creative teams sign off on the screens’ images. The goal is to make it seem like the live lighting is affecting the digital scenery. And Bobby has the final eye on everything, in terms of what makes good television,” he notes.
Many shows now use VOR, a software that allows you to capture video and audio of your show while overlaying information such as EOS console tracking. McCarthy finds that referencing VOR is better than taking notes in the theatre in the dark. “I can refer to their VOR video to make sure the cues are correctly placed, and see when the effects and chases happen,” he explains.
“We only have two 10-hour days to rehearse all the musical numbers. Harry Sangmeister, our brilliant moving light programmer, builds the show as we go. I develop a spread sheet ahead of rehearsals, with all the cueing information for lighting, screens, and everything from house lights to our seven followspots. That becomes our bible for the show.”
Highlights of the 78th Tony broadcast include a moment from Death Becomes Her, for the rainbow mash-up with spinning gobos all over the stage. “We did it digitally, but you think it’s lighting on real scenery,” says McCarthy, who notes that for the dramatic scene from Sunset Boulevard, there is no digital content as it takes place in a black void with six towers of white light and extra hazers. For Buena Vista Social Club, a colorful show that McCarthy compliments as “looking gorgeous on stage,” the song they chose for the Tonys takes place in a 90s recording studio set, very simply lit. But the actual 1950’s club set was a more interesting environment for TV, and showed off the production better, so McCarthy worked with lighting designer Tyler Micoleau on a new version of the song for the broadcast. “The whole vibe was gorgeous, and we used additional cues from other moments in the show that showed off the production in the best light. I sent Tyler the images in advance to see what he thought so we would be on the right track at the 90-minute camera blocking rehearsal.
For the awards part of the show – hosted this year by actress/singer Cynthia Erivo – the lighting team gets the script the week of the show. “The shell of an award show is pretty repetitive; it’s getting into and out of performances that brings the biggest challenges. We often shoot into the audience to avoid showing scenery shifts on stage before they are ready to reveal the next moment, or they set up during a commercial break. For the musical number from Just In Time, we started the number facing the audience, and when we spun around there was a full bandstand on the stage,” McCarthy explains.
“The lighting rig might seem generic, but it can handle anything that gets thrown at us. We need the flexibility, and have enough gear in the air to keep it visually interesting, with a few hundred moving lights overhead and front of house.,” says McCarthy. “One of the big challenges is making sure the people watching at home feel as if they are really seeing the Broadway shows in the theatre, while honoring the spirit of each show for television. That transition isn’t always easy.”
Starting to work with Dickinson back in 1999 as his New York lighting director, they have built a sense of kinship and teamwork over the past 25 years, but McCarthy wanted to stay in the New York theater scene and resisted moving to the West Coast. He is also the associate lighting designer for LD Howard Harrison on all Mamma Mia! companies in the Western Hemisphere, for which Andy Voller was the original UK associate.
McCarthy loves working on the Tonys: “I get to work with so many friends - designers, directors and stage managers, over the six weeks before the show,” he says. “I keep thinking, how can I ever retire; the Tonys are too rewarding an experience.”
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