Tharon Musser At LDI90

Back in the day, LDI used to audio record many of the conference sessions and make the cassettes available to attendees for sale. I have often thought it would be great to still have those tapes, so I was pleased when Todd Koeppl, operations manager at Grand Stage in Chicago, called to say he had found his copy of the LDI90 (1990) interview with legendary lighting designer Tharon Musser. And that he was willing to create a digital file that we could post. This interview is conducted by then editor of Theatre Crafts, Michael Sommers, and the result is a wonderful chat with Musser (1925-2009), a three-time Tony winner who set Broadway on fire with her incredible, state-of-the-art lighting for A Chorus Line, for which she won a Tony in 1976. She won subsequent Tony Awards for Follies (1972) and Dreamgirls (1982), and designed over 150 Broadway shows, garnering another seven Tony nominaions along the way. Here is the full recording of the LDI90 session with the "dean of American lighting design," who was known for her impeccable sense of timing and color, at a time when today's lighting technology was in its infancy, but she embraced it, using the first computerized console on A Chorus Line

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