The Great Gatsby, a Roaring Twenties musical on stage at the Broadway Theatre is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic 1925 novel. The production features music and lyrics by Jason Howland and Nathan Tysen, and a book by Kait Kerrigan, plus scenic and projection design by Paul Tate dePoo III, costume design by Tony winner Linda Cho, sound design by Tony winner Brian Ronan, and lighting design by Cory Pattak, who takes us into this design approach and gear choices. The musical opened on Broadway on April 25, 2024 after a world-premiere run at the Paper Mill Playhouse in the fall of 2023.
"The lighting for The Great Gatsby is bold and dynamic and through meticulous integration with video content and dimensional scenery, creates a constantly shifting and rearranging world onstage conveying a myriad of locations," says Pattak. "In the spirit of ‘more is more,’ there is no design element on this show that hides in the shadows. The entire surrounding set is a series of gold portals and arches with a swirling teal floor that emulates the water between East and West Egg. Much of the lighting pulls from those colors with rich golds and ambers contrasting with cool teals and cyans. And of course, there is the famous green light. Many of the blue/green colors throughout are a riff on the green light that is always pulling Gatsby. Also importantly, the lighting supports the music written by Jason Howland which spans jazz, pop, swing, and big old-fashioned Broadway tunes. The lighting matches the music every step of the way, hitting every accent, build and and crescendo."
Pattak notes: "The design is essentially a beefed-up version of what we did at Paper Mill. Playhouse The basic structure of the show stayed the same so we were able to have a starting point and having done it already, I had a better sense of what I was missing and wanted to add. Broadway allows for a bigger budget and thanks to our very generous and supportive lead producer, Chunsoo Shin, I was really able to build out the design in the way I wanted to and amp it up for Broadway," he says. "Also our scenic designer, Paul Tate dePoo, designed a lot of new scenery so I needed to be able to support all of those new elements as well. I added an entirely new system of conventional to light the portals, we added additional backlight and ladder sidelight, because we were building a deck I was able to integrate haze and fog into the deck. We also added a lot more set electrics in scenic pieces that we felt needed more sparkle and additional lamps and sconces to help fill out the traditional pieces of furniture and scenery. Some numbers were very similar to Paper Mill and we were just putting the lighting back together and other numbers we completely threw out and started from scratch. We had full moving light documentation from Paper Mill so before we ever started tech, my programmer Scott Tusing had already roughed in all the focuses so everything looked vaguely familiar as we hit each new scene. But very quickly, we stopped worrying about what we “previously did” and just worked on making it look good for Broadway."
For the aquatic elements, Pattak explains: "We looked at a lot of marine/lighthouse lighting and have pulled textural inspiration from that. There is both real scenery and video content that emulate the glass and lenses you’d find in aquatic lighting and the green channel marker that is famous to the story. In contrast, Wolfsheim’s big number entitled “Shady” is populated by noir-style shafts and little boxes of light piercing the darkness as various characters try and hide their nefarious activities. Gatsby’s mansion is decked out in architectural uplighting and soffit lighting that highlights every corner of the set and gives the illusion of even greater depth and height. Gatsby’s world is warm, tungsten, and inviting but the coolness of the water element is always present, cutting through, like a chilly undercurrent ready to swallow it all up in a single wave," the LD notes.
"Paul and I spent weeks working to create the perfect illusion between scenery, lighting, and video to blur the lines of what ends where. It allows us to keep surprising the audience with new locations and ways to use the stage space. There are transitions that transform the entire stage in just a matter of seconds. Hopefully, the audience will not always know what is real dimensional scenery, video or lighting, or how we even got from location to another," says Pattak.
When it comes to the gear, the workhouse fixture in the rig is the VL2600 Profile which Pattak likes for its brightness and fast iris and shutters. "I really like the color in the VL2600s as well. Our main wash light is the Mac Viper DX which might not be the newest light on the block, but is still great with color and brightness and I knew I wanted a subtractive wash light overhead for the warm tones I would need to create. Also I love the 'barn doors’ in the Vipers which are great for cutting off scenery. There is an upstage pipe of Elation Proteus that do really strong backlight ideas all night and shoot through the scenery and the haze. I love how bright and punchy the Proteus are," Pattak tells us. "I used them and the VL2600 on Spamalot as well. Just in front of the video wall is a pipe of GLP Xbars. One thing I really wanted after Paper Mill was a big single source backlight idea to shoot through the sliders and over the video wall and create a wall of light in the haze. We even help cover a scene change upstage by creating a wall of haze and light which helps mask what is happening behind that."
Rounding out the moving light rig are GLP X4s on the booms and ladders that light both people and scenery and a dozen Sharpy Washes on the upstage electrics and ladders to provide some piercing beams for the higher energy numbers. "We also have of large quantity of Chauvet Reve LED fixtures which I really love, having first used them on Spamalot. They are super bright and handle all of the conventional diagonal front light, sidelight, and portal washes," says Pattak. "It’s a big atmosphere show as well with two MDG hazers in the air, four Look Solutions hazers in the deck, two Look Solutions Cryo Foggers under the stage that deliver low fog via automated pop-ups, two Look Solution Viper smoke machines on the upstage ladders, and two bubble machines on the midstage ladders."
Click here for The Great Gatsby light plot, gear list, and slide show: Plot Luck: The Great Gatsby On Broadway