Mind Games: Lighting Preludes, Part One

Photo by Kyle Froman

In staging the premiere of Preludes, a new musical written by Dave Malloy and directed by Rachel Chavkin, the creators called upon the same design team they had worked with on Natasha, Pierre And The Great Comet Of 1812. This gave set designer Mimi Lien, lighting designer Bradley King, sound designer Matt Hubbs, and costume designer Paloma Young another chance to visit the Russia of the tsars, but this time, the action is set mostly in the mind of Russian composer/pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, as he is hypnotized in order to help battle the demons of his subconscious after the failure of his first symphony. Designed for the Claire Tow Theatre/LCT3 at Lincoln Center, Preludes premiered there on June 15. Be sure to read about Mimi Lien's scenic design.

Practical Lighting

“This show asks a lot of the audience, which I think is great,” says lighting designer King, recalling that he attended workshops for Preludes back in late 2013 and again in late 2014, before the show moved into the theatre in May 2015. “Mimi and I went to the 2013 workshop to watch and observe,” he notes. “I walked away and let it stew a bit. After the second workshop, we had a long, rambling Skype meeting on five channels with Dave and Rachel and the designers, since it was around the holidays and everyone was out of town. Mimi created a model in January 2015, with the idea of the sheet and being inside of a piano, and a high-gloss black interior. There was talk of black Plexiglas, but that proved too expensive.”

Based on his prior experience working with Chavkin, King says, “She is a fan of big gestures, rather than small details, so I used as many big ideas as possible.” Realizing that his plot was constricted by the huge power limitations in that theatre led King toward adding light bulbs, hanging lamps, and practicals, as well as the ten static lines of cool white electroluminescent wire from CooLight. “The wires were Nick Solyom’s idea; I can’t take credit,” says King, with a nod to his assistant designer. Rob Lilly serves as production electrician/programmer, and the show is run on an ETC Ion console.

Photo by Kyle Froman

The house inventory is still new, as the theatre is only three years old, so King was happy to use as much as he could from that gear, adding extra ETC Source Fours as well as moving lights—Harman Martin Professional Viper Performance units—and mini strips. Christie Lites supplied the lighting, and King says, “They did a fantastic job.”

“Having worked with Rachel a lot, I knew that every square inch of space was going to be used as playing space—and then some—so it ended up being a fairly large amount of square footage to cover,” the LD continues. “Even though the space is subdivided into sections—the kitchen, the throne platform, the ‘attic’ or upstage raised platform—I knew Rachel wasn’t going to stage things ‘in the kitchen’ or ‘in the attic.’ It’s more a question of transforming the entire space to be in one place or another. So I started thinking about my ideas in terms of whole-space ideas, as opposed to area-specific ideas.”  

When King started doing the space breakdown, he realized “that the house gear was just going to cover everything, barely. LCT3’s package basically has enough units to do a single idea with each fixture type, so I set about allocating. There are enough ETC Source Fours for one color of front-, side-, and backlight, with the backlights as Source Four Fresnels. The front and the sides are just frost or [Rosco] R119, and the Source Four Fresnels are R302 to add just a little bit more incandescent warmth when they’re playing at high level. I also have just enough units to add a second system of cool front in [Lee Filters] L201, so I can light faces in the colder scenes without ruining the color composition. I would have preferred to have a second high side system in cool, but that was cost prohibitive in both units and power,” King says.

Spaces Of The Mind

Photo by Kyle Froman

“Mimi and I had also talked early on about the idea of a giant goalpost on either side of the stage—otherwise, it would just have been black masking—and she was really into the idea,” King continues. “I wanted something that would not only light the space in an interesting way, but because the position is so visible, I wanted the units themselves to be architecturally interesting. The mini strips, the dimmable fluorescents, and the [ETC Desire] D40 LED PARs fit that bill. The ability to completely change the entire color of the space with the D40s proved extremely useful, and I love color-changing head-highs.” 

That left King some Source Four PARs. “I started thinking about them in a whole-space, architecturally interesting layout,” he says. “I ended up doing a steep backlight system on the most upstage pipes in the space, so that I could get both the dramatic angle and have the sources visible. Rob immediately saw what I was doing and made sure everything was hung and circuited very neatly.” The color is L201 to both play off the incandescent realtime scenes and to match the arc white in the MAC Vipers.

Photo by Kyle Froman

“I also knew from previous experience with Rachel that moving lights were going to be essential. We always end up with hundreds of very sculpted moments where characters are picked out, even if just for an instant, and there was no way I’d have enough specials for that,” explains King. “I knew I wanted Vipers, after using them at ART last season, for their speed, their optics, and especially their quietness. Matt Hubbs, the sound designer, would never have let me get away with anything louder. We also have three Rosco I-Cues with DMX Irises on a 19º angle at front-of-house that basically function as re-focusable face light. I kind of wish we could have afforded Source Four LEDs for those because color-changing would have been useful, but we made do.”

The Miro cubes were another must-have for King “because all of our early conversations about the giant First Symphony sequence in the second half of the show revolved around footlights, and after seeing what Jane Cox did with them in Machinal last year, I was blown away. I’m on a quest to rename them Cox-boxes in her honor.”

Read Mind Games: Lighting Preludes, Part Two here.   

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