Mind Games: Lighting Preludes, Part Two

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. Read Setting Preludes and Lighting Preludes, Part One before reading the continuation of the article below.

LD Bradley King started thinking about the objects in the space and ways to transform them during the shifts in and out of Rachmaninoff’s head. “I ringed the back of the giant painting on the back wall with LED tape—more as a gut feeling than anything else—and we did the same to the bottom of the piano, although we cut it after it made the piano a bit too ‘Liberace,”’ notes King. “I knew I wanted to do something with the lift lines/piano wire for the mountain, and my assistant had the brilliant idea to use EL wire. That proved to be one of the most useful tools in the chest. It constantly cues with the musical numbers, giving visualization to beats, tempo, etcetera. Rob Lilly, my electrician, spent hours finessing the wiring of the inverters and decoders to get everything working smoothly. We had to do some finagling to get the relays firing fast enough to run effects.”

Photo by Kyle Froman

The tsar’s throne is lit with MR-16s embedded in the top for toplight, with a strip of RGBWW LED tape that lights the costume while it’s in the case. The window backlight is just a plain-old, no-color Source Four. 

“Finally, Rachel sent me an email after three days of rehearsal asking if I had blinders in the tool kit,” King remembers. “I think I’ve had blinders of some sort on the last three shows we’ve done together, and I stupidly thought ‘meh, I don’t need them for this one,’ but she had an instinct about the hypnosis section, and she was right. Thankfully, Christie Lites was able to get us six, and we got them in time for load-in.”

Most of the color in the show is used “when we are inside of Rach’s head,” explains King. “The color palette started with ‘The Prelude,’ which I think is one of the most beautifully written and heart-wrenching monologues I’ve ever heard. It’s Rachmaninoff at his most introspective, and it’s extremely cold, with arc and fluorescent white. I started from there and built the ‘normal’ palette in direct opposition—warm and incandescent. The colors are mostly for musical numbers, especially the presentational ones. The red—I think red is a dangerous color because it’s very easy to wash the entire stage in red and go ‘Look! This is dramatic!’ but here I just had an instinct about it. It seems to work in two very specific moments without getting campy: ‘Music,’ the scene where we hear the Piano Concerto No. 2 for the first time and as part of the symphony sequence. There’s quite a bit of color in the symphony, but it’s very lurid—reds, yellows, and greens. It’s somewhat off, cartoony, and nightmarish, and it feels wrong in a sort of delicious way.”

Colors Of The Mind

Photo by Kyle Froman

King notes that, “Reality is always a little suspect, as even when we aren’t in his head, we don’t always know exactly where we are, but I am a fan of shifting color temperatures, so color, temperature, and angle shift from scene to scene. I sort of started with the idea that the pseudo-realistic scenes, the ones where nothing obviously nonlinear or psychological is going on, was going to be my baseline incandescent no-color. I had a strong feeling that the more tortured interior scenes, ‘The Prelude,’ ‘Blocked,’ and ‘Alone,’ were going to be arc-white and very cold. The opening number, ‘Your Day,’ starts with a very quotidian look: relatively bright, not particularly remarkable, and then as the number progresses and Rach gets more and more emotional, we do a very long slide into something much darker, colder, and more severe.

Photo by Kyle Froman

“Much of the musical plays that way, sliding in and out what we perceive to be ‘reality’ and Rach’s head,” King continues. “Gabe Ebert, who plays Rach, aside from being an exceptional actor, is extremely attuned to his environment—both lighting and sound—and reacted to cue changes in tech in absolutely thrilling ways, totally in character, as if Rach’s world is literally shifting around him. A lot of those moments made it into the piece, where I’m cueing based on shifts in his mood or even vice versa.”

A lot of the piece is also King responding to Malloy’s music, as the designer notes, “‘White Lilacs’ and ‘Subway’ are highly presentational, colorful, and spot-lit. Natalya’s numbers, ‘Vocalise’ and ‘Natalya’ ended up with a very red-shifted blue color palette, which I think plays beautifully and sadly against the glowing practicals, and ‘First Symphony’ is just a giant, complicated, ultimately kind of thrilling rollercoaster. We basically have to visualize Rach’s nightmare, but we also have to be extremely diligent in taking care of the audience. There’s an enormous amount of information and storytelling in the number, so we have to be able to hear and process all of it.”

Other moments riff on the style of the songs. “In ‘White Lilacs,’ Rach uses a mic stand like a rock star,” says King. This is another little anachronism in a show that takes the audience into the mind and music of a major Russian composer and pianist who was born in Russia in 1873 and died in Beverly Hills in 1943. Preludes is set circa 1900, halfway through Rachmaninoff’s life, and, like its protagonist, is breaking new ground musically, this time in terms of a new paradigm for musical theatre.

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