Noele Stollmack’s grade and high school years overlapped the movie and TV series Fame. It may be part of what propelled her career. Maybe not. The daughter of a TV director and much younger sister of an Equity actress, she was no stranger to the performing arts.
Attending a private elementary school with a lighting console surely helped. “I was allowed to do some very dangerous things involving ladders,” Stollmack recalls. She spent time in studios and backstage, and by the time she attended Montclair New Jersey’s Performing Arts High school as a lighting major, she was more than a little experienced. At school, she built scenery, hung lights, and worked with theater professionals. “The TD was a United Scenic Artists member, working on Broadway.”
Stollmack left New Jersey to do a BFA in lighting design at Boston University, then launched a career designing lighting and sets for theaters and opera companies, traditional productions, and cutting-edge work by the likes of Meredith Monk, Jonathan Miller, and Andrei Serban. She would also do architectural projects and product development and serve as lighting director and lighting supervisor.
In 1986, after she graduated, she headed to New York to work Off-off Broadway as an assistant LD and electrician, then did an internship at Houston Grand Opera “to learn large format projections.” In short order, she became the lighting supervisor.
In that role, she was able to work with major lighting designers, assisting Ken Billington, Pat Collins, and Duane Schuler. “I was exposed to European lighting design, and I got turned on to how fantastic opera is,” she recalls. “I used white light at that point, an interesting kind of old school, new school.”
Stollmack developed a love for “big light from really far away, really long throw sources that create a single shadow, a beautiful light. It’s an aesthetic that I’m drawn to, but something I found worked principally in opera,” she says. In opera, for instance, she could reveal the figure without necessarily revealing the face. Not so in the theater.
When she returned to the theater, the circumstances were, well, different. As assistant LD on Rent when the show moved to Broadway, just after Jonathan Larson’s sudden death, Stollmack stepped into a strange situation. The team had developed a downtown show from a downtown point of view and now were dealing with the shift to the commercial theater. As sole lighting assistant, she took on jobs normally done by at least two. She called followspots and handled all the paperwork. The LD, Blake Burba, “was an amazing draftsperson who didn’t like CAD, so all our drawings and revisions were by hand,” she notes.
Stollmack says Burba wanted to do things in a different way than the local 1 electricians were used to doing, and she translated for both. “It seemed like we rehearsed forever,” she recalls. “It was hard, but it was a good experience. “I remember distinctly one rehearsal when the producers walked in and announced that Jonathan had won the Pulitzer.”
Harder experiences, and very good ones, would follow.
Read Part Two and Part Three of her story.