Lighting designers Kenneth Posner and Philip S. Rosenberg are part of the team bringing the iconic 80s film, Pretty Woman, to life as a new musical, directed and choreographed by Jerry Mitchell. After a record-breaking run on Broadway the musical is still playing in London, Germany, and on a national US tour.
The designers describe their collaboration on the project as like having one brain, with an incredible aesthetic eye and a symbiotic relationship.
Live Design caught up with them to discuss the project when Pretty Woman: The Musical was at the Denver Center For The Performing Arts as part its Spring 2023 US tour.
Live Design: What was the overall feel of the lighting and the look achieved by the design?
Ken Posner: We just really wanted to lean into the whole Hollywood Boulevard aspect of it, and that was Jerry Mitchell's idea from the beginning, too. There's a lot of lighting elements built into the scenery. Truly, the Hollywood lights or the neon lights of Los Angeles are very present in the scenic design. So, we just embraced that, and kind riffed off it.
Philip Rosenberg: The scenic design is by choice, very skeletal and minimalist. We took it upon ourselves to add additional architecture with the lighting. with haze and defining the spaces a little bit more clearly using light.
LD: Were those arches video?
KP: There was no video in Pretty Woman at all. It's all lighting elements.
PR: People thought there was video on Broadway because we had a cyc that was ringed with LEDs so we could pixel map stuff. It does end up looking like a video wall in the back, but it is just a cyc and LED portals.
LD: What was behind your color choices?
PR: We tried to work within a world of realism, like a hyper-realism, where Hollywood Blvd was a much more colorful, electric looking world, versus moments in the hotel, which you want to feel more naturalistic. Hopefully the colors we chose reflected that.
KP: We really wanted to exploit the color that one sees in a beautiful, colorful California sky...the sunset and sunrise because they are very pretty, unique, and quite beautiful. And, the first time I saw a California sunset, I was working with Phillip at the time.
PR: It's interesting that you say that. Do you remember, Ken, In the first model renderings, it was wrapped in a sunset and palm trees? The first version of the model that David Rockwell presented was all about the California sky.
KP: Yes!
PR: And, interestingly, if you had seen the show on Broadway, the full portals used to light up the entire leg and the entire border of three portals worth. It has been reduced now to more-tourable, more-durable, light-up portals.
KP: Yes, that is right. The original portals were an expansion of the upstage horizon line. It did a great trick so we could have the Hollywood Hills in the background when appropriate, and then there do a little magic trick so it would go away, and we would just have the sky and the ocean together. It really informed our design.
LD: How did the lighting interact with the scenery?
PR: The scenery was very skeletal. We were always trying to figure out a way to add weight to the scenery—whether it be by texture or trying to highlight the structure that was there, and to give it a little bit more gravity. You're not going to recreate the hotel with one flying piece of back wall and a couple of pieces of furniture. We make that stuff look more substantial by adding architecture to the air using haze and beams of light.
LD: What console did you choose?
KP: ETC EOS Ti. The moving lights and the conventional fixtures, which we didn't have very many of, were all on one desk. Programming was by Alex Vogel, a really talented programmer.
LD: Was there a particularly piece of gear or tool you relied on for this production?
PR: This is sort of a weird answer, but the LED portal legs sort of set the tone for what was always happening within them. It sounds like a lame answer to say that LED tape was the tone, but it's a pixel tape. It was a very conventional rig and we didn't have a lot of fancy gear, just spots and washes.
KP: When we were starting out, there were fewer choices of lighting equipment, it was much more standard. From rental shops and even in the last 10 years, everything has just grown exponentially. I think what we're finding, Phillip and I, as lighting artists, is that if you give us a box of tools, we will give you a show. We have our favorite kind of equipment like any artist has a favorite chisel they pick up, or a favorite paintbrush they pick up, or whatever medium they work in. We have our comfort zone within certain tools, but really the industry has evolved into the way where you just pick up the brush and you paint, and you might learn to love one aspect of a light, but then another aspect of the light might not do what you want it to do. So, you have to design around that. Coming out of Covid we have to be aware of costs. We have to be able to adapt the design, preserve the ideas, and also let the design evolve.
PR: The gear most influential in setting the tone or setting the time of day or setting the emotional ideas is the light that is lighting the actors. We come from a different generation than the people that are lighting shows now. We have taken what we would consider our old light plots and translated them into a modern moving light-focused light plot. We make sure that we still can do our cross-light systems and our front light systems and our box boom systems, and we may use moving lights now instead of conventional, but our minds still think that way.
KP: I agree that those ideas hold. We imagine color from an incandescent source, which is obviously the most beautiful kind of light, whether it be a light bulb or a candle. And then we engineer those colors into either an arc source or an LED source.
PR: The way people think about color these days is completely different than how Ken I think about color. You work with incandescent sources and you flip through a swatch book that had 300 colors in it, and you made choices out of that, and now all of a sudden you have several different kinds of light sources and you can make millions of different kinds of colors. So how do you make those choices now? It's different, but that's a whole other article 😊.
Creative Team
- Kenneth Posner & Philip S. Rosenberg - Lighting Design
- David Rockwell - Scenic Design
- Gregg Barnes - Costume Designer
- John Shivers - Sound Designer
- Alex Vogel - Lighting programmer
- Craig Stelzenmuller - Associate LD
- Paige Seber - Lighting director.
Take a peek: