Opening this spring on Broadway to rave reviews, Bright Star—Steve Martin and Edie Brickell’s original and uplifting new musical—transports its audience from the Cort Theatre on 47th Street to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. Responsible for this transformation is a dynamic group of creatives, including set designer Eugene Lee, lighting designer Japhy Weideman, and sound designer Nevin Steinberg. Live Design spoke with these designers about their process, design inspiration, and experience in working on the show.
Bright Star’s set is simple and sparse by design with a unique deck, a structure in which the onstage bluegrass musicians can perform, an upstage brick wall, and a handful of props. Lee says his biggest challenge in designing the set was deciding where to put the band. “I decided to put them in a mobile, little house—a skeletal cabin—and let the actors push it around,” he explains. “I like it better than automation.”
Preferring the humanistic quality over automation, the cast is responsible for manipulating the house, creating different scenes and tableaux throughout the musical. “It’s worked out pretty well,” adds Lee. “The actors push it; they do everything, every piece of furniture moving around. I give them credit because they did a terrific job.” When more musicians were added to the cast, Lee decided to add balconies, or galleries, on either side of the stage for them. The upstage wall of the set is a phony brick wall. “Even that is done in a very simple way,” Lee states. “We just wanted the most neutral and simple element. It really has no major details to it.”
The stage deck was an element that the design team had to contend with. Originally constructed out of yellow hard pine with a 6'' tongue-and-groove, it started to get beat up by the furniture and house being pushed around on it. “Since things didn’t have castors, we put little pieces of rug on the bottom of say a bench, so you can just push it around, and when it stops, it doesn’t need special brakes.” After the original deck started to show signs of cracking, Lee decided to lay a new, stronger deck constructed from a harder laminate on top of it. “It made it really smooth, and that has held up really well,” the set designer says.
LD Weideman became involved with Bright Star when director Walter Bobbie reached out to him. “We just sat and talked at his apartment about various art, shows, and other aspects of life that inspire us,” Weideman says. “It was a natural and casual conversation; I immediately felt a sense of kinship with Walter, and I’m happy to say that’s lasted throughout the entire two and a half years of this process. And once I listened to the music, I immediately fell in love with it. Then, when I learned that the story takes place in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina, where I was born and raised, I knew I had to be involved.”
The direction he was given was to tell the story in a simple, smart, and genuine fashion. “[Bobbie] did not want any scenery to be literal, only suggestive and, at the same time, playful,” says Weideman. “He wanted everything to already exist on stage from the beginning, thus creating a theatrical space in which actors consciously tell the story to the audience. Josh Rhodes’ choreography moves the action, time, and locale. The actors move the set and furniture, through a kind of storytelling ballet, if you will, creating each scene. As you can imagine, the lighting must beautifully tie all these movements of time and space.”
Carolina Sunrises And Sunsets
Describing his systems, Weideman says that there are systems of backlight, high sides, low boom sides, and front box boom keylight washes, but he rarely has anything turned on as a complete system. “One system that I do rely on heavily is a low box sidelight system, with only a few lights from each side hung on the low box front-of-house to sculpt the actors and ‘pop’ their faces with a glow,” he says, adding that the production relies heavily on Philips Vari-Lite VL3500 Wash fixtures from overhead as a strong single source backlight. “We have eight in the plot,” he says, noting that he loves the lights because of their brightness. “They can cut through anything and always give the actors a godly, divine rim,” he says.
Weideman also has 13 Philips Vari-Lite VL3500 Spots overhead, with VL1000 Arcs to create clouds for the white mountain sky drop that makes appearances throughout the show. “By putting breakup templates into them and running the focus soft, we managed to create very realistic clouds that could slowly shift color throughout the scenes,” the lighting designer says. “Also in conjunction with these, we have Philips Color Kinetics ColorBlaze TR4s and [Harman Martin Professional] MAC Auras to color the sky drop. It’s the combo of these three different lights that results in an ever-changing skyscape.” The show uses an ETC Eos console, programmed by Colin Scott. Justin Partier is Weideman’s associate LD, with Kate Bashore acting as assistant LD, and Dan Coey as production electrician. Lighting was supplied by PRG.
Weideman states his background growing up on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina inspired his design process. “I was always outside,” he says. “I can’t tell you how many Carolina sunrises and sunsets I experienced growing up there. Those mountains and sky are my core driving force to this day. Living in New York, there’s not a moment I don’t miss the great Blue Ridge Mountains, but it’s through the practice of lighting that I keep that life-force alive. This project handed it all to me on a silver platter.”
Weideman’s desire was to keep the color of the show to the full range of white light, wanting the production to look like a picture from the past, “sepia-toned and aged with warmth, while also having the surprise of becoming coldly stark and angular in the more dramatically tense moments,” he describes. “Regarding color, it always starts with shades of white. Of course, there are many shades of white from low Kelvin 2,900 amber tones—6'' Fresnels on low booms—to high Kelvin blues—Philips Vari-Lite VL3500 Wash, at 5,000 to 6,500 Kelvin. I attempted to keep it in the full range of white, with one exception in Act Two for ‘Pour Me Another Round,’ where we were inspired by 1940s neon and lit the bar in saturated blue and pink, but this scene was the only rule-breaker. “There are musical moments in this show that soar to a height so beautiful it feels almost gospel,” Weideman exclaims. “I kept seeing arrays of warm, divine beams of light as I listened to the tracks. So I implemented many rows of PAR ACLs, carefully focused in various beam patterns that could be used in different ways throughout the show, and as the cueing moved forward, they were always there to turn on at just the right moments. The beams of light that ACLs create with the use of MDG haze are stunningly beautiful, warm, aged, and godly.”
Weideman also calls attention to his lighting of the cabin, the central set piece. “By sidelighting the cabin, I was able to create many beautiful, natural shadow patterns across the space, and in the air, we used a thin layer of haze throughout. I strongly believe it’s always more interesting to create real shadows by shooting light through objects on stage, rather than using templates.”
A vital piece of the storytelling process which transforms the stage from day to night and from the city to the country is the white mountain cyc. Weideman describes the drop as a “flat piece of stretched white muslin with the bottom cut out in the shape of a Blue Ridge Mountain horizon line. This flies in front of the brick back wall of the set. In addition, we have a black mountain piece that is the same shape/size of the white mountain drop that can fly in front of it, creating a line of light on the horizon that, in effect, expands and contracts.”
Stay tuned to learn more about the production and its sound design in Part Two!
Steven Battaglia has worked in theatre production and operations for more than 12 years. He has been the operations manager at Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York for the last six years and also works as a production manager and lighting designer in his spare time.