"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Article 8

 

[Below is the final installment in my republication of the American Theatre special section on sound design from the July/August 2019 issue.  Jerald Raymond Pierce makes a return to the series to write about the many jobs to which a contemporary theatrical sound designer must see.

[As I’ve done on the previous entries in “Hear, Hear,” I recommend that ROTters who haven’t been reading the entire collection of eight articles go back and pick up the earlier ones (posted on 25, 28, and 31 March, and 3 and 6 April).  The articles all address separate topics and each stands on its own, but reading all of them provides an excellent overall view of the art of sound design for the stage.]

“HEARING THE DIFFERENCE”

by Jerald Raymond Pierce

 

Sound design isn’t one-size-fits-all, and distinctions within the discipline are crucial.

There’s an old saying, invoked by Abe Jacob [b. 1944], one of the forefathers of modern theatrical sound design, that everyone in theatre knows two jobs, their own and sound design. While that statement may be a comic exaggeration, it gets at the frequent confusion surrounding sound designers and what it takes to do what they do.

The confusion may be understandable, as the field remains among the newest distinct design disciplines in theatre. The job title “sound designer” didn’t even appear on Broadway until more than midway through the 20th century. Jacob is one of the first two men to receive the credit, for his work on Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971. (Jack Mann [c. 1924-2013] received the title in 1961 for Show Girl.) For context, lighting design, also a relatively new designation, only became a Tony category in 1970.

Over the last 50 years or so, technology has increased what sound designers are able to do, making their work more integral than ever to telling stories onstage. The job description can range from using microphones as reinforcement in a straight play to balancing singers with an orchestra in a musical. It can mean finding existing music and effects that fit the script. There’s a technical side that takes into account venue specifications, house sizes, and acoustics so that speakers are placed in a way that ensures every audience member has a similar aural experience (see “Acoustics Are the Canvas[” – posted on 3 April]). Then, of course, there are the designers who create their own soundscapes from scratch, using either music samples or completely original compositions.

Theatrical sound design has come a long way from the old days of having a stage manager or electrician backstage poised to drop a needle on a record player or hit play on a tape deck. The science and art of it have become more precise and complex, opening the doors for producers and directors to call for any number of ideas—and for designers to come up with creative and artful solutions.

The proliferation of possibilities means, as sound designer and engineer Charles Coes puts it, that there can be a perception that a sound designer is a “one-person band.”

“Being a sound designer is quite different depending on the context in which you’re doing it,” Coes explains. In film, he notes, the sound designer is the person who adds sound effects; in the music world, that’s the person who creates “a very particular sound that you hear when you press a key on a synthesizer.” But in the theatre, the phrase “becomes this catch-all.”

So while some designers are especially adept at the engineering side, at manipulating acoustics and speakers, others are particularly skilled at using microphones to reinforce actors’ voices in large venues. Where the line gets especially blurry, though, is when original music gets inserted into a non-musical play. All of a sudden the sound design job includes “composer.” [See “How to Make Theatre Scores More Cinematic,” Article 3 on 28 March.]

Elisheba Ittoop is a sound designer and composer who defines her responsibility, in its most basic terms, as “anything that makes noise in a theatre production.” The difference between her two jobs, she says, is that composing is only the creation of original music, while sound design encompasses everything on the technical side of things (speaker setup, microphones, etc.) as well as prerecorded music, sound effects, and soundscapes, and then structuring all of those aspects—including the music—in time and space.

“I feel like I’ve met a lot of people who are very pleasantly surprised, happy, excited, to find out when they interview me as a sound designer that I’m also a composer,” Ittoop says.

But a tricky conversation often follows. Indeed Ittoop had just this conversation in preparation for a rolling word-premiere production of Native Gardens that ran this year at Syracuse Stage [February and March 2019], Geva Theatre Center [Rochester, New York; March and April], and Portland [Oregon] Center Stage [May and June]. At a design conference about the production, director Melissa Crespo realized that Ittoop also composed music. It was a felicitous moment, but it led to a larger discussion.

“I initially signed on to be just the sound designer,” Ittoop recalls. “It took another week or two for us to have conversations with the powers that be. Then they were like, yeah, this makes the most sense for you to make original music for this show. So we’ll also hire you on to be the composer.”

While in this case the conversation resulted in a second contract for Ittoop, this doesn’t always happen. Some theatres go ahead and hire two separate artists, one to compose and the other to integrate the music into the larger sound design; others just see a way to save money with a two-in-one hire. But the jobs are distinct, and, as Coes explains, skimping on that separate composer contract can force the sound designer to go outside the normal scope of their job.

Of course, whether a production uses original music doesn’t always come down to a question of whether the play would benefit from it, but to whether the production can afford it. But there are no shortcuts, as Coes, a lecturer at Yale School of Drama who has designed across the country, points out: A sound designer who is mostly compositional might require the concurrent hiring of a sound supervisor or associate designer who can focus on the technical aspects. Conversely, a designer who specializes in engineering sound systems may require a composer who is more skilled at creating content.

Coes himself often works as the sound designer and engineer for Nathan A. Roberts’s music. Coes brings with him the strength on the technical side, while Roberts brings the musical know-how. That’s not to say that both artists can’t design shows alone (they have and most likely will again), but their individual strengths complement each other in a way that can maximally benefit productions.

“It’s a hard thing to convey, because you can be an extraordinary artist in one of those things and not great at another,” Coes says. “One of the things that’s very tricky is that producers and directors and collaborators don’t always know what kind of sound designers they’re looking for or how big the scope of what they’re working on is.”

One group leading the charge in these conversations around sound designers, especially those concerning proper compensation for compositional duties, is the Theatrical Sound Designers and Composers Association (TSDCA). The organization was born in 2014, when the Tony Awards suddenly eliminated the Best Sound Design category. David Budries, a co-vice chair on TSDCA’s executive board, describes that time in 2014 as a collective “WTF” moment.

“We realized that, collectively speaking, sound designers did not have a voice in this country,” Budries says. “We’re really about the intention of sound design and how to create some kind of voice for ourselves, some kind of common language, and some manner in which to both define and describe ourselves.”

TSDCA began with 17 sound designers and composers gathering informally, and has grown to include sound designers for Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional, and international productions. While United Scenic Artists Local 829 represents sound designers as a union and handles their contracts, TSDCA aims to create context for the work of sound designers, Budries says, and to find a common language to discuss their art.

“In some cases, a sound designer might be asked to come in as a sound designer, composer, musical director, arranger, all of these things, which are really four different jobs,” Budries says. “What’s that worth? If somebody’s asking you to do that, it’s probably a small company and they don’t have a lot of money. All of a sudden, you’re doing four tasks for less money than any one of those tasks might be worth in a larger professional context.”

To bridge the gap between expectation and reality for sound designers, there’s no substitute for learning the process and having honest conversations. Designer Cricket Myers notes that many young directors still view sound design as something as simple as putting together a playlist of their favorite songs.

Myers, who received a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination for her design of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, says that while there are some directors who love and understand sound, others shy away from the topic. She’s had to learn the best way to talk to directors who don’t know much about sound and may even be hesitant or intimidated by their lack of knowledge.

“I don’t need you to understand anything about music or sound,” Myers says. “Just talk to me about story. Talk to me about texture. Talk to me about tone. I know how to translate that into sound.”

Finding a shorthand with the director is part of what excites Myers about each new project she works on. One director she works with, for instance, likes to put together a playlist of different kinds of music for her sound designers, creating a glossary of tones and moods.

Ittoop, who received an MFA from the North Carolina School of the Arts, wrote her thesis on the very topic of communication with directors. She warns young sound designers to steer clear of technical jargon or talk of frequencies and decibels, urging them instead to find a discipline the director knows well and use that language.

“We have to be mindful of where the director is coming from and what they’re comfortable with,” Ittoop says. “Maybe this director is more rooted in the vocabulary of lighting or costumes. That’s why I love talking with other designers. They might have a really good in to the story, and I want to follow along to see how to flesh it out with audio.”

Ittoop recalls working on a show with a director she’d never worked with before. The set designer, who knew the director very well, asked Ittoop to hop on a call, and the two of them spent close to an hour talking about the show. Though it was a simple conversation focusing on transitions and set changes, it gave Ittoop insight into the director’s process and impulses from a designer who had worked with the director many times.

This kind of collaboration can be crucial in helping sound designers create what designer Mark Bennett refers to as the “sonic world” of the production. For Bennett, who received a Drama Desk Award for his work on 2007’s The Coast of Utopia, the sonic world helps to tell the story of the play. It may include prerecorded textures, pre-existing music, or original music, or any combination of the three. Finding and mapping this world, Bennett says, is a large part of his job as a sound designer. And because sound design is an art that takes place in real time, Bennett says, working with actors and being present during rehearsals is key.

“I would say that 80 percent of the productions I do have me in the rehearsal room with the actors on an almost full-time basis from at least two weeks before I go into tech,” Bennett says. “Some shows, I am there from the very beginning and I never leave.”

For Myers, being at the first rehearsal helps a play come alive for her. She’s able hear it spoken aloud and to experience the world of the play through her ears.

“I love hearing the cast’s voices right from the beginning,” Myers says, “getting a sense of their rhythm and their cadence. It’s really important for me, because so much of that defines what my cues are going to be. The more I can be involved in rehearsal, the better.”

This isn’t just a matter of the sound designers’ preference; directors increasingly want sound designers and composers to be in the rehearsal room as much as they can. This expectation has evolved along with technology, as designers can now create and provide more content on the spot, and edit and adjust it quickly in response to notes. Back when Bennett started in sound design in the late 1980s, notes given during tech rehearsals couldn’t be acted on immediately, and changes would have to wait until the next day.

“You had to go home,” Bennett recalls, “you had to re-record it, you had to re-edit it, you had to re-splice the tape. Now because of what the technology allows us to do, we are able to operate ‘at the speed of light’—in other words, at the speed that lighting designers can change a cue in the space in tech, we can often come as close to changing many aspects of our content.”

Sound has traveled a long way from the days when Abe Jacob got his start. After touring and doing sound for Jimi Hendrix, Peter Paul & Mary, and the Mamas and the Papas, he made the transition to Broadway and found a theatrical sound landscape far removed from both the concert world, let alone from the digital ease of today.

“Sound design in the early days was a very rough set of pieces of equipment that didn’t always sound as good as we would have liked it to,” Jacob recalls. There was a different division of labor too: “The stage manager was the one who used to go and pull whatever sound effects from the prerecorded libraries and give them to the electrician. He would make the tape, and the electrician would hit playback on the stage manager’s cues.”

That electrician, Jacob explains, would be backstage operating the sound. From his experience working in concerts, Jacob changed the setup. He knew that someone needed to be out in the house to hear exactly what the audience was hearing. It was a simple change, but it signaled a larger movement toward designing shows around how the audience experiences the sound in the space.

Jacob doesn’t make himself out to be the most important figure, the “founding father” of sound design. He credits the concert and movie worlds for improvements in equipment, and acknowledges that other designers were working while he was; they just didn’t happen to get the elusive title of “sound designer.”

“It legitimized the work that we were doing,” Jacob says of receiving the credit. “It put us in keeping with the other disciplines of design so that producers, directors, and to some extent the audience began to realize that sound design was an important and vital part of the theatre world.”

Efforts to gain respect for sound as its own design discipline got a boost in 2008 when the Tony Award Administration Committee began to give them their own award—then abruptly suffered a setback when the committee reversed its decision and eliminated the category in 2014. (They changed course yet again, reinstating the award in 2017.) Budries, who chairs the sound design program at Yale School of Drama, had been brought in to talk to the American Theatre Wing when the initial decision was made to introduce the award.

Budries recalls explaining to the Wing at that time what the possibilities were and what to listen for during productions. Members of the Wing nodded and clapped and said the presentation was wonderful, Budries says. More than a decade later, even though the award category has been reinstated, Budries isn’t sure how much of his talk stuck with them.

“There’s a big challenge there, because there are so many ways to interpret sound in our world,” Budries says. “I mean, do they like it? Okay, they give it the award. I think it’s going to be another generation or so before we get people who really understand sound design in award granting situations.”

Despite the frustration, many sound designers get why it’s difficult for some to evaluate their art. Sound design sits right on the line between supporting and enhancing what’s onstage, while managing not to be distracting. Other design disciplines are crafted to be seen, but sound design must make its impact while remaining invisible. A phenomenal sound design is hard to notice because it will blend perfectly with the cast’s work.

“If you find yourself listening to the underscoring instead of listening to the actor,” Myers continues, “then we haven’t done our job. A really good sound design doesn’t draw attention to itself.”

This is even true when there’s a lot of sound, as in a rock musical. As with any musical, you want to be able to hear the singers, she points out. But it’s a rock musical—the band should be loud. A mediocre sound design would make the vocals heard by making the band quieter, but a great sound design keeps the lyrics reasonably clear while maintaining the rock aesthetic.

“There’s a style and there’s aesthetic and there’s a design choice to the way the music sounds in a room,” Myers says. “Which I think a lot of people don’t pay attention to. They say, ‘Oh, I could hear it.’ Which is good. But there’s a lot more to it.”

Proper evaluation of the aesthetic choices made by sound designers goes back to understanding and appreciating their different capabilities. There’s an art to audio reinforcement and using microphones and speakers, allowing conversational and intimate dialogue to be heard with crystal clarity. And there’s an art to crafting transition music and underscoring that pull from the emotional context of one scene and propel the audience into the next moment.

Perhaps Budries is right—it will take another generation before there are leaders in place who can truly and effectively evaluate sound designers. But theatre is a naturally aural experience. Every sound, or even the absence of sound, is an aesthetic choice by a designer. It’s their art, and it’s an art that remains a pivotal part of any production. Over the next generation Budries referred to, producers and audiences would do well to stay attuned to the way that art can bolster a production.

“When there’s a consistency of actor, story, direction, lighting, costume, scenery projection, all of the physical elements, the tactile elements with the ephemeral elements,” Budries says, “when there’s a consistency and everybody’s telling the same story, then, all of a sudden—I feel like it’s very, very successful.”

Hear, hear. 

[FYI: TSDCA’s mailing address is P.O. Box 25653, Chicago, IL 60625-9998; its website is https://tsdca.org/.  The site doesn’t provide an e-mail address, but the Contact page (https://tsdca.org/contact/) has an app for submitting questions which will be answered via your e-mail.

[I hope readers have enjoyed this re-presentation of “Hear, Hear,” and perhaps even learned something about the art of sound design.  As I observed in my introduction to the first installment, I occasionally post articles discussing work in the theater about which most audience members (and even some pros) don’t know much.  Sound design, as it happens, is one aspect of theater with which I, myself, am unfamiliar—at least in the specific details of the art. 

[I’ve been around theater long enough that I figure that if I don’t know something . . . well, then many others are also likely to be ignorant about it as well.  If my assumption is correct, I trust some of the clouds have been lifted as a consequence of reading American Theatre’s excellent coverage.]

"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Articles 3 & 4

 

[Welcome to the second entry in my republication of American Theatre’s July/August 2019 series on sound design.  The two articles below will discuss the use of background music in “straight” theater the way moviemakers use it and the various ways a young sound designer can learn the practical lessons of the art.  

[The articles in this series aren’t linked contextually, but they all treat the same general subject.  Each article has advice, lore, and recommendations (including references and sources of information) that can be helpful or just edifying.  So I recommend going back to 25 March and picking up articles 1 and 2 in the series either before or after reading articles 3 and 4 posted below.

[The remaining four articles in this collection will be posted at three-day intervals through 9 April.  I hope you will read all of them.]

 

“HOW TO MAKE THEATRE SCORES MORE CINEMATIC”
by Caitlyn Halvorsen 

Composer Jeremy Douglass was inspired by video games to create underscoring that reacts in real time to the action onstage.

It’s a common experience at the movies: You’re sitting in your seat, tense with anticipation, and at a pivotal moment the camera closes in on the hero while the music swells in the background. In films, a musical score is as integral as camera angles and lighting. It emphasizes and undergirds the action, sets the tone for a scene, and even tells us how to feel in a particular moment. While it’s rarer in theatre, more and more non-musical plays are using composers for similar purposes: Imogen Heap’s score for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, for instance, has generated as much buzz as the magical effects. 

According to Florida-based composer Jeremy Douglass, when it comes to scoring straight plays: “You have to just stay out of the way.” Much like other design elements in a theatrical production, underscoring is most effective when it amplifies the action onstage without distracting from it. 

But while a film composer will score based on footage that’s already been filmed, in the theatre it’s usually the other way around. Most of the time the sound designer or composer is at work before the performers have even put the show on its feet. While a lighting shift can usually be triggered in real time by a specific line or action, a show’s score cannot operate in the same way. As unpredictability is a defining element of live performance, it is nearly impossible for a piece of recorded music to specifically reflect the shifts in mood or tone throughout a live scene, because, as Douglass says, “You’re just pressing play.” That means that composers for stage plays are often confined to creating scores that are static, cautious, even bland. “You have to distill a complicated scene down to its most basic element and hope that it works, hope that it informs the audience,” says Douglass. While there is always the option to have live musicians plays along with the action, a la the string quartet in the recent Broadway production [of King Lear, 4 April-9 June 2019 at the Cort Theatre], sitting onstage playing music by Philip Glass, that’s an expensive option with its own instrumental limitations.

Frustrated by these constraints, Douglass discovered a potential solution when he was asked to score Hedda, Lucy Kirkwood’s adaptation of Ibsen’s 19th-century drama, at Jobsite Theater in Tampa, Fla. Director Stuart Fail sent Douglass a copy of the script marked with moments to be accompanied by music. Douglass was concerned, as many of those moments occurred during scenes of tension between the characters. He remembered thinking: “How am I gonna write music for this scene with all these shifting emotions if we’re just gonna press play and not choreograph to the music?” 

Unsure how to approach the task, a source of inspiration came to Douglass from another medium entirely: video games. Specifically, the 2014 survival horror game Alien: Isolation. In the game, players must hide from the title creature, with the alien’s proximity to the player indicated by how many layers of music are playing. One layer may include screechy violins, another the rumble of brass instruments. Douglass describes the game’s underscoring as “orchestral tension music,” minus melodies or chord changes. Because it lacks traditional musical development, the layers of the score “can start and stop at any moment within their own loop and it doesn’t sound like it’s starting in the middle,” resulting in music that feels reactive to the player’s every move. Douglass says that this type of composition has been used in video games for a long time, but he was unsure if anyone had tried adapting the style for theatre. Regardless, it seemed like the perfect solution to his uncertainty about scoring Hedda.

So how does this method work? Compositionally it requires a particular style made up of multiple layers of music, with each layer containing “elliptical phrases, these loops that repeat over and over again,” says Douglass. “They don’t have a beginning, they don’t have an end. You can fade a loop up at any moment, and it sounds like the beginning, just because now is the first time you’ve heard it.” The loops must be composed so that they can be played in any combination at a time, whether it be a single loop, three loops, or every loop in the composition. The composer must also decide which combination of loops, or layers, should play during a specific moment. This layering is what creates the musical development of the underscore, replacing what is traditionally fulfilled by melodies and chord changes.

Douglass cites the music of composer Bernard Herrmann, a frequent Alfred Hitchcock collaborator and master of loop-like motifs to create tension, as a major inspiration for his music choices in Hedda. The loops heard in Douglass’s score feature the instruments of a small string orchestra, a purposefully traditional soundscape that befits the domestic drama happening onstage. “We’ve already given orchestra a space in cinematic underscore,” Douglass explains. “Everybody’s comfortable with it—it’s a character we all know.” 

Then, during the performances of Hedda, the loops were programmed into the scene using QLab, a program designed for running sound and light cues that is commonly used in theatres. Using QLab allowed Douglass and sound designer Matthew Ray to program in advance the rate at which different tracks fade in and out, whether it be an immediate change or one gradually happening over 30 seconds—so it could better match the pace of the live scene. Then during performances, an operator only needs to press a button.

Douglass notes that, while looping programs such as Ableton Live exist, using QLab for the underscoring tracks is a more efficient option, as the tracks can run alongside lights or sound effects also in the program. “No special skills are needed if the company already uses QLab,” Douglass wrote in an email. “A lighting tech can run it, because in the end it works just like lights.”

The biggest challenge Douglass and Ray encountered during the process involved volume levels. The levels, or sound intensities, of each track had to be adjusted so that when all of the tracks play together it didn’t overwhelm the dialogue. For Hedda, Douglass set these levels in Logic Pro, the program he used to compose the score. Once the files were transported to QLab, however, making the levels consistent between cues became tricky.

“Music Cue 1 maybe has 10 tracks, and all of the tracks have been exported at different volumes depending on how I want those tracks to be blended when you turn them up,” Douglass says. “So that makes it difficult to keep the levels for each music cue consistent. If Music Cue 2, when all tracks are playing, is still too quiet compared to Music Cue 1 when all tracks are playing, we have to go through and bring up the levels of each track in Music Cue 2 so they match Music Cue 1.” Douglass believes this complication can be avoided in the future by waiting to adjust the levels of the tracks until the files are in QLab.

The next production he hopes to use this approach on is Steve Martin’s Meteor Shower at Jobsite, which he plans to give a contemporary sound with more modern instruments. To help other composers and sound designers who are trying to figure out how to better underscore a play, Douglass plans to create a series of videos outlining his process, so that they feel, as he does, that “you now have infinite control over music developing into a scene.” Score! 

[Caitlyn Halvorsen is a dramaturg and writer based in the Hudson Valley. A former editorial intern for American Theatre, she is currently working as the education intern for Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, New York. She is a recent graduate of SUNY New Paltz’s Theatre Design and Technology program.

[On 3 and 6 March 2014, I posted an article on The Shaliko Company’s Strangers, an avant-garde performance piece composed by Leonardo Shapiro, the troupe’s director, and his company.  Strangers had a live score composed by jazz percussionist Max Roach.  In performance, Roach’s composition, which was part of what Shapiro called the “instrumental track” of the production, was improvised by a musician seated within view of the spectators at the edge of the performance space.]

*  *  *  *
“AURAL LEARNING”
By Jerald Raymond Pierce

Whether you learn at school or on the job, success as a sound design doesn’t follow an easy track.

When you’re in high school, sound design can seem so simple. There’s nothing too complicated, after all, about plugging an iPod or computer into a mixing board and cranking up the volume; even if you’re using a program like QLab, it’s still mostly press and play. But that’s not really sound design, of course, any more than high school acting is really acting. The training involved to do it on a professional level involves learning about music, science, script analysis, and even social skills.

While educators at both undergraduate and graduate levels agree that going through an official sound design training program isn’t the only way to make it in the industry, training can definitely allow for a smoother entrance into an already difficult field. Those who hope to make a living as a sound designer may find themselves working on anywhere from 10 to 20 shows in a year, if they can get the gigs. Chicago-based sound designer Victoria Deiorio, who runs a sound design program she helped create at DePaul University in Chicago, offered a general disclaimer: Sound design is a tough career, and, like many creative jobs, should be something you really want to do if you’re going to pursue it. Deiorio added that the difference between going to school or learning on the job depends on where a young sound designer wants to put their “safety net.”

“In school,” said Deiorio, “you have the ability to make missteps and crumble, in a sense, without too much consequence on whether you’re going to get paid, whether [or] not you’re going to have a job, or whether or not you will have burned a bridge. It’s an environment where you can test things out without too much consequence if you fail.”

In school, the room to fail includes the chance to experiment with different levels of equipment—not always the state-of-the-art digital sound boards, necessarily, as that’s not the reality out in the world—and to branch out artistically. Since sound designers are responsible for taking audiences on an aural and emotional journey, Deiorio added that an interest in human nature is important when deciding to work in the theatre.

“You have to really understand history and anthropology and sociology and psychology and the physiology of how sound waves hit the body,” said Deiorio, who authored The Art of Theatrical Sound Design: A Practical Guide, a sound design training book. “If you like all of those things, then it’s definitely the career for you. If you like psycho-acoustics then it’s totally the career for you.”

Expecting to find young designers or students with a knowledge of all of those areas is a tall task. That’s why programs like the masters program David Budries runs at the Yale School of Drama set out to find students of varying backgrounds and interests to complement each other. With just three students chosen per class, Budries said he tries to get one student who is more oriented toward the technological and engineering side of sound design, one who leans more toward musical composition, and one who falls somewhere in between.

“I have discovered over the years that the integration of different ideas, different dramaturgical approaches, just different mindsets is hugely important to the diversity of the individual classes,” Budries said.

In the classroom, those differing voices are able to bounce ideas off each other and grow based on the strengths of their fellow students. Deiorio, who had conversations with Budries, among others, as she crafted DePaul’s undergraduate sound design curriculum, also employs this strategy, noting that varied voices are crucial as the sound design field moves toward diversifying its workforce. Porsche McGovern’s HowlRound study of design positions in League of Resident Theatre (LORT) theatres between 2012 and 2017 found that 86.4 percent of sound designers were men, and that those men took up 89 percent of all sound design jobs. (The number jumps to 96 percent if you look at Broadway employment during the 2017-18 season, according to data collected by ProductionPro.)

More variety in the background and interests of sound design students means that the training programs are able to provide a necessarily comprehensive training in all things “sound design and engineering” while also allowing students the flexibility to explore their specialties and affinities. According to sound designer Sun Hee (Sunny) Kil, assistant professor at SUNY New Paltz, computer software like Logic Pro and Garage Band makes it easier for students to craft music and soundscapes. While it’s not essential that all students come out as expert composers, it’s important that they have the tools to realize their ideas.

“Students need to get trained to express the emotions or drama in each scene,” Kil explained. “Only sound can make the emotions. We are the psychologists, we are the manipulators—we are the people who can tell the story and really tie it to the audience.”

To that end Kil has her students study music, theatre, and piano, all to help learn the connection between the aural world and human emotion. Students also have to take engineering and physics classes too to better understand the science of sound. As Kil pointed out, “There are many sound engineers who have no sound education out there; they start learning from the shop or touring companies.” Kil said those engineers are missing out on important foundational knowledge.

That’s not to say that bypassing traditional schooling, or joining the sound design game late, can’t work out in the end. Deiorio herself was a ballet dancer who pursued musical theatre as an undergraduate. She had moved to Chicago thinking she’d be an actor and director (she still occasionally does both), but the sound design world, she says, “chose her.” She considers her first three years working in the field to have been her training. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, then, that Deiorio, in both her book and her program, emphasizes teaching young sound designers how to collaborate and express themselves.

“I remember there were times that I did things or said things that were my young, rash mind—what I thought was the right thing at the time,” Deiorio confessed. “You burn bridges. I didn’t want that to happen for the sound designers who were starting out.” She hopes to give her students the ability to clearly and diplomatically “speak to why you want something in a show or why something may not be the best fit for the delivery of that emotion to an audience.”

Effective communication of ideas becomes even more important when considering how difficult it can be for young sound designers to prove their worth to new companies. Sound engineering and soundscapes are so intrinsically tied to their productions that simply playing a director or producer a sound can’t possibly carry the same weight as that sound did in the context of a play.

Kil, who served as the associate sound designer for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, recommends that young designers put together a website and portfolio of photos and documentation from previous productions. She advises students, if they didn’t compose the music, to take pictures and include diagrams so people can see the size of the production and the setup. Then, as sound designer Jeremy Lee says, comes talking about that work.

“As a sound designer,” said Lee, former head of the sound design program at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, “you have to get really good at communicating your ideas clearly. The people who are going to be hiring you as a designer are directors and producers, so they want to know what your process is.” 

Lee notes that summer stock theatres and internships that rely on student talent pools are great opportunities to build relationships with more experienced sound designers. (Kil equates this to the restaurant industry—it’s smart to work in a restaurant and see how it’s run before trying to own your own place.) Those connections, in a world as small as the theatre world, may be conversation starters in interviews down the line. Once out of school and working in the industry, Lee explained, it’s all about who you’ve known and worked with and the relationships that have been built.

Once relationships are established, the skills learned as a sound designer can translate to jobs in many entertainment industries, not just legit theatre. Deiorio said she’s had students go on to work on cruise ships, with Cirque du Soleil, and even intern at Kirkegaard Associates, an acoustics and a/v consulting firm. Television, film, gaming, and animation are all open to theatrical sound design students because, as Deiorio noted, the students already know how to tell a story and find that story’s emotional value.

To get there, though? It comes down to meeting people and putting in the work. Deiorio said she encourages her students “to be lifelong learners. You can learn from every single person you work with.” If you’re willing to listen, of course.

[Jerald Raymond Pierce is the associate editor of American Theatre. He studied acting at Ohio University and received his M.A. in arts journalism from Syracuse University. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association, he is also a freelance reviewer for the Chicago Tribune. 

[Article 5 in this sound design series will be posted on Wednesday, 31 March.  It discusses the measures theaters can use to counter potential interference with wireless microphones on their stages. I hope ROTters will come back to read this examination.]

"Despite the Pandemic, It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like 'Christmas Carol'"

 by Jerald Raymond Pierce

[For weeks now, I’ve been seeing television commercials for a solo performance of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol featuring Tony-winning actor Jefferson Mays channeling at least 50 characters.  As you’ll see from Jerald Raymond Pierce’s report “Despite the Pandemic, It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like ‘Christmas Carol’” (American Theatre 3 Dec. 2020, https://www.americantheatre.org/2020/12/03/despite-the-pandemic-its-beginning-to-look-a-lot-like-christmas-carol/), posted below, Mays’s adaptation is just one of many renderings of the Dickens classic across the country during this pandemic-dominated holiday season. 

[(For more about Mays, see my report on “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” posted on Rick On Theater on 16 October 2014, and “The Front Page,” 16 November 2016; and the compilation “Jefferson Mays, Chameleonic Actor,” 31 October 2014.  AT also has a 2018 interview with Mays on his Dickensian production by Diep Tran, “Jefferson Mays Is Doing ‘A Christmas Carol,’ By Himself,” at https://www.americantheatre.org/2018/11/06/jefferson-mays-is-doing-a-christmas-carol-by-himself/.)

[Mays’s staging is a filmed version that began streaming worldwide beginning 28 November.  It was adapted by Mays and his wife Susan Lyons, and two-time Tony-nominee Michael Arden (Spring Awakening, Once On This Island), who also directed; Mays conceived the piece with Tony-nominee Dane Laffrey.  The production was filmed at New York City’s United Palace, a cultural and performing arts center in Washington Heights, and is based on the 2018 world première at Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse.

[At the time of his interview two years ago, long before the coronavirus made its devastating appearance, Mays declared:

I think [Christmas Carol] is probably the greatest secular humanist text ever written.  It’s particularly useful now to be reminded about things like charity and mercy and forbearance and benevolence and kindness and decency, and to ask the questions, “What makes a good life?  What is important in life?”  The basic human touchstones.  I think it’s useful to be reminded of them.

[How much more significant are all those issues now!  They apply not only while we’re suffering under the burdensome restrictions of COVID-19, but its threat to our health and lives—and, at the same time, we’re experiencing a rocky transition of political leadership that threatens our very governmental and social system. 

[That may be precisely why A Christmas Carol is such a popular holiday offering perennially—and why so many theaters around the country put in the often prodigious effort to bring the story to their audiences this year.  Here’s Pierce’s round-up of the innovative ways American theaters are meeting that perceived need.]

Amid the constraints of social distancing, perhaps more urgently because of them, many U.S. theatres are finding ways to bring audiences an annual dose of Dickens.

A tradition unlike any other. No, not the Masters, despite Jim Nantz’s claim to the trademarked phrase. Annually, theatres across the country mount renditions of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a holiday production that can anchor a theatre financially, opening doors for bigger artistic risks in the rest of the season. But in the middle of a pandemic, when wallets are tight enough as it is, many theatres are keeping the tradition alive—less because of its potential box-office bounty than because, after nine months in a punishing pandemic, a story celebrating compassion and charity feels sorely needed. And after nearly a year of canceled performances, maintaining or reconstituting the connection between theatres and audiences doesn’t hurt either, even as some of the pain of this time is finding its way into some theatres’ adaptations.

“It’s a beloved tradition,” said Milwaukee Repertory Theater artistic director Mark Clements (he/him) of his theatre’s production, which brings in nearly 40,000 people annually. “People always call it a cash cow. It’s actually not as big of a cash cow as people think, but it’s an important stream of income. The tradition is very, very important in Milwaukee. It’s often the first live theatre experience outside of say children’s theatre that a lot of kids have access to.”

To keep Milwaukee Rep’s 46-year tradition of producing an Ebenezer Scrooge ghost story alive, the theatre had originally planned to present Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol, Tom Mula’s one-person adaptation, which follows Marley’s effort to redeem his former business partner, in front of a socially distanced live audience. But with the coronavirus showing no signs of slowing down, the theatre canceled live performances of the Clements-directed Mula adaptation, and did as many theatres have done this year: They shifted to a digital option.

The plan is now to record the Lee E. Ernst-starring one-person version of Carol. Clements, in an interview before the Thanksgiving holiday, joked that despite them being three weeks into rehearsal, he only ever saw Ernst’s eyes in the rehearsal room, due to mask safety measures. The production, which Clements said they were aiming at recording on stage on Dec. 5 with a soundscape from foley artist Dan Kazemi, will run Dec. 10-24 at $20 per household.

Milwaukee Rep is not alone in its need to cancel in-person plans, nor is it alone in offering a one-person adaptation in a year where human interaction onstage is more worrisome than jolly. In Staunton, Va., American Shakespeare Center was similarly faced with the reality of needing to cancel performances for an in-person audience [see my Rick On Theater reports on this company dated 18 and 21 Nov. 2009 and the NewsHour report posted on ROT on 18 Oct. 2020]. Their adjustment, though, has been to use a small ensemble who have been in a “work bubble” for a production that will stream live on Dec. 4 before being available on ASC’s streaming service BlkFrsTV.

The most notable of the one-person offerings is of course the version adapted by and starring Tony winner Jefferson Mays, which was released on Nov. 28 [see the ROT profile of Mays on 31 Oct. 2014]. With proceeds benefiting community and regional theatre impacted by COVID-19, theatres across the country have signed on to bring the production to their audiences, including Huntington Theatre Company, La Jolla Playhouse, Geffen Playhouse, South Coast Repertory, and more. 

For its part, Milwaukee Rep’s digital plans didn’t stop with the one Christmas Carol. As Clements explained, the theatre also wanted to make sure the show would be available for children, and to underrepresented areas of the city who would normally be able to see the production for free through Milwaukee Rep programming. So, through Dec. 24, Milwaukee Rep is offering its 2016 production of A Christmas Carol, adapted and directed by Clements, to view online for free for anyone looking for the large-cast iteration they know and love. 

Meanwhile, Writers Theatre in Glencoe, Ill., has also gone the double offering route with its Two Scrooges: A Christmas Carol, Two Ways. The first is a one-person show starring artistic director Michael Halberstam in his adaptation of A Christmas Carol, last seen onstage in 2008. The production, directed by Stanton Long, will run Dec. 8-Jan. 3, 2021, with tickets ranging $15-$50, depending on the number of viewers.

The second is a co-commissioned adaptation from Chicago’s Manual Cinema, Chicago’s acclaimed performance collective, known for their shadow puppetry and cinematic techniques. They don’t typically find themselves in a position to take on the classic Dickens tale, due to touring conflicts, according to Julia Miller (she/her), one of the company’s five co-artistic directors. This year, a combination of the constraints of the pandemic and the troupe’s love for The Muppet Christmas Carol opened the door for the company to try its hand, so to speak.

As Miller explained, Manual Cinema’s production has been created not to distract from the reality of pandemic limitations or shy away from Zoom fatigue, but to embrace the reality of how many families are gathering this year. Using Zoom as a frame, their undertaking follows the fictional Aunt Trudy as she attempts to perform A Christmas Carol, a task usually taken on by her partner, who died earlier in the year, over Zoom.

“We’re trying to speak directly to the fact that people can’t celebrate holidays this year together in the same way,” Miller explained. “She’s trying to carry on his memory and the tradition for the family, and then goes on her own Scrooge-like self-discovery of learning that family is important and connecting is important even though it’s not possible to do it in person. I hope people find a little comfort and a little connection through our adaptation of the show.”

Manual Cinema’s Christmas Carol, co-written by Miller and her co-artistic directors Drew Dir, Sarah Fornace, Ben Kauffman, and Kyle Vegter, with puppet design by Dir and Lizi Breit, is scheduled to run through Dec. 20, with ticket prices starting at $15. The production will be performed live from Manual Cinema’s studio, which posed a challenge for a group used to performing with five or six puppeteers and four or five musicians in close proximity. Working through safety procedures that include separating musicians from puppeteers from Aunt Trudy, each in their own individual corners of the space, Manual Cinema’s world premiere production will be presented all over the country through university and regional theatre co-commissioners and presenting partners.

Similarly not shying away from the Zoom realities of 2020 is Houston’s Alley Theatre, which is offering a virtual production of A Christmas Carol featuring actors who have filmed themselves in their homes with props, costumes, and equipment delivered to their door. This Doris Baizley adaptation follows a company of actors who, without their sets, attempt to tell a holiday story despite the circumstances. (The Cratchits [. . .] are all played by members of the same family, who’ve been “bubbling” together.)

As the situation evolved around the Alley’s production plans—seeing the anticipated Carol go from plans for socially distanced performances in a theatre to a virtual at-home reality—artistic director Rob Melrose (he/him) said the company worked with Baizley to adjust lines to adapt to the pandemic’s restrictions. Then, Melrose explained, managing director Dean Gladden had the idea to offer it as a free holiday gift to the Houston community and beyond.

“We already have 90,000 registrations for people to see it,” Melrose said in November. “It’s already going to be the most seen Alley production in our 74-year history.”

Additionally, Melrose said, this production is gearing up to be the Alley’s most accessible production in other ways, with subtitles translated into multiple languages. The free production will run Dec. 4-27. Melrose pointed out that one value of A Christmas Carol is that it asks and allows audience members to annually take stock in their lives and reflect on what they have.

“It’s a show that really makes you count your blessings and be grateful for the gift of life, the community you have, and the family you have around you,” said Melrose. “It makes sense why people come back to it year after year, and why it’s so particularly important this year.”

Many theatres are bringing that annual introspection directly into the home through digital offerings. Hartford Stage in Connecticut is bringing theatremakers and community neighbors together to create A Community Carol, to stream live for free on Dec. 17, followed by a four-day on-demand streaming period. Summoners Ensemble Theatre in New York City is working with the historic Merchant’s House Museum to stream a classic retelling of A Christmas Carol filmed in the storied city landmark. The Summoners Ensemble production will stream Dec. 18-24 for free, with a suggested donation of $30 for those able to give.

Those interested in something a little off the beaten path may be interested in People’s Light’s offering of A Christmas Carol in concert, featuring original music from Zak Berkman, carols, and readings from Dickens’ work, streaming Dec. 8-Jan. 3, 2021, with tickets starting at $25. Or, if extremely strapped for time but still jonesing for a holiday treat, NY Classical Theatre is presenting a reunion reading of A {15-Min!} Christmas Carol. Two actors, with the help of everything from puppets to wooden spoons, will tell the story of Scrooge, as adapted and directed by Stephen Burdman. The free production will stream Dec. 17-20. 

When artistic director Sarah Rasmussen (she/her) joined the McCarter Theatre Center in August, the conversation around Carol had already begun to shift away from in-person possibilities and to ideas of how the company could share the story with patrons at home. The thought of sharing the script for families to enjoy came up. But while some families might enjoy the DIY experience, the McCarter wondered if others would find the idea of having a full two-act play dropped in their laps during the holidays a bit overwhelming.

“I started to circle around the idea of an at-home ritual,” Rasmussen said, “where there’d be some abridged readings from this beloved story, but then also a way for people to engage with each other and really reflect on both the story and this extraordinarily challenging year.”

The result, Rasmussen explained, was to create something along the lines of A Christmas Carol meets a seder. The McCarter created gift boxes people could purchase that had abridged scripts, suggestions on doubling parts depending on the size of the family, and conversation cards that featured a Dickens quote on one side and a discussion prompt on the other. From there, families can allow their creativity to run wild with the story while simultaneously being able to reflect on meaningful questions.

“What we love about live performance is that something surprising can happen,” Rasmussen said. “I love the idea of people at home maybe seeing someone in their friends or family group acting who they wouldn’t expect to see acting, or hearing answers that might illuminate things about relationships. It’s really about gratitude and giving back to one’s community, and that feels very poignant in the winter of 2020.”

Rasmussen noted that not only have families bought these boxes for themselves, they’ve also had boxes shipped to family members so that far-flung relations can participate together over Zoom. The popularity of the McCarter’s A Christmas Carol @Home has resulted in a sell-out of available boxes by the early days of December. After all, Rasmussen said, in a year like this, many people are simply looking to create some sense of normalcy and a creative way to do that has been to find new ways to bring families together.

If a family is still itching to get out of the house for their dose of Dickens, some companies are turning to the drive-in for their winter tradition. In addition to its streaming option, American Shakespeare Center is offering a filmed performance as a drive-in movie presentation on Dec. 12 and Dec. 20 in Lexington, Va., and as a classic cinema experience through Visulite Cinemas Dec. 18-24. In Atlanta, Alliance Theatre has turned to the drive-in to present A Christmas Carol: The Live Radio Play, co-adapted by Leora Morris and Ben Coleman, with Morris directing. Staged for the first time as an interactive drive-in experience, the Alliance production will run Dec. 4-23, with tickets beginning at $50 per car.

Meanwhile, if it’s an aural Carol that will satisfy your holiday yearning, theatres across the country have that option at the ready too. Chicago’s Goodman Theatre is streaming Tom Creamer’s adaptation of the tale, directed by Jessica Thebus and featuring an all-Chicago cast, for free through Dec. 31. And San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater is streaming Carey Perloff and Paul Walsh’s adaptation, A Christmas Carol: On Air, Dec. 4-31 with tickets ranging from $40-60. Peter J. Kuo will direct.

The St. Louis Shakespeare Festival is combining the urge to get out of the house with a unique audio experience, created by the Q Brothers Collective. A Walking Xmas Carol invites audience members to take a 21-stop stroll by window displays designed by PaintedBlack STL, a group that earlier this year worked with local Black artists to paint murals on boarded-up businesses. Artistic director Tom Ridgley (he/him) and company had also worked with PaintedBlack STL on A Late Summer Night’s Stroll, which featured curated archways, loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s midsummer tale, for participants to walk through.

“When we were looking ahead to the holidays,” Ridgely said, “we knew it was going to be a long, hard road, without so much of what makes that time of year festive, enjoyable, and even bearable. The holidays can be a rough time for folks. The same way it felt like people over the summer were hungering for something like that, it seemed like, what can we do that will give people a chance to get out in the distant presence of other people and experience something in real life?”

Of all the activities that can feel at least somewhat safe during COVID-19, Ridgely noted, taking walks has been one that has kept a lot of people sane. So, Ridgely, PaintedBlack STL, and company went about transforming vacant storefronts into a way to experience the beauty of A Christmas Carol. And having already worked with the Chicago-based Q Brothers on Dress the Part, the troupe’s take on Two Gentlemen of Verona, to start the year, Ridgley said they had already been discussing bringing the collective’s take on Dickens to St. Louis.

With an audio companion recorded by the Q Brothers serving as a story guide, participants have the opportunity to use QR codes placed at each window display and their phones to take a walking tour through a contemporary take on the holiday classic. The experience, running through Dec. 23, is free for all those who are interested.

There’s something comforting about a slew of Christmas Carol productions popping up throughout the country at this fraught time—something familiar and welcome. Perhaps it’s just the underlying longing for some sense of normalcy that theatrical traditions can provide. After all, companies across the country are also still finding ways to mount The Nutcracker, even if that means streaming it on the side of a building. But there’s still something grounding about A Christmas Carol that goes beyond the Tiny Tims and Scrooges who take the stage every year. It’s the gathering: of family, friends, and theatremakers around a story that begs us all to take stock of what we share while we have it. In a year where feeling distant is all too common, it’s refreshing to be able to come together a little closer, even virtually, around a common theme. Dickens bless us, everyone.

[Jerald Raymond Pierce is associate editor at American Theatre.  He studied acting at Ohio University and received his M.A. in arts journalism from Syracuse University.  A member of the American Theatre Critics Association (ATCA), Pierce is also a freelance reviewer for the Chicago Tribune.]

"Light The Lights: A Focus On Lighting Design," Article 7

[The July/August 2018 issue of the Theatre Communications Group’s American Theatre (vol. 35, no. 6) contained three special articles spotlighting (if you will) lighting design in the theater.  On AT’s on-line site (https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/light-the-lights-a-focus-on-lighting-design/), the forum was expanded to include five additional articles.  As part of my on-going interest in posting articles about theater professions and arts that many spectators (and even some pros) don’t know much about, I’ve collected the eight AT articles, covering diverse aspects of the art of lighting design, which I’ll finish posting on Rick On Theater today and next week.  Post seven in the AT series on the lighting arts is another article from the print edition of American Theatre, Jerald Raymond Pierce’s “Charge of the LED Brigade,” a look at the latest lighting technology for the stage.]

Theatre is as much a visual as a verbal medium, and among the key perceptual guides not only to what we see but how we see it are theatrical lighting designers. Though it’s only been officially recognized as its own distinct profession since the 1940s, the manipulation of light and its properties has been an integral part of theatremaking since its beginning. This special issue looks at the latest developments in the craft and technology of illumination through the eyes of some of its leading practitioners.

“CHARGE OF THE LED BRIGADE”

by Jerald Raymond Pierce

Tomorrow’s lighting technology is already here, though the changeover is not yet complete.

Theatre has come a long way from the days when “lighting” meant the ability to manipulate or work around the movement of the sun. Now theatres have extensive grids that allow designers to hang and focus tens and hundreds of lights to conjure everything from bright sunlight to a candlelit dinner, and all points in between.

Until fairly recently, if you walked into any given theatre that was setting up for tech, you’d often see a lighting designer up on a ladder on the stage, possibly with an assistant down below. They’d hang one, two, maybe a third instrument and focus all of them on the same area. One area, three lights, each with its own gel—specific colors selected to provide a warm or cool or specialized light, as the case may be.

Now you might see something a little different, as theatre is in the midst of a fundamental lighting change—one that will narrow those three instruments down to one, and make them at least partly remotely adjustable. The change has a bulky official name, Light Emitting Diode, but everyone knows it as LED.

“They’re great time-savers,” said lighting designer Kathy A. Perkins of the lighting technology that is sweeping the field. “Where I used to double-hang and triple-hang down and back light, I only do it with one light source. I’m hanging fewer lights, I’m having to focus fewer lights, and it gives me more time in tech.”

This shift will see most if not all of the traditional lighting instruments in theatres replaced with LED lights, which designers previously kept at arm’s length. About a decade ago, around 2007 and 2008, LED lights were just starting to hit stages around the world. In a 2010 interview, Tony Award-winning lighting designer Kevin Adams discussed his use of LEDs in Spring Awakening, Next to Normal, and American Idiot. At the time he used them primarily as a way to light background surfaces, he explained, and as lights to point at the audience. Specifically citing the color that LEDs were able to produce, Adams said that it was “a little bit tricky to get a variety of colors that look handsome on skin.”

That has begun to change. Around the time Adams was using LEDs mainly for supplementary lighting, Electronic Theatre Controls, Inc. (ETC) acquired the Selador product line from Selador co-founders Rob Gerlach and Novella Smith. This game-changing acquisition meant that LEDs, once possessed of a simple red/green/blue combination, could containing seven different colors, thus increasing the nuance available to designers.

Color is the key to LEDs’ appeal, as Michael Lincoln, a lighting designer and professor at Ohio University, explained, and it’s hard to understate how fundamental a change they’re making in the way lighting designers work. “We’ve never had a source before that instantly changes color, that you didn’t have to have some mechanical means of changing the color,” Lincoln marveled.

With incandescent instruments designers must place color gels in front of the light to change the color of the light onstage—the equivalent of draping a scarf over a lamp to set up lighting for a party. And to change the color, the gel either needs to be changed, or another light with a different gel has to be employed. But LEDs change colors digitally, both in the original red/blue/green models and the newer seven-colored instruments.

Lincoln, who has designed more than 300 productions on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in regional theatre, raved about the “crazy amount of control” that designers have with LEDs. Previously Lincoln had to use what he called “scrollers” if he wanted one incandescent instrument to create different colors during the course of a show. These attachments for the front of lighting instruments allow designers to scroll among multiple different color gels, in a programmed sequence, usually changing over repeatedly throughout a performance.

The trick, and the difficulty, comes in those changeovers. Because scrollers aren’t instantaneous, Lincoln said, a lighting designer needs to carefully figure out when to take a light out so that the machine has time to scroll to the next color—not a terribly quick process sometimes—before the light comes back up. Poor timing, or just a short blackout, can result in the light coming up while odd colors scroll by onstage, like one part of a kaleidoscope that can’t quite keep up with the rest.

LEDs have changed that, effectively putting scrollers out of their misery, according to Lincoln. “We tried to get our (scrollers) fixed and they’re like, ‘Nope, we can’t, sorry, we can’t fix those anymore,’” Lincoln explained. “You can’t get the parts. So as they die, they’re just dead.”

The advantages of LEDs being able to change colors more or less instantaneously means that the conversation designers have around lighting and color is changing, Lincoln said. Those trained in a previous era, he pointed out, are used to discussing color based on Rosco gel labels. For instance, R68 is “sort of a medium blue.” But LED systems, which don’t require gel labels at all, present designers with a circle containing the entire spectrum of light.

“You just click on a place in that color spectrum and say, ‘Give me that color,’” Lincoln said. “You don’t even pay attention to the fact that it’s an old R68 or something like that—it’s just what color looks good onstage right now.”

Designers still go through their extensive planning process before they get into the theatre and start hanging and focusing, but LEDs and their numerous color options give designers more freedom throughout the whole process. Lighting designers always create a color palette that allows them to paint with light during the tech process. What LEDs do is give them the opportunity to expand and adjust that palette on the fly, without needing to climb a ladder to replace a no-longer-needed gel.

Despite the obvious benefits, designers have had their reservations about LEDs.

“A lot of us wouldn’t use LEDs because they had such a harsh quality of lighting,” said Perkins, who has worked regionally with theatres such as St. Louis Black Rep, the Goodman, and Steppenwolf. “You could definitely tell it from an incandescent.”

LEDs were first invented in 1962 by Nick Holonyak Jr. while he was working for General Electric. The first LEDs were only red and were used for indicator lights and calculator displays in the 1970s. Soon pale yellow, green, and blue diodes were invented, which quickly led to researchers producing a white light using a combination of red, green, and blue LEDs.

Holonyak wasn’t trying replace incandescent bulbs when he invented LEDs; he wasn’t even trying to create a light source. He was actually trying to make a laser. But as researchers continued to work on his LED discovery, LEDs became brighter and found more uses, thanks to the advantages they presented over incandescent lights. While incandescent bulbs lose 90 percent of their energy as heat, because they use electricity to heat the metal filament inside until it becomes hot, LEDs emit very little heat at all. LEDs also emit light in a specific direction, which reduces the need for elements that can trap light, like reflectors and diffusers, which could result in more than half of the light never leaving the fixture.

Since their invention, LEDs have been used in flashlights, kids’ light-up shoes, optical computer mice, car headlights, and televisions. In addition to being more energy-efficient, LED bulbs can have a lifespan of upwards of 25,000 hours, or more than 25 times longer than incandescent bulbs. Still, despite their advancements, the different science behind LED meant they had their own particular look which theatres weren’t initially eager to accept.

The big change Lincoln has seen over the last two or three years has been in how much more intricate LEDs have become. While LED lights used to emit a distinctive cold blue light, they’re now able to mimic color temperature anywhere from the harsh fluorescent of a hospital room to the warmth of a regular tungsten fixture, like any in-home light bulb.

“The technology, as it always does, advanced rapidly, and now they’re the most sophisticated conventional unit,” Lincoln said. “You can produce a light that I don’t think any lighting designer—if they didn’t know that it was an LED source, they couldn’t tell.”

Lincoln compared the shift to what he saw when the Source Four instrument came out. Conventional instruments before the Source Four used halogen bulbs and produced a warm tungsten light. Lincoln said he heard established designers vow they’d never use the Source Four because it didn’t look like the old units. Now, he points out, the Source Four is dominant in the theatre because it was simply the most sophisticated option.

Despite initial resistance, Lincoln suspects that the LED movement will eventually be widespread. So far, however, the cost of a complete switch-over remains prohibitive for many. As an example of the price difference, Lincoln estimated that, leaving aside bulk deals, a standard Source Four instrument can run a company around $300, while an LED Source Four can be in the neighborhood of $2,300.

Christ Conti, a product manager at Production Resource Group (PRG), sits on the supply end of these transactions. PRG supplies lighting equipment and support for theatre, television, film, concerts, and other major events. Conti sees the additional cost as an unintended consequence of designers so excited to upgrade that they haven’t sufficiently planned for the changeover. One problem is that “the infrastructure,” as Conti explained, “the cable and the power and data distribution infrastructure—to connect the front end, the control console, with the back end of the lights—is a significant increase over conventional tungsten lighting. That adds cost.”

While both LED and tungsten units have power cables, Conti continued, the tungsten power connects to a dimmer, while the LED just connects to a power distribution rack. For the tungsten fixtures, a control cable is simply run to the dimmer, which only needed to control the fixture’s intensity. But for LEDs, a data cable has to be run to each LED fixture. Then, for each LED fixture, there are multiple control channels needed to control the overall intensity, as well as the red LED, the white LED, the blue LED, the green LED, and combinations of the four to make the color the designer chooses. The sheer amount of physical data means that a more refined and capable lighting console is needed.

“Often,” Conti said, “that infrastructure cost gets lost or it gets forgotten about until you have to pay the piper on it.”

But it’s money well spent in the long run, Lincoln noted. LEDs are “really expensive, but then they are so much more efficient; they use about 10 percent of the power that an old fixture uses. Producing organizations have to get on board, or they’re left behind.”

And the increase in availability has started to lead some prices to come down, which should help smaller theatres to afford more. Conti said he’s seen high schools start to buy and use LED tape—thin strips of programmable LEDs that can be attached to set pieces for illumination. LED tape is an easy gateway to LEDs in general, because it’s low-cost and doesn’t require a lot of skill to pull off.

So far the cost of the best LED fixtures has meant that the shift has happened most rapidly where there’s money for it: on Broadway, where producers and rental companies have been willing to invest in the latest technology.

Broadway is also on the front lines of another big change for lighting designers: video projection. In some cases, LED has gotten into that act. On Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a show on which PRG worked, LED video screens were used. These large panels can be used behind scenery as a cyc or backdrop, or can even be used as moveable legs, as they were in Spider-Man. Adding these massive video panels—in the case of Spider-Man, eight feet wide and 33 feet high—adds a new challenge for lighting designers, who have to work with the panels and consider them as their own light source.

“It’s an arms race,” Conti said. “When you start incorporating LED video panels, the light levels onstage go up significantly. It’s a big Lite-Brite, for lack of a better term.” He did point out that rarely do they run LED video panels above 30 or 40 percent power, dimming them as much as possible. But even then, “when you have a video wall, it’s hundreds of thousands of LEDs. It puts off a lot of light.”

Both because of cost, and perhaps just ease, many theatres still use traditional projectors for video elements. This has added another element that lighting designers are still figuring out the best way to collaborate with.

“There’s a lot more of a blend now,” Conti said. “We see the lighting guys are wanting to control the light levels onstage a lot better, so they’re working with the video guys or, in many cases, are handling the video themselves. We’re seeing a lot more cross-pollination between the departments, and the lines between the departments are blending.”

Another technological change that’s gaining momentum (literally) is moving lights. Conti pointed out that while moving lights have been fairly common for the last decade or so, the trickle-down of affordable products is in full swing. “It used to be only top-tier productions were able to afford that,” Conti said. “That’s no longer the case. The barrier of entry has been lowered significantly.”

For Perkins, moving lights and products like I-Cue’s have proven invaluable tools. I-Cue attaches a programmable mirror to the front of a basic instrument, effectively turning that instrument into a moving light. Now Perkins is able to handle contemporary plays that call for more offbeat locations and numerous scenes.

“With younger playwrights, they write for TV,” Perkins said. “It’s no longer A Raisin in the Sun, all in the kitchen or the living room. They’re all over the place.”

Moving lights give her the freedom to know that she can give the director as many specials (lights used to highlight a particular area or object) as needed; she never has to say she doesn’t have enough instruments, or that the crew needs to refocus instruments that are already up in the air. She can simply program a moving light to do the heavy lifting she needs.

“Light plots on Broadway—I would say most of them are predominantly moving lights,” Lincoln said. “On Broadway, space is at such a premium because those theatres really aren’t very big. They’re desperate for every square inch, so if you put a bunch of moving lights in, you’ve got ultimate flexibility.”

Between LEDs and moving lights, lighting grids across the country could look completely different within the next few decades—assuming, of course, that the prices for LEDs, moving lights, and the highly coveted moving LEDs come down to something manageable for regional and smaller theatres. The advancements that LEDs have seen have simply made them irresistible to most in the industry.

“If I had enough money,” Lincoln said, “I would go to all LEDs on everything we have.”

[Chicago-based writer Jerald Raymond Pierce is a former intern of American Theatre magazine.

[There’s one more article in the American Theatre series on lighting .  I hope readers will return on Sunday, 11 November, for the last article, a look at master lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer and how they work with directors.]