Arts Administration, Article 4

 

[Welcome to the third part of my series of American Theatre articles on “Approaches To Theatre Training: Arts Administration” from the January 2019 issue (36.1) of the Theatre Communications Group magazine.  Stuart Miller’s “Charged With Taking Charge,” below, is entitled “7 Educators On Training For The Future” online, where it was posted on 2 January at americantheatre.org.

[“Arts Administration” is part of my occasional series on Rick On Theater of coverage of theater and arts professions about which I believe many people are unfamiliar.  The seven articles in this collection stand on their own, but the first installment, posted on 2 December, includes Editor-in-Chief Rob Weinert-Kendt’s general introduction to the Special Section of AT.] 

“CHARGED WITH TAKING CHARGE”
by Stuart Miller 

When teaching arts administration, data and tech are important tools to have, but the human connection remains paramount.

In the past decade, the U.S. has undergone rapid changes and experienced tremendous tumult: the devastating impact of the Great Recession, the dangerous acceleration of climate change, meddling in our elections by foreign governments, the rise of a reactionary president who riles up his base via Twitter, the birth of the #MeToo movement.

Many of these shifts—the economic turmoil, the explosive growth of social media, the attention paid to sexual abuse, the dramatic alterations in domestic policy—have also had a tremendous impact on arts organizations. There are other pressing factors as well, from the dwindling of subscriptions at the expense of single-ticket sales to the growth of data analytics.

“Arts and culture are facing pretty serious headwinds,” concedes Zannie Giraud Voss, director of the National Center for Arts Research at Southern Methodist University. “More than half of arts organizations in the country have more constrained working capital than they did four years ago, and half of the arts and cultural centers are seeing attendance decline. Arts and cultural organizations are not really well prepared to weather another recession or economic downturn.” On top of that, adds Voss, “There’s a lot of uncertainty about what’s going to happen to contributions with changes in the tax laws and the constant cuts in federal funding and changes in consumer preferences.”

Voss suggests that the key to survival is gathering information and understanding what it means and how to best deploy it. “Arming arts and cultural leaders with more facts and knowledge can give their organizations more long-term stability,” she says.

It also means equipping a new generation of arts administrators with these tools. To that end American Theatre convened a virtual round table of leaders from a half-dozen graduate programs around the country to discuss these changing times and what they mean for the future of the field. The participants in the conversation are Jessica Bathurst, interim head of the Performing Arts Management Program at Brooklyn College; Joan Channick, chair of the Theater Management Program at Yale University; Kathryn Heidemann, assistant dean of Heinz College and the College of Fine Arts and director of the Master of Arts Management Program at Carnegie Mellon University; Cameron Jackson, executive director, producing artistic director, and director of the theatre management program at Florida State University; Thomas Karr, head of theatre management graduate studies at Wayne State University; Alex Turrini, chair of the Meadows Division of Arts Management and Arts Entrepreneurship at Southern Methodist University; and the aforementioned Zannie Giraud Voss.

STUART MILLER: How has the field of arts management changed over the past 10 years?

ALEX TURRINI: It is more professionalized—you cannot improvise as a manager any longer! The manager should know more about management techniques and tools than in the past. You have to be faster and faster, coping with all the information available.

ZANNIE Giraud VOSS: There’s a growing interest in and appetite for more knowledge about data and what it can do for the field. It’s not field-wide yet, but we’re trying to build a national culture for data-driven decision-making.

KATHRYN HEIDEMANN: Arts didn’t used to exist in the space of Big Data like our corporate colleagues, but it is being integrated everywhere now. There are now repositories of central data for larger field-wide trends, which we haven’t had before. There are more tools available and more consulting companies, and a lot of it has become less expensive. And the field is getting better at telling the story of what’s behind the data.

CAMERON JACKSON: Social media has become such a big player—the question is, how do you analyze it and mine it for things that might help? 

THOMAS KARR: The biggest change is in the technology we use to make our decisions. What I learned in school 20 years ago, in that aspect, is largely obsolete. We have the ability to get deep dives into data and to personalize messaging. It’s so important now; you can forget we didn’t have these tools in the same robust sense even a decade ago. We are able to make smarter decisions. Once we were throwing a really wide net out there and hoping a couple of fish would be caught. Now we’re casting individualized hooks.

JACKSON: Another change is that people want to have a different experience, one that isn’t necessarily as passive, facing in one direction along with everyone else in a dark room, waiting to be entertained.

HEIDEMANN: I’ve never seen as much cross-sector movement within the arts—there’s arts and community development, arts and business, arts and tech. You need to think outside the box. There has also been a lot of cross-pollination and “de-siloing” overall, which informs managerial practices. For instance, there are more collaborations with museums presenting theatre or music or dance. And there’s the “de-siloing” of marketing and development. The ability to collaborate and experiment—and to learn from any mistake—is vital. That willingness to be innovative can build new audiences.

KARR: When I started, marketing had its list, and development had its list, and ne’er the two mixed. There’s still some residue, but we really have seen those barriers come down.

JESSICA BATHURST: One big change is the push for better communication skills and better teamwork—there’s less of a top-down management approach. Another change is the new emphasis on diversity, inclusion, and equity, which is starting to be implemented across the field, though it might be a few years until those programs are fully in place, in terms of hiring and board recruitment and who’s not in the room and who needs to be represented.

Do these changes translate into a difference in what the audience sees, or just how the organizations are run?

BATHURST: In terms of diversity, inclusion, and equity, it will change what you see on the stage, because the people making the decisions will have a broader outlook.

TURRINI: What is changing are not the artistic decisions but the ancillary services, the space in arts venues devoted to different types of experience around the performance, including even those not connected to the show. It’s about delivering an overall experience to the audience.

HEIDEMANN: There are so many ways audience members can develop a relationship with the company; the artistic process is now part of audience consumption before, during, and well after the performance, so the process is no longer mysterious. Artists have warmed up to that.

JOAN CHANNICK: As theatres become more participatory and more responsive, we think about our physical spaces and about the audience and how they connect with you. We are thinking much more holistically about the relationship, which is a catalyst for discussions within the communities, as theatres make a real effort to become more central to community.

JACKSON: Part of that engagement in the community has meant that devised theatre has started to be a little less fringe, a little more mainstream.

What tools does someone in arts management need to thrive in this era?

CHANNICK: We are training people to be leaders, so the curriculum is not unlike curriculum in business school, albeit through the lens of theatre—you must be able to plan and execute those plans, and that means you need communication skills and political skills. You need to be flexible and adaptable.

BATHURST: You must have the ability to talk to people, to make a plan, and work together as a team.

KARR: You must be able to adapt, to make decisions based on new information on almost an hourly basis.

VOSS: It’s not that everyone who works in arts and culture should be a data analyst—just like not everyone should be a lighting designer—but even people who are not into doing analysis themselves must know what stories the numbers are telling. That’s how you understand your current situation and make better decisions. It’s not about numbers for numbers’ sake, and you should not base all of your decisions only on data; there are qualitative issues and expertise and intangibles. But data should be an important element that helps you understand what is going on.

HEIDEMANN: You need a passion for the arts and for the mission. You have to love it, but that alone won’t enable you to run an arts organization. Even a phenomenal visionary must at end of day raise money and market programs and balance books. So strong business   acumen and quantitative management skills are important tools now. But then emotional intelligence—empathy, asking questions, being humble, being curious—is also critical, especially in leadership. You can have those other skills, but you may not get things done (or even get the job) if you have shortcomings in emotional intelligence.

JACKSON: The umbrella that all these things fit under would be nimbleness—everything is going to change, and once you learn these rules, tomorrow’s rules might be different.

How has your program evolved to keep up with the changing times?

CHANNICK: We’re trying to get away from the old-fashioned anecdotal style of teaching and into something more structured, more disciplined, and more intellectually challenging. War stories are helpful to illustrate a point, but our teaching has become more rigorous. In the last decade we have largely adopted the case-study method of teaching—looking at complex real-life examples as a way to acquire lot of experience in a brief period of time. It’s not passive learning, so you’re not just sitting and listening to lectures. But we found a dearth of cases specifically about the arts and nonprofits, so we have been generating our own case studies—every student here researches and writes their own case study. We now even license these cases to other universities.

VOSS: Data analytics is increasingly part of the curriculum—looking at box-office data and patron data to see how you can better understand your audiences, your pricing, and customer behavior. So increasingly the next generation of arts leaders has these capabilities and is bringing them into arts organizations.

TURRINI: We are focusing attention on reading the data, then making decisions on the basis of evidence you can gather from different sources. Data arts is a major initiative.

KARR: We now have a course on data-driven decision-making for the arts, where students learn how to extract and analyze data. Those tools are also used in the other classes to help them make hard decisions.

HEIDEMANN: We started doing data back when “data” was a bad word. Now we also like them to do cross-disciplinary learning, not just taking theatre classes but also taking, say, one in museum management, to make you think differently. We pay a lot of attention to what our alumni are doing, and we are seeing job titles that we’ve never seen—“visitor experience manager,”  or “audience engagement manager.”

JACKSON: What used to be soft skills have also been foregrounded.

BATHURST: We are working with professors to figure out how to be more intentional about it, to emphasize how to collaborate. Sometimes it is using more team projects, sometimes it’s having students working through improvisation—not straight-up acting, but using those techniques to work through role-playing situations.

KARR: I restructured students’ practical work so when they are working on teams, they are now constantly switching out partners. We want them to have that experience of working with somebody new who may have a very different opinion. It has proven to be really powerful. Students say, “I thought I had the answer, but I realized I had an answer.” There are other ways to do things and ours aren’t always the smartest.

JACKSON: We want to improve our understanding, our own blind spots and prejudices, not just in terms of #MeToo and sexual harassment but gender, not being binary, and all these issues you now need a sensitivity to. This is threaded throughout courses, not compartmentalized.

KARR: We are redeveloping curriculum for 2020 with some courses to better serve the students on topics like legal and ethical issues in the arts.

CHANNICK: We’re trying to introduce a greater multiplicity of voices on the faculty—the changing demographics of our field demands that. We have a very diverse student body, but our faculty has been less diverse, so that is one of my big priorities. Some courses now have multiple teachers so students are not just hearing one person’s perspective. We have also built beyond full-semester courses with an extensive array of half-day workshops that can be a single session or series of up to four. These mini-courses allow us to teach subject matter that maybe doesn’t warrant a full semester yet needs to be in the curriculum. It is also a way to bring in lots of additional faculty members to diversify our department.

Since social media is so vital now, has your program adapted to incorporate it into the curriculum?

BATHURST: Social media marks the biggest change in marketing. It didn’t exist not that long ago, then it did exist but was totally free. Now there are things you have to pay for. So in our marketing class we now teach how you maximize it, but also we teach that it is a tool with all the other marketing strategies you have—it’s not a replacement for, it’s an add on to.

HEIDEMANN: I’m learning from our students. It’s interesting to watch how they interact with arts organizations. Social media continues to evolve: Four years ago we talked a lot about Twitter, now we are not talking about Twitter quite as much. Facebook is still relevant, but now it’s Instagram and Snapchat. The trends are constantly changing.

KARR: What social media has allowed us to do is become better listeners—we are getting immediate feedback about our work, so we can make decisions quickly on the fly that we couldn’t before. Our students are also using it as a tool to network among their peers, having conversations with graduate students or young professionals in other states, asking advice when they find people who may be facing the same issues.

JACKSON: These topics absolutely must be part of their education and their experience in hands-on training. It could be looking at building an app for an organization and learning how to keep up with it—the technology itself becomes part of the education. As more things are consumed on the phone, our students must adjust: They might shoot a trailer to promote an upcoming show, because people like that (they relate it to the movies), but they must learn what will look best on the mobile device in their hand rather than on the giant monitors we have when we’re editing it, in terms of colors, cinematography. Arts managers didn’t used to have to worry about things like that.

What about the role data analytics plays in your program and how that is changing?

JACKSON: It has been foregrounded in the marketing classes—it’s not just an add-on. It’s not only a bigger part of marketing but also of community engagement. We teach how you might mine data for free and what more you get if you can pay for it. But the bigger part of it is: Now that you have it, what do you make of it? What does it mean for the show or organization? They need to learn to make it into a tool rather than just a report. You might have a segment of your audience that wants to be marketed to a certain way, so you can really customize it—if there are 500 people and we know how each one would prefer things, then we can group them together to disseminate information and engage with them on their preferred platform.

BATHURST: But we are also making the need for communication of the ideas explicit. Ideally what you want is someone who has as much facility talking to a person as dealing with all that data, but people are going to have their strengths and weaknesses, so you have to emphasize both.

HEIDEMANN: At Carnegie Mellon we always had core courses of statistical methods and advanced data analytics, but what has changed is that we’ve integrated the data more in our marketing and development classes. Still, human interaction is really important. We teach that not only in our negotiation course but by taking students to conferences and networking events and by holding mock interviews and mock solicitations. Today’s students need more guidance about talking to strangers and learning to find common ground in a way that’s authentic. You can’t just send a text and hope people will donate.

CHANNICK: That is a weakness for us. I don’t think we do enough to emphasize quantitative skills and ata analytics. We need to be writing more case studies that require data analytics. Our workshops are a good way to test this, and maybe then we will develop something into a full course. We’re not sure yet.

There has been a lot of attention focused on #MeToo, gender identity, and equity, diversity, and inclusion. It has started to change the field. Are you addressing those issues in your program in a way that you weren’t three or four years ago?

BATHURST: These issues do get addressed in the classroom, and we are looking at how organizations can and should handle them, but we are going to have to think about how to have them put more explicitly into the curriculum.

JACKSON: These issues must be inextricably bound in all the things we’re talking about in courses—season selection, marketing, engagement. If we’re doing Taming of the Shrew, is it seen as misogynistic? We’ve had people say you couldn’t do South Pacific because it’s teaching racism. We must prepare for the conversations to start to take place, so you’re not having a reactionary response.

KARR: Students understand the conflicts and the concern, but the marketing person may have a different viewpoint from the artistic side, and they need to learn to say, “There’s going to be backlash if you’re not prepared for it!” The students have to be prepared to address the questions the public is going to have.

CHANNICK: We’ve been trying to raise awareness of and to prevent sexual misconduct more in recent years, to create an environment where it’s reported more often so people know where to go and what kind of help is available. We’ve also been offering bystander intervention training for several years, so people can defuse situations in a low-key way. #MeToo has certainly been a wake-up to our field. Our students feel angry and betrayed by institutions that turn out to be condoning bad behavior. They are determined to do better when they are in charge.

On equity, diversity, and inclusion, we’ve been working for three years to provide training for our students, faculty, and staff, including three lengthy workshops. It’s part of the fundamental training. We are trying to create a truly inclusive environment here. If our students bring these practices out with them, they can influence the field. So we are trying to equip them to create more equitable and safe institutions, and we hope to make our training and our environment here a model. 

[New York City-based journalist Stuart Miller writes regularly for American Theatre.

[The series on ROT is half over now.  I hope you will all come back on Friday, 11 December, for the fourth installment and every three days after that for the two remaining parts of “Arts Administration.”  I also hope the series has been informative and has helped you understand how valuable, even indispensable, the work of arts managers and arts administrators is to cultural institutions.]

"Light The Lights: A Focus On Lighting Design," Article 8

[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, of which this is  the final installment.  The eighth and last article in the AT lighting series, also the final article from the print edition of American Theatre, is “They Speak Lighting” by Stuart Miller, a look at master lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer and how they work with directors.]

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.

“THEY SPEAK LIGHTING”

by Stuart Miller

How master designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer help us see what their directors want to show us.

The cast of The Iceman Cometh stands in a circle onstage at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, hands clasped, lines from the play ricocheting from one actor to another. It’s a starry group—David Morse, Bill Irwin, Colm Meaney, and, of course, Denzel Washington—yet during this rehearsal they are left in semi-darkness. The only person fully illuminated is an 80-year-old man, standing alone, unmoving, at the top of the staircase stage right.

That man, Jules Fisher, is not part of the cast, yet he is an essential part of the show; he has been lighting up stages in New York City (and beyond) for more than 50 years. Fisher, along with his working partner Peggy Eisenhauer, 55, are among the preeminent lighting designers in the American theatre, while also lending their illuminative talents to movies, rock concerts, opera, and Las Vegas spectacles. Fisher made his Broadway debut in 1963, seven years before a Tony Award for lighting even existed. He has been nominated, solo or with Eisenhauer, 21 times for that award, winning nine.

Light is, of course, ephemeral—both wave and particle, a thing and not a thing. And even for old hands like Fisher and Eisenhauer, things get a bit blurry when they try to describe what they do, whether it’s to a reporter or to a director counting on them to match his or her vision, or to a producer about to lay out a major investment for the equipment they need before a show.

“Our primary job is enhancing the mood and emotion of the storytelling,” Eisenhauer says, hastening to add, “The most difficult thing about being a lighting designer is communicating what we do.”

The pair has struggled over the years to develop a vocabulary that directors and producers can relate to, pulling in words or phrases from other media. “We can relate something we’re planning to a painting or music or to a scene from The Godfather,” Fisher says, and Eisenhauer chimes in that they “collect words” that resonate—“words about speed and tempo and time, or an emotional quality, and every word that has to do with brightness or dimness or darkness or shadow and time of day.”

Ultimately, Fisher says, to communicate fully they need to look at the director face to face to “see in their eyes if they understand what we are saying. We are trying to inhabit the mind of the director.”

This kind of mind reading is necessary because, until a show is up onstage, there is no way to demonstrate in advance how a lighting design will work. Even during that Iceman rehearsal, Fisher was pointing out how the actors’ street clothes would reflect or absorb the light differently than their costumes.

“We can’t show them what we are planning beforehand,” Fisher emphasizes. “The costume designers or scenic designers can bring a rendering, a photograph, or a model to show the director or producer.” This isn’t just an aesthetic challenge but an economic one: Producers have to take their word that they need a half-million dollars worth of equipment rather than a quarter-million dollars worth. “It is a gigantic leap of faith on the part of producers,” Eisenhauer concedes, explaining that directors are at least more attuned to their ideas and concepts, like working with the dynamics of a space.

Some of this has to be modesty, as directors continually clamor to work with the duo. Director George C.  Wolfe has previously collaborated with them 11 times before Iceman.  “George shows confidence in us, and we’ve developed a shorthand with him,” Fisher says. “He rarely says ‘make this blue’ or ‘make that brighter’—he’ll say, ‘I don’t understand the fear in that scene,’” and his designers will interpret that on their lighting board.

Wolfe might be the team’s biggest fan. “They have incredible sense of craft and storytelling, regardless of what show it is,” the prolific director says. “On Jelly’s Last Jam, I had the idea of darkness as a color, and they were able to articulate that. And on Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk, I wanted lighting fueled by the rhythm—and they did that.”

In Noise/Funk, Wolfe wanted the dancing to suddenly bring a lynching to mind. He says that Eisenhauer and Fisher took that impulse and translated it by embedding a light in the cotton bales onstage to make it look like the dancer’s head was disembodied.

Fisher had climbed up onstage during Wolfe’s Iceman rehearsal just hours before a preview because he and Eisenhauer were relentlessly trying to tweak a minor problem. “Denzel leans over every night when he’s on the staircase, taking him out where there is no light,” Fisher explains, after climbing down from Washington’s spot on the staircase. “We ask him to stand straight, but he has his way of doing it. Now Peggy has found way to keep him in the light that should work. We’ll see tonight.”

The Lennon-McCartney-style share-all-credit partnership between Fisher and Eisenhauer is unusual in lighting design, which is typically a field for solo artists, and it’s even more surprising because of the quarter-century difference in their ages. Yet it was that gap that actually led to their working together.

Fisher grew up in Norristown, Pa., and as a child aspired to be a magician, another field that relies on a flair for making audiences see what you want them to see. An uncle in New York would take him to magic shows where he’d see how the magicians used lighting to their advantage. In Delbert Unruh’s book The Designs of Jules Fisher, the designer recalls building a puppet theatre with red and blue bulbs, then creating switches that enabled him to mix the colors in different ways. On the stage crew in high school, he’d sneak in alone and run the dimmers in the theatre to see how the colors mixed there.

“I liked science—the idea of the physics of things,” Fisher recalls. He really wanted to be a magician, but this son of a delicatessen owner was “too practical” to take the plunge. “Maybe it was a mistake—maybe I would have been a wonderful magician,” he says with a laugh.

Instead, in 1954, after his last year of high school, he worked for the summer at the Valley Forge Music Fair doing various jobs. “I looked up at the lighting and said, ‘I can do that,’” Fisher recalls. He got encouragement from a colleague who told him that Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) had the top lighting program. Fisher was already enrolled at Penn State but he quit to move to Philadelphia, where he picked up a job loading in shows, many heading for Broadway, while working in lighting in amateur theatre.

One day he was carrying lights for The Most Happy Fella when designing legend Jo Mielziner took the time to explain some tricks of the trade to him. That made a lasting impression and helped inspire Fisher to apply to Carnegie Tech to study lighting. During his senior year there, a friend who had graduated invited him to light All the King’s Men Off-Broadway, so he got permission to miss a couple of weeks of class. Then that show’s scenic designer invited him to light the Off-Broadway production of Jerry Herman’s Parade. His professors weren’t thrilled, but Fisher would not be deterred—even when that gig led to a third show and more missed class time. He did finally graduate, and was able to move to New York as an established lighting designer in 1960.

Fisher worked on nearly two dozen Off-Broadway shows—and patented one of the first pan-and-tilt moving lights—before landing his first Broadway job in 1963 in Spoon River Anthology. He got to work with everyone from Mielziner to Richard Rodgers to Stephen Sondheim, and lit Hair not only on Broadway but all over the world. By the 1970s, he’d emerged as a star. In one seven-year span, he lit 21 Broadway shows (including an Iceman starring James Earl Jones), raking in six Tony nominations and three awards.

But his career also expanded wildly to include lighting and production supervision for epic tours by David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, George Clinton, and KISS, and later the Simon & Garfunkel reunion in Central Park. He oversaw the concert sequences for the Barbra Streisand movie A Star Is Born, and started theatre consulting and architectural lighting firms, with projects including the disco Studio 54. He was so much the epitome of a lighting designer that when he wasn’t lighting such Bob Fosse shows as Pippin, Chicago, and Dancin’, he was playing a lighting designer named Jules Fisher in a small role in Fosse’s film All That Jazz.

Fisher divides most directors into nurturers or despots, but says Fosse was both—he could be cruel but still get the best out of people. “I once told him my solution to a problem he’d raised, and he asked if I was sure it would work,” Fisher recalls. When Fisher expressed confidence, Fosse changed tactics, asking if Fisher had ever used that particular idea before. Fisher said he had once, but this didn’t placate the director. “He said, ‘Then I don’t want it!’ He always wanted something fresh, something new.”

Working with Fosse on Pippin brought Fisher his first Tony, but the bigger impact on his career was the effect his magical work in that show had on the audience—or at least on one teenage girl.

Peggy Eisenhauer started training in classical piano at age six in Nyack, a New York suburb. “It was very serious,” she says, explaining that the following year her instructor added music theory to her education. “My folks didn’t know where it would lead, but they felt it really was important to learn a discipline early, to learn the importance of practice.” Eisenhauer says that her relentless work ethic and willingness to try every possibility in lighting a scene to get it right dates back to those days of endless practice. “We are performing as lighting designers—we are delivering a creative performance in the now, driven by the clock of the tight production schedule.”

When Eisenhauer was 13, her attention shifted: She started hanging around a community theatre and helping out. “I thought I wanted to be a performer, maybe a tap dancer,” she says. One day a grown-up didn’t show and they stuck this teen girl on the lighting console. She loved the job and stuck with it. Within two years she was designing lighting for the theatre.

That 13th year proved particularly important, as Eisenhauer got invited by a friend to see Pippin. Just describing the experience seems to transport Eisenhauer back to the gushing enthusiasm of a teen.

“I don’t have a great visual memory, but I can still picture this moment where Ben Vereen popped out with his white gloves and black bowler hat,” Eisenhauer recalls. “He delivered his line in a sharp purple spotlight—POW. The light created a visceral sensation.”

She noted the name of the designer, Jules Fisher, and her parents—“my clipping service”—began to look for information about him and encourage her to see shows he designed. When The New York Times profiled Fisher (“above the fold,” she remembers), her mom had the paper waiting for Peggy on her breakfast plate.

Carnegie Mellon was the ideal college for an aspiring lighting designer, but Eisenhauer readily adds that one impetus for going there was to follow in Fisher’s footsteps. On the essay question that asked, “What person, living or dead, would you want to meet, and why?” she wrote about…well, everyone reading this article can guess.

During her sophomore year she saw an announcement posted about a “mandatory attendance” lecture from a certain famous alum. Her wish was about to come true. Fisher spoke to the whole theatre department, then made a special visit to a lighting class, since the professor, Bill Nelson, had also been his professor two decades earlier. Most students asked specific questions—about what gel Fisher might use on a light in a certain scene, or the like—but Eisenhauer went for the big picture, inquiring, “How do you know if you’re any good?” Neither recall what he answered, but they both know what happened next.

Eisenhauer raced out afterward and called home (“long distance”) to gush, “Mom, I met him, I met him. It was worth all the tuition!”

Eisenhauer’s mom sprang into action and found Fisher’s address in New York, writing him a note thanking him for taking the time to talk to the class and explaining how excited her daughter had been. Fisher, who had been so thrilled as a youngster when Mielziner took the time to encourage him, wrote back (“Of course I still have the letter,” Eisenhauer says with a grin) to offer to lend her a helping hand.

So in 1982, after college, Eisenhauer ditched her summer stock gig to come to New York, where Fisher’s street cred helped get her name on the roster at the Public Theater. She worked there as a spot operator for designer Richard Nelson on The Death of Von Richtofen as Witnessed from Earth. She proved her chops assisting Nelson over the next few years, and then began assisting Fisher when she was 23. Over the next seven years she was by his side for every show.

Then, around 1992, Fisher decided that that alignment no longer made sense. “I said, ‘Well, she’s just as good at this as I am, and she can make me look even better, so we should be partners.’” A few years later they incorporated as Third Eye Studio, which shares headquarters with Fisher’s architectural lighting design company, Fisher Marantz Stone, and with his theatrical consulting company, Fisher Dachs Associates.

Their work succeeds in part, Fisher believes, because they push each other. “We look at something and see two different problems and try solving both,” he says. But, Eisenhauer points out, when they are creating, they work as a single unit: “We don’t have any pride of ownership for our ideas.”

Tommy Tune, who directed four Broadway shows lit by the duo and who first worked with Fisher back in 1973, says, “They share the same eyes, with a sense of color and drama and place and time.” Tune adds that “they have an astonishing work ethic and they maintain an equilibrium that is highly appealing in the days before a show opens, when everything is crashing.”

One reason they are able to stay relatively calm, they both say, is that they have each other. Being a lighting designer, Eisenhauer concedes, can be “isolating,” with “fear and loneliness” built in. As a duo they can face those challenges with complementary strengths: she the meticulous planner, he the more patient crisis manager.

“I take pride in planning and always think ahead and use all our experience to think about possible outcomes,” Eisenhauer says. “But when the wheels start to fly off, I don’t have the flexibility. Jules can peel off and help solve the problem. It’s amazing to me how other designers do both things at once.”

“She’s more critical—in a good sense—and will tell me why something wasn’t okay, and she’s usually right,” Fisher says. “I’m more relaxed and more used to dealing with the other personnel.”

Each day during Iceman previews, Eisenhauer and Fisher made adjustments based on notes from Wolfe and from his stage manager, but the most detailed course corrections came from the pair’s own pages and pages of notes. Those early stagings are their first chance to really see how their choices play out on the actors’ varying skin tones and in their actual costumes.

“As we go on in previews, the number of notes doesn’t decline, we just get more granular in the details,” Eisenhauer said, sitting at her temporary lighting desk in the back of the orchestra one afternoon, running through various cues on her headset with her computer programmer positioned at the back of the balcony. She methodically ran through each note, taking lights up or down one at a time, discussing with Fisher his idea about changing the color correction. They would run any significant change by Wolfe, but Fisher said the director does not insist on controlling every tiny detail. “Some directors do not want us to touch anything without consulting them,” he said.

Still, no matter what the director’s style is, Eisenhauer noted, “The director’s vision always comes first and comes last. We may feel a spark of an idea and see if we can develop it on our own, but once it grows, then we submit it to the director.” The key, Fisher chimed in wryly, is to get them to own the idea. “Then they like it because they’ve said it,” he joked.

During previews, they will sit in different seats to make sure the lighting works not only from their booth but everywhere from front of the orchestra to the back of the balcony. “Sometimes the actors look great from the balcony, but you see the light causing patterns on the stage that can be a distraction,” Fisher explained. “Or you find a dark hole and you need to fix it without making it worse elsewhere.”

Iceman’s four-hour run time and large cast means lighting the show in such a way that “the audience won’t get bored,” but Wolfe insisted it not look “too pretty or eloquent,” Eisenhauer elaborated. So ultimately “what makes Iceman exciting is that we are hiding the lighting—we are pulling the audience’s attention around and setting the right mood without people really seeing it.”

By the time that show’s previews were over, they’d solved the staircase problem: When Washington briefly appeared there, he remained brilliantly lit. And then the moment was gone in the blink of an eye, before the audience could even appreciate the time and effort that had gone into perfecting it. (Tony voters at least recognized the duo’s work with their 21st nomination.)

The Fisher-Eisenhauer partnership has not changed much over the years, though Fisher says he gradually became more trusting of Eisenhauer’s superior musicality and her understanding of rhythms in lighting. And Eisenhauer says their style has evolved over time. “I like to think we carry the influences of all the directors we have worked with,” she said.

That heritage is important, she continued, pointing out that Iceman brings them back to the very venue where Eisenhauer first worked with Fisher as his assistant back in 1985.

“It’s nice feeling a sense of community and a sense of lineage,” she said. “To know that you take a little bit of George Wolfe or Bob Fosse with you—that this is where and who you come from—is just incredible.”

[New York City-based arts journalist Stuart Miller writes frequently for American Theatre magazine.]

More on Movicals

[In December 2013, two periodicals ran articles on stage musicals based on films.  Readers of ROT will recall that on 20 September, I posted my own article, “Movicals,” which traced the history and discussed the dramaturgy of the genre.  (Neither of the following articles, republished here from Playbill and the Washington Post, uses the term “movical” for the type of stage play they cover, and both make at least reference to some musical plays that are actually based on books from which popular or successful movies were also drawn.)  The connection between these two recent articles and my own blog post seemed strong enough to warrant revisiting the subject and bringing the two newer pieces to the attention of ROT readers.

[The Playbill article, “Lights! Camera! Action!” by Stuart Miller, who also writes for the New York Times, appeared in the December 2013 issue of the program magazine (the on-line version of the article was dated 25 December) and spotlights one particular musical play that’s on its way to Broadway: Rocky, based on the 1976 film of the same title, due to open on 13 March at the Winter Garden Theatre.  The second article, “Live, onstage . . . from the screen” by Nelson Pressley, was published in the “Arts” section of the Sunday Washington Post on 29 December.  It focuses on productions that were currently on D.C. stages at the time, but Pressley, a review-writer for the Post, discussed the movical in general from that viewpoint.  Both articles reinforce some of the same points that I made last September, but they also update the discussion and raise some issues I omitted.  Together, they’re good follow-ups to my post, so I bring them to you in the interest of completeness and continuing coverage.  ~Rick]

“LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION! —

Broadway’s Newest Musicals Draw Inspiration from the Silver Screen”

by Stuart Miller

Thomas Meehan, Marsha Norman, Susan Stroman and Stephen Flaherty chat with Playbill.com about adapting popular Hollywood movies into musicals for the Broadway stage.

*

When Sylvester Stallone first asked Thomas Meehan if he’d write a Broadway musical of Rocky, he said no. Meehan essentially wrote the book on writing the book for films turned into musicals – he scripted Broadway’s version of The Producers, Hairspray, Cry-Baby, Young Frankenstein and Elf – but he feared that Rocky was too iconic, still seared in the memories of most Americans.

“Then Sylvester brought me to his house on a mesa at the top of Beverly Hills and we watched ‘Rocky’ together,” he said, “and it reminded me how well the story was constructed, how much it was already like a play. So I said yes.”

Making movies into musicals is nothing new for Broadway – since My Favorite Year in 1992, nearly every season has had one. Just as Hollywood seems increasingly in thrall to superheroes and young adult novels, Broadway is turning with increasing frequency to Hollywood for stories with recognizable brands. This season brings not only Rocky but Bullets Over Broadway and The Bridges of Madison County (technically an adaptation of the best-selling novel). Not to mention the forthcoming Aladdin, from the Disney movie musical, and Ever After, from the 1998 Drew Barrymore film.

“It’s very tricky,” said Marsha Norman, who wrote the Bridges book, when it comes to figuring out what stays, what goes, and where to put the songs. This year’s trio of iconic movies-into-musicals all feature experienced hands: Norman (The Color Purple), Bullets director and choreographer Susan Stroman, (The Producers, Young Frankenstein, Big Fish) and Meehan, who brought in Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (My Favorite Year, Ragtime) to write the score.

“The process is similar in that you start with the screenplay and figure out how to re-structure it into a musical,” Stroman said. For starters, movie screenplays build over three acts while plays have two, “and you need a cliffhanger so people come back after intermission.”

Additionally a movie may have 80 locations while a show cuts that down to eight or ten. “Then you have to decide which scenes to keep and how to incorporate them,” she said. “Then you have to identify where the songs [go].”

With Mel Brooks, she would say, “I need you to write a song here called ‘Break a Leg,’“ but Woody Allen is using classic period tunes “so we had to sit and go through the American songbook and find songs that could push the plot forward.”

Meehan said sometimes Flaherty and Ahrens would ask if they could take one of his scenes and make it into a song, using his dialogue as lyrics.

That’s when the transformation really begins. “Once you start down this road of turning it into a musical you never go back to the movie,” Stroman emphasized.

Certain storylines have to be simplified. “Woody [Allen] had to lose a few of the gangsters he loved,” Stroman said, while others were added. “I invented new characters and new scenes,” said Meehan, adding that his early days writing parodies for The New Yorker of everything from James Joyce to “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” has enabled him to capture the voices of Mel Brooks (for whom he also wrote in television and movies), John Waters and now Stallone. (Next up for Meehan is an adaptation of Preston Sturges’ “The Lady Eve.”)

Norman said her favorite part of Bridges has been expanding the viewpoint to include the remote father, quarreling teenagers and a secondary couple in the model of Fred and Ethel Mertz, who “give the viewpoint of the community looking in, raising the question of how you live your own life with everyone watching you.”

Everyone emphasized that movies don’t translate straightforwardly to the stage because they speak different languages. “I remember in the movie of ‘Bridges’ there’s an incredible moment when Meryl Streep is in the truck seeing Clint Eastwood in the rain through the windshield wipers,” Norman said. The theatre can’t recreate that, but “what the movie lacked – and what only a musical can do – is let people sing the size of their emotional life. The real power of music is that it fills you up and expresses what’s inside you.”

Flaherty said the music replaces the movie close-up. “I wrote a song for Adrian that goes beyond the movie – it’s about what she doesn’t say, it’s her interior life,” he said, adding that even in the musical’s climactic fight scene, the team wrote songs so the audience hears what the titular character is enduring.

Rocky presents several challenges that go beyond the typical screen-to-stage adaptation. For starters, so many scenes are part of our collective pop culture landscape. When Flaherty first saw the movie, “my best friend and I came home and started pounding ground meat in my mother’s kitchen.” That famous meat-punching scene is about to be parodied in Stallone’s latest movie, “Grudge Match.”

Additionally many of the most memorable scenes are actually intimate moments more suited to an Off-Broadway play. Meehan insisted on sticking with those scenes. “It’s a big musical with a huge set and cast and millions being spent but there’s a row of them in Act I that last 15 minutes,” he said referring to the Thanksgiving scene, Rocky and Adrian ice skating and their first time alone in his apartment.

The showstoppers were challenging, too. It took a week of watching boxers in a Brooklyn gym for Flaherty to “crack the nut of how to write the music for the prize fight and to figure out how to fit the vocals in there.” He and Meehan heaped credit on fight choreographer Steven Hoggett and director Alex Timbers for figuring out how to re-imagine the fight scene itself as realistic, soulful and theatrical.

Then there was Bill Conti’s soundtrack, still unforgettable nearly four decades later.

Meehan – who had persuaded Stallone to forgo Hollywood tunesmiths for Flaherty and Ahrens – insisted the show have an original score... and include Conti’s music.

“The music is part of the movie’s DNA,” Flaherty said. “To deny it exists would be crazy. I had to find ways to weave it in and out of my score, to embrace it yet to stay ahead of the audience. Sometimes I disguise it, sometimes it’s just in the rhythm or in a harmonic progression – it is there but I use it surprising ways.”

Yet Flaherty said, “Rocky is in an odd way my most personal score ever.” As a teen, he was struck by how much Stallone’s characters were like the people in his working-class Pittsburgh neighborhood, so “I wrote this imagining my neighbors watching it and any time I felt the writing getting too fancy I’d crumple up the paper. I wanted a gritty urban score.”

Flaherty said after he and Ahrens wrote the first four songs, they journeyed to Philadelphia where Stallone was filming “Rocky Balboa” to see what he thought. “Lynn sang Adrian’s part, but I’m 5-foot-4 and I didn’t have the guts to sing the part of Rocky for Rocky himself, so I brought an actor along,” Flaherty said.

They started with the defining number, “Fight From the Heart,” and when they finished Stallone slammed his fist down hard on the table.

“I didn’t know why he did it at first,” Flaherty recalled. “Then he said, ‘That’s it. You’ve nailed it.’“

[This article was originally published in the December 2013 issue of Playbill.]

*  *  *  *

“LIVE, ONSTAGE . . . FROM THE SCREEN”

by Nelson Pressley

How extreme is the craze for adapting movies into musicals? Consider what’s singing out at the Kennedy Center:

“Elf the Musical,” based on the 2003 Will Ferrell hit, is currently hopping through the Opera House. “Flashdance – The Musical,” an expansion of the hugely popular 1980s movie, is also running in the Eisenhower. Last month, a tour of “Sister Act” wimpled through.

That undeclared mini-festival is just the tip of an iceberg that may be sabotaging ingenuity in one of America’s proudest native art forms. And while the run on Hollywood titles may suggest a gold rush, the formula for success is inscrutable. Offbeat triumphs were nabbed by minor movie titles such as “Once,” “Kinky Boots,” and “Grey Gardens,” while such Hollywood blockbusters as “Ghost” and “Catch Me if You Can” – the latter by “Hairspray” songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who would seem to know how these conversions work – flamed out fast.

The one sure thing: Like a Netflix menu, the titles keep coming.

“Big Fish,” “Far From Heaven,” and “Little Miss Sunshine” all lifted their newly musical voices lately in New York. Big musicals due on Broadway this winter and spring: “Aladdin,” “The Bridges of Madison County” (a successful novel made even more popular by the Clint Eastwood-Meryl Streep film), “Bullets Over Broadway” and “Rocky.” Just announced for off-Broadway in March: “Heathers.”

The fad is international: “American Psycho,” “The Bodyguard,” “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “From Here to Eternity” are all running in London’s West End.

“Coal Miner’s Daughter” is in the works. So is “Dirty Dancing” (now on U.S. tour, and playing in London), “Ever After,” “Honeymoon in Vegas,” and even “King Kong,” a rock spectacular that has already conquered Australia and stars a one-ton gorilla puppet 20 feet tall.

Even the most highbrow composers can’t resist the lure of musicalizing movies. The property Stephen Sondheim kept saying he’d like to get around to in the past decade or so but never did? “Groundhog Day.” And what has “Light in the Piazza” composer Adam Guettel been working on since the plug was pulled on his unfinished version of “The Princess Bride”? “Days of Wine and Roses” and the 2004 Danny Boyle movie, “Millions.”

Michael John LaChiusa’s “Giant,” first seen here at Arlington’s Signature Theatre several seasons ago, finally made it to new York (briefly) last year. That LaChiusa worked from the Edna Ferber novel is moot, marketing-wise: Audiences hear “Giant” and think Liz Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. Likewise Signature’s premiere musical next spring, based on the Iris Rainer Dart novel that became the Bette Midler screen smash, “Beaches.”

Isn’t this dependency on Hollywood-branded titles strangling Broadway’s originality? According to the composers of the musicals scrolling through the Kennedy Center, it ain’t necessarily so. (That’s from “Porgy and Bess,” touring through the National Theatre this month and adapted by George Gershwin from the DuBose Heyward novel.)

“With ‘Sister Act,’ I was resistant,” says composer and uber-adapter Alan Menken, whose first stage hit was 1982’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” and who owns eight Oscars for songs and scores of the movies “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Pocahontas” and “Aladdin.” He helped convert “Mermaid” and “Beast” into stage hits, and his new musical of “Aladdin” just opened in Toronto en route to its first Broadway performances in February. Last year Menken won his first Tony with “Newsies,” adapting his own score from the 1989 Disney film; a January workshop is scheduled for Menken’s new musical of the Disney film “Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

“People were saying, ‘Oh, my God, everything’s coming from film, it’s getting uncreative,’” Menken says by phone from his home in the New York area. “But I think it depends on where it comes from, and what you do with it.”

The “Sister Act” title “felt tired,” Menken said, but he warmed to the challenge of revitalizing it for the stage. The 1990s story was relocated to 1970s, allowing Menken to pen disco songs and R&B tunes.

In the end, he says, “I loved it. Once you throw that gauntlet down, you find yourself doing it.”

Menken argues that movies are a natural source for musicals, just as books and plays were for so many standards written in Broadway’s Golden Age, from “My Fair Lady” to “South Pacific.”

“Most of those hit shows were based on things they read, or based on plays,” Menken says. “We’re in a different culture,” he adds, wondering if adaptations of TV series will be next.

The turning point

“Elf” composer Matthew Sklar suggests that “The Producers” in 2001 was a turning point. The tidal wave of 1980s and 1990s megamusicals finally crashed, and “The Producers” reintroduced the world to musical comedy.

“After 9/11, I think people wanted to laugh,” says Sklar, whose musicals with lyricist and book writer Chad Beguelin include “The Rhythm Club” – an original show that premiered at Signature Theatre but never made the Broadway leap – and the short-lived 2006 Broadway musical of the Adam Sandler comedy “The Wedding Singer.” (Beguelin is currently writing the book and additional lyrics for “Aladdin.”)

But it was Disney and the 1994 “Beauty and the Beast” that really unlocked Pandora’s Box. That show ran 13 years and paved the way for “The Lion King,” which has been an unrelenting smash since 1997. The first week of this December, “The Lion King” grossed nearly $2 million for its eight performances on Broadway alone, filling 93 percent of the 1,597 seats in the Minskoff Theater and averaging $155 a ticket. National and international tours continue, sweetening the pot.

Even though Menken asserts that the lure of Hollywood dates to Gershwin and Irving Berlin, the aggressive theatrical arm of Disney in the 1990s plainly paved a new avenue for Hollywood execs to tread. Film studios increasingly opened their own theatrical divisions after the Disney hits and the next decade’s successes of “The Producers,” “Hairspray” and “Wicked.”

“Now you literally have heads of studios coming in wanting to be deeply and directly involved,” Menken says. “By film standards, it’s practically dirt cheap to put up a musical.” (The new musical “If/Then,” which recently finished its five week pre-Broadway tryout at the National Theater, cost $10 million.) “If a show is successful, they go, Wow! Then it’s like a streetwalker with a Cadillac: ‘Hey, honey, want a title?’ I get that all the time.”

“Flashdance” composer Robbie Roth confirms. “I am most often approached by people interested in adapting movies,” he says from his home in Toronto.

Roth is new to musicals, and he is emphatically not what the producers are hawking. “Featuring the No. 1 Hit Songs You Love,” the “Flashdance” ad copy promises. Living up to a familiar story, characters and maybe even sound can be tricky.

“People come in and are excited to hear ‘Maniac,’” Roth says of “Flashdance,” which made its 2010 debut in London and has been retooled for its ongoing U.S. tour. He has written over a dozen original songs for the show, which is aimed for Broadway but hasn’t clinched a date yet.

Roth, 40, likes writing for the stage after years of penning pop tunes and working in rock bands. He has an original show in the works – but also another adapting gig with “Drumline.” For “Flashdance,” he says, “My job is keep it in the world of ‘Maniac’ and ‘Gloria’ and all those songs so it didn’t feel like a cross section of eras.”

“You have to manage the expectations and hope people enjoy your show,” Sklar says. For “Elf,” the tasks were to make the cast smaller and get the story off the North Pole and into New York faster. The upside, Sklar says from Manhattan, was being able to compose a relatively traditional score with big band overtones.

A silver lining

Still: Aren’t all these adaptations trumping fresh ideas?

“There are a lot of original musicals being written,” Sklar contends. He points to producers who have shepherded new material to success: Kevin McCollum of “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights,” David Stone of “Next to Normal” and perhaps “If/Then.” “There are a few producers on Broadway that get them there. But it’s a difficult thing to do.”

“There is still an excitement and an urge to write original material,” Roth says. “Whether it has the same opportunity to be heard, I don’t know.”

If not, is the obstacle producers who won’t bankroll something they haven’t heard of? Or audiences leery of paying $100 and up for tickets to something they know nothing about?

“Those things feed each other,” Sklar says. “Producers are reluctant to put money into something if they have no idea who the audience is going to be. It’s just so expensive these days.”

Menken, who pleads guilty to signing on for a cynical project or two during his career, says, “There are certain titles where you roll your eyes: They did it because of the title. But that’s probably true of any number of musicals going back through time.”

Then Menken notes one of the silver linings for composers: royalties, and the fact that songwriters have a hard time getting paid now in the age of digital sharing. “ ‘A Whole New World’ made me a lot of dough,” Menken says of his 1992 “Aladdin” ballad with lyricist Tim Rice. “Live theater is one of the few viable ways for a composer to actually make any money. That’s why so many rock musicians are coming to Broadway. I’m sure Elton John makes more from his theater projects” – “The Lion King,” “Aida,” “Billy Elliott” – “than from his albums.”

Menken recalls what it’s like to start from scratch, pushing uphill to get backing for something brand-new. These days, he’s mainly interested in work that can actually get done. So he likes the support of a producer – Disney – with the infrastructure to develop a show and put the result onstage. And that may well mean working with established titles and ready-made projects.

As Menken says, “There’s a ton of those things around.”

[The article above was originally published in the “Arts” section of the Washington Post on Sunday, 29 December 2013.]