Joe

When taking on designing Secret Garden, I was given a unique challenge of lighting a majority of the show very mysteriously and creepily; the lighting had to mirror the sorrow and dullness that all of the characters had. Then, throughout the production, the joy and adaptability of the youth characters transform the mood of the musical and inspire the happy ending. The lighting in the garden had to be particularly uplifting and bright, compared to the rest of the show, as it is the connection between Mary Lennox and her late aunt Lily (a beautiful and happy woman, who's death evokes the sadness surrounding the estate).

In addition, the set design was very basic and versatile. All of the mansion scenes were done in front of a black scrim with a blackout curtain behind it. The mansion was constructed of several free-standing columns, doorways, and furniture to suggest the rooms of the house. The lighting had to further identify the rooms and the gloomy mood of the mansion. The garden scenes were done with a white cyc.

Finally, there had to be a separation between the real characters and the ghosts of dead relatives that still haunted the estate. I tried to keep the real characters in conventional light, while using two no color arc-source moving lights to pick out the ghosts when they were in the same scene as the alive characters.

My frontlight and mid-sidelight colors were Roscolux 60 - the cold blue color was useful in creating stark, emotionless light. Downlight was Roscolux 79 - bathing the stage in all this rich blue downlight allowed me to make the stage look bigger, even if the key scene lighting was only on a part of the stage, as if it were in a big room of a mansion. Most of the mansion color choices were made so that it could be very subtle. The garden was colorful. I was able to paint the cyc with RGB mixtures of Roscolux 120, 121, and 122.

The first thing the director said to me at our first production meeting was "Gobos! Joseph, I need gobos!". I had worked with him several times before to know that he meant he wanted lots of breakup templates. I choose Rosco 77805 templates for the whole show - that pattern is one of my favorites. It was particularly effective in Secret Garden, because you can change how the pattern and light beam looks entirely just by adjusting the softness/hardness of the focus. I had hard edged patterns for the garden, so it looked like the light was coming through all the foliage, then soft edged patterns for the mansion, as if the light was broken. I wanted this because practically, the light in the old mansion would be broken by windows, old antiques, etc getting in the way of the light, but also figuratively, because all of the character's spirits were broken and blurry.