Gypsy
by Joyce Storey
from Pro Lights Sound & Staging, Tuesday, June 17, 2003

Every June, the Broadway community celebrates the accomplishments of the gifted artists who dedicate their talents to creating live theatre on Broadway. In the lighting industry when one thinks of the Tony Awards, the names of lighting designers Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer are often the first to come to mind. Having collectively garnered an impressive eight Tonys along with 24 nominations, this powerhouse team of designers continues to raise the bar in lighting design.

Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer began their collaboration 18 years ago with their work on Bob Fosse’s Big Deal. They received the 1996 Tony Award for Bring in ‘da Noise, Bring in ‘da Funk and have recently been nominated for their designs of Marie Christine, The Wild Party, Ragtime, Cabaret (which Eisenhauer co-designed with Michael Baldassari) and Jane Eyre. Jules Fisher has designed more than 150 Broadway shows in his 40-year career, taking home Tonys for Pippin, Ulysses in Nighttown, Dancin’, Grand Hotel, The Will Rogers Follies and Jelly’s Last Jam, the latter three in collaboration with Ms. Eisenhauer.

In the music industry they have created designs for such artists as Whitney Houston, Tracy Chapman, Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Crosby, Stills and Nash, and Linda Ronstadt. They also generated a great deal of excitement with their theatrical lighting design for the movie Chicago, in collaboration with cinematographer Dion Beebe, which received a 2003 Academy Award nomination for cinematography.

And now they are back on Broadway. Who better to light the revival of the legendary musical Gypsy than this legendary team of designers? So what is it that puts this duo in a class of their own? Says Jules Fisher, “Our work is diligent and intense. We don’t do many shows at once. Many people seem to be able to do two or three shows at a time, and we just can’t do that. We are so intent on making it the best we can do. We fully concentrate on that one project and that is all consuming, dealing with the aesthetic and the art of it, telling a story, plus the business and the management and the mechanics. We have a really focused, narrow view. We are working on that show to the exclusion of many other things. I don’t know any other way to do it other than giving it your full all, your total dedication.”

Eisenhauer adds, “There’s also a kind of depth that we gravitate toward in terms of the detail. Sometimes we are working at a level that is beyond perhaps what’s required by a director or by a producer. We enjoy and are drawn to a very critical and minute level of detail in terms of composition, timing and in terms of how a shadow may look or how an edge of something might look. That’s kind of where we live.”

For Gypsy, Anthony Ward’s set design was largely open space with specific set pieces capitalizing on the bare walls of the theatre to give that brick wall backstage flavor to the show. Says Eisenhauer, “From our perspective, it’s a monumental task to tell the story in a largely open space. Lighting helps change the size of the space, especially when you have a space that is a significant size and is open. Ragtime is another example. It is carving the space in an architectural way that helps tell the audience that one is in various locations.

“Finding the style is probably the most significant task of all. It’s exactly what we want to be doing, but it’s the hardest thing to solve. In what way and in what style do we introduce light into that space? On Gypsy, since we were working in a period environment, which is very unusual—to actually create period lighting not only in fixtures that are used, but also in the quality—we decided that the system over the stage would be entirely comprised of soft fixtures. The razor-sharp edge of a newer automated fixture from a very high trim, which we had, would betray the period. Those kinds of style-related design decisions are the hardest to make, but they speak the most to what the design is doing.”

Fisher adds, “Presenting a play within a large open space that the audience always is aware of has its own problems such as: ‘How do you pull that space down to an area or a smaller picture that you can then hone in on and stay with, without always seeing the larger space?’ And similar to Ragtime, how do you then present a picture that is a complete composition, always being aware that there’s a larger picture outside of it? You can’t just do it by making the rest of it dark, because it will never quite disappear. As soon as you put some light on the center of the stage you’re going to see the rest of it.

“Using a soft edge source allowed us to have hard edge sources define some of those shapes within. In the kitchen scene, we were able to provide sharp edges on the floor to help delineate the space between a door, a window and another door and define the room, even though the main light source was a single hanging light bulb. There are a number of places in the show in which single bulbs provide the source. Even though they’re just 60-watt bulbs, that lets the audience relax into saying, ‘Oh, I get it. This light comes from a bulb that I’m very familiar with. I have one like that at home.’

“The ghost light, which begins and ends the show, is another light source that the audience can feel comfortable with. It lets you know the rest of the space is there in the large space, but it gave us the freedom to light a person standing next to it. In the end when Rose comes out before her final song, she’s lit in a narrow passageway of light, but you totally accept it as if it comes from some light off stage. I think it’s wonderful that the stereotypical bulb in the theatre, a ghost light, is the source of light for her to get excited by to start her final song.”

“Every choice that we make in every area has to tell the story,” Eisenhauer says, “the color, the timing, the edge of the beam, the choice of angle. As long as you know the story that you’re trying to tell, then all of those choices fall in. A lot of people say, ‘How did you choose this or what was the reason behind this or that choice?’ We don’t arrive at it by analyzing it. We just need to know the story that’s being told and then we imagine how to tell it. At a certain point in one’s artistic development it just comes out.”

Says Fisher, “We were able to approach Gypsy as a play, to say this is a dramatic story. This is not frivolous. It’s about a mother who’s in pain, who inflicts some of it on her daughter. Peggy has the ability to musicalize the rhythm, so the changes melded musically and the lighting has a rhythm through the course of the entire evening. It almost lulls you into enjoying it so you can just relax and let this flow of light take over and go from a serious moment to a comedy moment because of this rhythm, which Peggy’s built into the cues. I think that’s a particular aspect of our work of which we’re proud.”

Under the direction of Sam Mendes, the cast and crew rehearsed steadily through most of the preview period of Gypsy. Though it was an exhausting schedule, Fisher considers this time a gift. “We had a chance to take many, many scenes and look at them a second time. This is what Broadway can give that you won’t get in regional theatre or the not-for-profits, a chance to really work something over and spend the time to focus on it and say, ‘How can we make it better?’ and then keep improving it day after day.”

The vaudeville section of the show was presented with a quality of today’s brightness and crispness of color, but in a way a modern audience would imagine it. Says Eisenhauer, “If a person in 1929 were going to a vaudeville theatre, it would have been brighter than anything they’d ever seen on stage. The colors would have seemed extreme, because that’s what vaudeville was. People were seeing something that was show business at another level, so we used everything we had that could provide that feeling. We were trying to project what people might experience in the vaudeville, which to our audiences is different now than it would have been then.”

One of the devices they used to heighten the vaudeville effect was creating shadows with footlights. Comments Fisher, “This we thought was a throwback to the day when people accepted shadow as what you got when you went to the theatre because so much was lit with footlights, plus there were rapid changes. It’s pink one moment or blue the next or green the next.”

Eisenhauer adds, “Again, that’s period. We always had to imagine, if there were a lighting change it would not have been a sophisticated one because they didn’t have that kind of sophistication. We had to do something that belonged to the vaudeville theatre.”

Though moving lights were not part of the era, Fisher and Eisenhauer chose to use Vari*Lite Arc 1000s on Gypsy. They had very little space available above the stage due to scenery pieces and they also had a 36-foot trim. They had used the Arc 1000 on Amour and were very happy with it. They used half the system with the iris assembly and the other half with the shutter assembly. Eisenhauer notes, “We test the use of products very, very carefully, both in the lab and in production. We would only ever hire a small number of lights that we’ve never used before and we integrate new products into our inventory very carefully.

“We had an amazing staff. The production electrician is Jon Lawson, who we’ve done many musicals with, and he had a team of Mike Hyman and Mike Pitzer, who ran the local crew and were responsible directly to us for all of the automated lighting and the conventional system. I had a wonderful programmer, Laura Frank, who did immaculate surgical-level programming. It doesn’t get better than what the followspot operators, Tim Altman and Gary Fernandez, provided. I’ve worked with some really wonderful spot operators, but these guys were just phenomenal from the first day. I told them every day it was a privilege. That’s one of the other things that Broadway provides. This was amazing work.”

Jules Fisher sums up the Gypsy experience: “It was a wonderful chance to do something with nuance that was layered and particular, to meet our enjoyment level of what is good lighting, especially one that feels like a period piece. People always say that lighting is meant to be invisible. We had a chance here to make it invisible, I think. That was one of my joys on the production.”