Fiddler on the Roof
City Springs Theatre Co. Byers Theatre Sandy Springs, GA
Lighting design for the 2023 production of Fiddler on the Roof at City Springs Theatre Co., directed by Shuler Hensley.
About the Lighting Design
Fiddler on the Roof has been my favorite musical since I played the Constable in sixth grade. So when Jacob Olson posted a TikTok of his conceptual Fiddler set design, and our stage manager Shay Holihan showed it to me, I went to Shuler Hensley the next day and pitched it.
The set Jacob designed wasn’t just a set. It was a kinetic sculpture: moving houses with internal lighting, each representing a family in Anatevka, plus a stationary tree of life upstage. As families were driven out across the show, the houses left the audience’s view. By the closing image, most of them were gone.
For the lighting, the trim height was the first challenge. Fixtures had to cut through forty-plus feet of air and still land clean focus on the actors below. Mac Ultras handled that throw. Then the same Mac Ultras shot beams down through the houses themselves, casting patterned breakup light on the actors below. The tree got the same treatment, scraped with texture and color while beams through its branches cast natural shadows across the floor. The visible beams in haze became architecture in the room, aligned with the scenic geometry rather than fighting it.
Color carried the emotional arc. The show opens warm, the village content despite its tensions, and cools progressively through act two as families are pushed out. Winter exterior scenes land that cooling literally. By the closing image, the palette has tipped into the cool side and refuses to come back.
Tevye’s direct-address moments lived in their own isolation language. When he turned to the audience, the rest of the stage froze and a tight special found him alone. Those moments read as private. What’s coming is in his head before it returns to the larger story.
Doing this show as both Resident Lighting Designer and Director of Production meant I was inside the production reality the whole time. I knew what we could pull off and what we couldn’t. So the design got built within the actual constraints, not against them.
- Book
- Joseph Stein
- Music
- Jerry Bock
- Lyrics
- Sheldon Harnick
- Based on Sholem Aleichem stories by special permission of
- Arnold Perl
- Original Orchestrations
- Don Walker
- Director
- Shuler Hensley
- Choreographer
- Marla Phelan
- Music Director
- Miles Plant
- Scenic Designer
- Jacob Olson
- Costume Designer
- Jeffrey Meek
- Lighting Designer
- Mike Wood
- Sound Designer
- Anthony Narciso
- Associate Lighting Designer
- Toni Sterling
- Assistant Lighting Designer
- Mack Scales
- Programmer
- Will Elphingstone
- Production Electrician
- Michael Barahura
- Apprentice
- Em Stripling
- Lighting Shop
- 4Wall (Rep: Tyler Bevel )
- Company Manager
- Jalise Wilson
- Production Manager
- Clay Garland
- Production Stage Manager
- Shay Holihan
About the Show
Set in Imperial Russia, this musical centers on Tevye, a milkman in the fictional village of Anatevka, who attempts to maintain Jewish traditions as outside influences encroach upon his family's lives. He must cope with his three older daughters' wishes to marry for love, choices that are increasingly challenging for Tevye, while an edict of the tsar eventually evicts the Jews from their village.
Source: MTI
Cast
Jacob Fishel as TevyeLiza Jaine as GoldeCarly Ann Lovell as TzeitelLeigh Ellen Jones as HodelAliya Kraar as ChavaBrian Wittenberg as MotelHaden Rider as PerchikCourtenay Collins as Yente
Production Photos
Press
Mike Wood's lighting design is similarly strong, particularly during 'Tevye's Dream,' where he gets to cast the stage in gleefully eerie greens and purples.
Light Plot of the Week feature on Mike Wood's plot for Fiddler on the Roof
Accenting the set with cool and warm tones, lighting designer Mike Wood gave the set a different feel and tone appropriate to each scene.