Lysistrata Jones

Lysistrata Jones at Marymount Manhattan College ran with an all-student lighting team. I had a programmer, plus student assistants and associates. The job had two pieces from day one: make the show look good, and make sure the students learned something along the way.

The setting was a college gym. Multiple locations were visited, all framed by the same gym walls. I poked the noses of fixtures purposely through the wings, visible to the audience, evocative of the kind of stadium lighting arrays you might find at a sporting event. During the big gym moments, the rig wasn’t hidden. It read as part of the architecture.

It’s a typical two-world musical. Book scenes in realistic interiors. Song moments in heightened reality with saturated color and shifted texture. The gym framework held both worlds together. The same physical space read as a locker room, a classroom, or a court depending on the light.