The Music Man

The Music Man was a white-set show. Scenic designer Jacob Olson built a predominantly white world, which is generous to lighting in one mode and unforgiving in another. The design problem was figuring out which mode the scene needed and tuning the rig accordingly.

In heightened musical moments, the white set was the design’s best friend. Saturated color landed across the whole canvas, the bounce light amplified itself, and the visual lift of a song was already half-built in. When the design pushed into musical territory, the set met it.

The naturalistic scenes were the harder problem. Iowa daylight on a white set reads as visually loud. Pushing the brightness up to see the actors clearly meant the set started overpowering everything else. The work was in restraint: pulling back, finding angles that lit the actors without hitting the walls, letting the set recede into the background instead of dominating the room.

The two worlds blended back and forth seamlessly across the show. Iowa storytelling shifted into musical numbers and back again, and the design tracked the white set’s behavior in each.

This was during my dual run as Resident Lighting Designer and Director of Production at City Springs.