BEHIND THE DESIGN:
THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW
When production meetings began for The Rocky Horror Show back in February of 2019, I genuinely did not know where I wanted to go with my lighting for this project. Of course, having been a Rocky Horror Picture Show fan since I was around 13, there was quite a lot I wanted to try in the making of this show, but so much of it seemed impossible to achieve grand-scale in a blackbox thrust-stage setting.
So, I started with brainstorming every single idea I possessed and ran with with the handful of things I knew had a pretty high success rate (in an ideal lighting world) in the time slot of around 14 weeks.
The first idea was to start off the world of Denton, Ohio as a grayscale/black-and-white/film noir style look as a way to not only highlight the apparent bleakness of Janet Weiss and Brad Majors' current world, but their lack of anything spontaneous or thrilling. This look was achieved through the first three scenes up to the well-known song "The Time Warp" as a way to fade into the colourful and exuberant world that Frank N. Furter had created. In creating this lack of colour, I used a neutral density gel (Rosco #211: .9 ND) along with the same degree lamp in each instrument within the "grayscale wash" to achieve the almost two-dimensional and flat world of Denton.
Along with the idea of a grayscale wash, the colour wash chosen also heavily reflected not only specific location, but had been addressed individually to each character within the show. For example, while in colour, Brad and Janet reflected the stereotypical gender-identifying colours: pink and blue. This was not only to highlight the fact that they were an everyday stereotypical heterosexual couple, but the almost preposterous notion that colours can be used to identify specific genders. As this show was put on through an all-inclusive and social issue-based theatre company, the idea to use blatant humor to address trivial standpoints of gender, race, sexuality, or religious preference was something desired within this process as well. To bring the colour wash to life, the use of seven Chauvet DJ COLORband Pix LED Bars was needed in the constant changing of colour themes. These seven LED bars do not include the constant use of a large wash of complimenting cool-warm gels for frontlight (Rosco #05: Rose Tint and Lee #161: Slate Blue) and more accented sidelight/backlight (Rosco #339: Broadway Pink, Rosco #48: Rose Purple, and Lee #136: Pale Lavender).
The element that led to the most audience-response was the use of only blacklight in the iconic "Floorshow" scene in the middle of Act Two. With the only light being that from the blacklight, the UV paint on our checkerboard-painted set reflected onto the five actors in the scene, making the UV makeup (and wig on Columbia) glow in the dark. This look of only the lips of the actors being lit reflected the well-known opening number from the 1975 movie-musical rendition of "Science Fiction/Double Feature".
Another element to this production included the use of two Robe FOG 1500FT haze machines on each side of the downstage wings. These not only provided the illusion of the illustrious castle/spaceship taking off, but reflected the fogginess that both Janet and Brad feel after realizing things between them wouldn't be the same after their night spent in Frank's castle. This is why the final song "Superheroes" is the most focused on in my design, as it is the metaphorical "full circle" moment in the production. In the beginning of the production, we start in a grayscale/film noir Denton, Ohio, and by the end we find ourselves in the lawn of what once was Frank N. Furter's castle. As the final notes of the song ring out and the narrator begins their last two lines, the haze between Brad and Janet lifts, and they find each other in an embrace of only greyscale light - all colour once again drained from the scene.