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INSIDE THEATRE
PROJECTION LIGHTS & STAGING NEWS
Joan Marcus
Stumbling
Upon
The 39 Steps
Kevin Adams, LD, The 39 Steps
Giving a
Professionally-Staged
Farce a Low-Budget Look
LD Kevin Adams had no choice but to learn about
theatrical fog effects for action sequences like this
one, featuring Cliff Saunders and Sam Robards.
Lighting designer Kevin Adams always
wanted to put a Hitchcock film on stage,
particularly Psycho with its infamous
shower sequence. So when he was told that
The 39 Steps, which began life in London a few
years ago, was being brought to the Great
White Way nearly scene for scene, he was ecstatic.
Of course, the catch was that this was
not a straight-on rendition of that famous
thriller from the master of suspense, but rather
a low-budget parody of the film. Or more
specifically, it’s a parody whose premise was
that a tiny theatre company with a cast of four
was attempting to play out the whole film onstage
without the proper resources.
Adams loved the concept and eagerly
jumped onboard. Little did he know that the
Broadway incarnation of The 39 Steps would
win him the 2008 Tony Award for Best Lighting
Design of a Play and the 2008 Drama Desk
Award for Outstanding Lighting Design —
not bad work if you can get it.
Warm Tents of White Light
“I remember that part of what appealed
to me about The 39 Steps is that for the last
couple of years I had been doing Spring Awakening,
Passing Strange, and these large, deeply
saturated, colorful pop shows,” recalls Adams,
“and I wanted to do something completely
opposite of that. I like trying to put a black
and white film onstage. I like how rigorously
monochromatic The 39 Steps is. There’s very
little saturated color in the show. There is a lot
of cool light and warm tents of white light.”
Director Maria Aitken and set designer
Peter McKintosh kept telling Adams that they
wanted film noir elements, which was “fine
with me, even though the film was a mid-
1930s film. I think we were all interested in
using elements of film noir vocabulary, which
is actually late 1940s and 1950s. I’ve done a
lot of shows based in that period of cinema
vocabulary, so I was very eager to merge that
mid-1930s English film sensibility with early
1950s American film noir vocabulary.”
Lighting a show to look like a lowbudget
rendition of a famous black-andwhite
film is not easy. The 39 Steps includes
minimalist settings in an apartment, house
and country inn, but it also includes a train
chase sequence using trunks as the tops of
train cars, a showdown in a private study
outside of which a dance is taking place,
an on-foot chase across foggy moors and
the famous plane chase sequence across
the moors hilariously portrayed with puppets
and models in shadow play. Ironically,
it required a lot of modern technology to
make this piece look like it was done on a
shoestring.
“I call this the mixture of an American
plot and a European plot or a German plot,
in that the front of house is all Lekos with
well-controlled areas, and then on stage is all
ETC PARs,” explains Adams. “It’s all specials on
stage. There are very little area systems. It’s all
specials for almost all of the scenes and beats.”
While he saw the recent British production,
Adams did not use their light plot.
Setting the Tone
The tone for the Broadway show is set right
from the get-go, when a strobe light effect is used
to mimic a flickering film screen, before we close
in on Richard Hannay, the protagonist, whose
desire for mindless activity (“I know, the theatre!”)
leads him to meet a young woman who involves
him in a plot of international intrigue and murder.
When Hannay goes to the theatre to see Mr.
Memory and his amazing ability to remember
famous and obscure facts, a red curtain acts as a
full backdrop, and two elevated box seats, placed
on either end of the stage for Hannay and his
doomed date, are used for maximum effect and
widen the perspective of the show.
For the theatre within the theatre, the wellplaced
footlights at the front of the stage adorn
the set nicely. “I think they were 60-watt clear
light bulbs inside those footlights,” recalls Adams.
“I like using light bulbs for really warm, very
general wash, a little tent of warmth. They’re
mostly used for the little shows within a show,
when the red curtain comes in.”
From that point on, the show’s first act
maintains a breakneck pace in terms of witty
wordplay, accelerated action and frantic scene
changes. The second act slows down a little,
but the dialogue and action still maintains a
fairly rapid trajectory. In fact, the manic energy
from the four-person ensemble, with all but
the actor portraying Hannay playing multiple
parts, generates plenty of laughter through
slapstick comedy, verbal jousting, and purposely
misplaced cues (not to mention namechecking
many other Hitchcock films.)
“This production had existed for years,
and I think the set designer had been with
it for many years,” elucidates Adams. “The director
came to it later, then I came to it later
than she, so some of these things had been
in the production for a very long time. I think
a lot of the shadow play was in there before
she got involved, and when I came into it we
developed it more. A lot of the things I lit, the
beats of the show, were already set in previous
productions.”
Shadow Dancing
Interestingly enough, two of the more striking
sequences, the plane chase and the showdown
in the study, with silhouettes of people
dancing in a party in the next room, required
very simple lighting. For the backlit shadow play
in the plane sequence, a 50° Source Four was
used. For the darkened dancers through the
study door, he employed an 8-inch 1K Fresnel.
“We removed the lens to get a nice, hard shadow,”
adds Adams. “There are little shadow cutouts
that dance in front of the light.”
Despite those simple lighting effects,
Adams feels that this version of the show is
more detailed than its overseas cousin. “I tried
to play more with using the light as a framing
device so you can get a close-up, medium
shot or long shot. So at times, just like a camera
does, it pulls you into a small detail, like
someone looking through a window. You get
little details of a place or a close-up of a place,
or the camera pulls back and you see an entire
place.” The imitation of cinematographic
20 PLSN NOVEMBER 2008