Week 4: Simplicity's Effectiveness By Comparison

Since I talked about lighting in a show for my last blog I will only talk briefly about the lighting I observed this afternoon in Gypsy and how it relates to the pictures I ended up taking. Overall I did not like the lighting design in Gypsy. At times it was hard to tell whether the stage manager was calling cues too late/unresponsive board op (don't get me started on how long the scene changes took) or whether the cues were put in odd places by the designer. But the one thing that stuck out the most was the preposterous overuse of heavily saturated colors throughout the entirety of the show, particularly hot pink. At times I could easily see why hot pink was a good choice. Gypsy is very "showy" so having obnoxiously colored light during the showy scenes makes sense. But during the scene in the desert at the beginning of the second act does not. I'm pretty sure the two hot pink side lights were on for the entire show. It got old, it was distracting, and it made me wish for more variety and softer lighting shifts.

Then I got home and I noticed the color of the sky outside my house. I thought it was interesting because it was so simple and easy to look at. It reminded me of that time around 5AM where it's not dark anymore but the sun hasn't come up yet and there isn't any kind of warm colored sunrise. The color in these pictures reminded me of this time (especially the second one that doesn't include the street light being turned on) even though the actual time these pictures were taken was in the PM. It was calming and a nice change from IN-YOUR-FACE-Gypsy (and yes quite literally there was light in my face because they put a special on Rose standing downstage center at the very end lighting her from above upstage right and shooting out into the house).