Week # 4: Wizard of Oz Lighting

This weekend I saw a childrens theater group's production of "The Wizard of Oz" in Northridge, L.A. While I have seen and been in many shows with this group, i never really paid attention to the lighting until now. Whether it was because Im learning stuff in this class or because there was a new lighting designer for this show, I noticed myself paying a lot more attention to the lighting. The first time I found myself drawn to the lighting was during Dorothy's first song, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow". While it looked like she was in white light, the haze in the air showed that she was actually being light by four different colored lights. The four colors were the three secondary colors, yellow, magenta and cyan, and, if i remenber right, blue. Through additive color mixing those four colors were being mixed into the white light that was lighting Dorothy.
In this groups version of the play, they took the black and white part of the movie and adapted it for the stage by making everything in Kansas really dull, with different shades of tan and brown so that when she gets to Oz the colors pop out like they do in the movie. So when I saw those beams of colors in the Kansas scene I got really excited because it maybe was the new lighting designers way of showing that even though she is in this really dull colored place, her dreams, like the place she is singing about, are actually really colorful or it could also be a form of foreshadowing through lights. While the normal lighting designs for our shows are more natural, I was very impressed the new guys look of the show. From what i could tell, they were using eight of those moving lights, that we saw in the studio theater, in almost every scene throughout the entire show. I was really impressed with how when he designed the lights and how well they helped tell the story.