Stages St. Louis designer uses lighting to tell stories
July 18, 2010 12:00 am • BY JUDITH NEWMARK • Post-Dispatch Theater Critic > > 314-340-8243 314-340-8243
You want to create a romantic mood for dinner, so you light candles. You want to tell ghost stories, so you gather around a campfire. You want to intimidate your underlings, so you make your desk back up to a window. That keeps you in shadows while whoever sits across from you is lit up like a Christmas tree.
See? We're all lighting designers. The difference between most of us and Matthew McCarthy is that he does it consciously, with some very cool equipment at his disposal.
Since 1991, Stages St. Louis has relied on McCarthy to design the lighting for its shows. This season, however, brings special challenges. Stages' mainstage productions — "Big River," "Promises, Promises" and "State Fair" — vary tremendously in terms of style, period and mood.
And McCarthy is all about mood.
"Lighting is storytelling," said McCarthy, 42, a New Yorker who grew up in Ladue. Acknowledging that his particular theater art tends to be ignored (unless something goes wrong), he remains convinced that audiences are more affected by stage lighting than they realize.
"Lighting creates atmosphere," he said. —For example, in 'Big River' (a musical adaptation of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"), the lighting had to create a comforting funeral home in one scene and (Huck's father) Pap's frightening shack in the woods in another.
"The set for those scenes was basically the same. But the mood was different, specifically through changes in the color, intensity and texture (of light). Set designers create the environment, but I create the atmosphere."
Like most — or, as he suspects, nearly all — people in theater, McCarthy first saw himself as an actor. "But I felt shy," he said.
The eighth child of Libby Mast and the late John McCarthy, Matthew McCarthy discovered his path at 15, during a summer internship at a theater in Ohio. When he came home, brimming with excitement about theatrical lighting, Horton Watkins High School teacher Phil Murray told him that was exactly the kind of thing he might study in college.
McCarthy took Murray's advice, first as an undergraduate at Ithaca College and then as a grad student at New York University. Since then, he's designed lighting for plays and operas on stages from coast to coast.
But this season at Stages has demanded every ounce of his creativity. He made sketches; he developed "word clouds" of adjectives for each show; he talked with the costume designers, the set designers and with Stages' artistic director Michael Hamilton. He also made artistic connections, associating each musical with a different painter.
"Big River," with songs by the late country music artist Roger Miller, put McCarthy in mind of the paintings of George Caleb Bingham, drenched in golden light and a woodsy air so strong you can practically smell it. For "State Fair," a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that opens at Stages on Sept. 3, McCarthy was influenced by Norman Rockwell's slices of American life and by the heightened color in old Kodachrome snapshots.
Although those two shows take place about 100 years apart, they're both rooted in rural America life.
"Promises, Promises" is a different story. Based on Billy Wilder's movie "The Apartment," "Promises, Promises" is set in New York in the early 1970s. It boasts a Neil Simon script, a Burt Bacharach and Hal David score ("I'll Never Fall in Love Again," etc.) and a cool assessment of the self-regarding ethics that prevail on streets like Madison Avenue. That demands a completely different look, one that led McCarthy and set designer Mark Halpin to think of the hip, geometric style of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian.
Stages' production of "Promises, Promises" seems to take place in a glass box illuminated by multicolor rectangles of light. The lights change colors according to locale. For example, a Chinese restaurant where a married big shot (Michael Halling) woos his girlfriend (Tari Kelly) is dominated by shades of red; the apartment where junior executive Chuck Baxter (Ben Nordstrom, in a role originated by Jack Lemmon) comforts her is an urban oasis, bathed in shades of blue and green. McCarthy designed different lighting for each locale and emotional moment in the show.
These effects demand special equipment, plastic tubes punctuated with bulbs."It's expensive, about $50 for just three feet" of tubing, the designer said. "But now that Stages has purchased it, we'll have it in the inventory" for other shows.
In a world of artists, McCarthy knows that some people think of him as a methodical engineer. In a world of engineers, of course, he'd probably be seen as a kooky artist. But as far as he's concerned, it's an ideal combination.
"You can't shape light with your hands — you have to use your tools," McCarthy said, recalling his school days when he discovered his facility for math and science, which didn't really interest him, and his ineptitude for painting, which did. In the end, he made it balance out.
"I am terrible with a paintbrush in my hands but, onstage, I paint with light," he said. "It's not just nuts and bolts. It's storytelling."