During my long career as a Production Stage Manager I have always loved to work with designers in the field of Lighting Design. These people are the valuable keepers of the way the stage looks and how the creations reads to an audience, they bring nature indoors and the mysterious interior of emotions through color, texture, architecture to the stage. They are artists, engineers, and nerds. They work under the strong arm of the work of the artistic creation of others, directors, choreographers who can be difficult, impatient, both critical and problematic if they don’t get what they think they want. They sometimes are unable to express their thoughts but do project their unhappiness. The problem is you run out of time in the theater which is expensive. I think it is at best a precarious profession. The best of these designers reach a complex place of earning the respect from the artistic directors they work with, who will then give them more freedom to make excellent work. Maybe because I think the process should be protected and because of my love of seeing the results, I have a determination to call cues correctly working equally for both sides — the creator of the work and the designer. It is the secret glue to any production.
Here is a list of the ones I have had the pleasure to work with. My aim is to tell the amazing careers that they have created.
Jean Rosenthal (March 16, 1912 – May 1, 1969)
Jean was a pioneer in the field of theatrical lighting design. In the early part of the 20th century, the lighting designer was not a formalized position. Rather the set designer or electrician handled the lighting of a production. Rosenthal helped make the lighting designer an integral member of the design team. She also said that lighting “was a career in itself”. As well as inventing lighting innovations, she created an atmosphere specific to the production, and she was in demand as a Broadway lighting designer. She was the lighting designer for hundreds of productions, including numerous Broadway shows, Martha Graham’s dances, the New York City Ballet, and the Metropolitan Opera. On Broadway she lit musicals such as West Side Story (1957), The Sound of Music (1959), Take Me Along (1959), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Hello, Dolly! (1964), Cabaret (1966), and The Happy Time (1968). “Some of the signature lighting she did for Balanchine and the diagonal shaft of light she created for Graham (lovingly referred to by her as “Martha’s Finger of God”), are now in such widespread use by dance companies of every style that they have become standards of the lighting repertoire. My work with her was as an assistant after an interview in 1965, when she hired me, which gave me the privilege to watch this legendary woman work her craft in many different areas. She said that she liked that I was asked repeatedly to work again with the companies on my resume. Eventually, She asked me to stage manage for a Martha Graham season in Brooklyn.
Gilbert V Helmsley Jr. (1936-1983)
Few theater artists have been more respected and loved than Gilbert who over the years created lighting for New York City Opera, Martha Graham Dance Company, Broadway plays and musicals, The Metropolitan Opera, American Ballet Theatre, Bolshoi Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, National Ballet of Cuba, and numerous regional ballet, opera, and theater companies. He was trained both at the Yale School of Drama and by pioneers in the lighting field including Jean Rosenthal and Tharon Musser. He brought many young students with him when he worked, mostly at his own expense, to venues all over the country ranging from The Guthrie Theater and The Mark Taper Forum to The Metropolitan Opera House where he offered them invaluable opportunities His commitment to lighting as a nucleus for life in the theater acted as a magnet for students attracted to his love of life and his overwhelming need to share. He touched so many working in the theater, from stagehands to directors to performers, that bringing up his name to this day will result in a story that only further continues to illustrate his vibrancy, his laughter, his love of all theater and the ever-present entourage of talented and eager assistants who worked with him. His legacy, in the form of The Helmsley Lighting Programs, is a tribute to not only the past but to the ever growing impact that he continues to have on so many in the field of theater. He was a wild card, lived fast and died young.
Nicola Cernovitch (1929-2018)
He attended Black Mountain College, a small progressive school located in North Carolina, from 1948 to 1952. While there he studied design and color theory with Josef Albers, as well as dance, theater and photography with faculty such as, Charles Olson, M.C. Richards, and Edward Dahlberg and with visiting teachers including Buckminster Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Lou Harrison and Franz Kline. Nick was a performer in the first “Theatre Piece”, often referred to as the first “Happening”, with John Cage and Merce Cunningham at Black Mountain in 1952.
In the early 1950’s Nick moved to New York and into a loft that he shared with his partner, Remy Charlip (a dancer and one of the founding members of the Cunningham company), and they lived together and collaborated artistically for the next ten years. Nick’s interest in Asian art and philosophy led him to his first job at Orientalia bookshop on 12th Street off of Fifth Avenue. From 1954 to 1964 he worked in New York City as a stage manager and lighting designer for dance companies and scores of individual artists, including Merce Cunningham, Jose Limon, Alwin Nokolais, Anna Sokolow, Paul Taylor, James Waring and many younger modern dancers. When Merce Cunningham started his own company in 1953 he asked Nick to be the resident lighting designer and technical director – a position that Nick held until Robert Rauschenberg took over in the early 1960s. In 1960 he received the New York City Village Voice Obie award for lighting design. He was always very generous with his time and expertise and he helped many a fledgling lighting designer start their own career. In addition he wrote dance reviews for the Village Voice under the name Nicola Cherny. During this time he was also one of the founding members of The Living Theatre, along with Judith Malina and Julian Beck. Between 1960 and 1962 he designed all of the lighting for The Living Theatre and acted in or directed many productions for their Monday Night Series of experimental works, collaborating with Diane Diprima and Le Roi Jones. He was also very active in The Judson Church working with avant-garde choreographers and artists on various programs. Some of Mr. Cernovitch’s other credits for lighting design have included: the original production of James Joyce’s Ulysses in Night Town, directed by Burgess Meredith and staring Zero Mostel; all lighting design for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater from its inception until 1969 (including the original and current lighting design plot for the seminal dance, Revelations); the Paris Opera’s centenary production of Paul Dukas’ La Peri, a number of ballets for the American Ballet Theater in New York, including Rudolph Nureyev’s full-length production of Raymonda, and stints with The National Ballet in Washington DC, and The Harkness Ballet in New York.
He immigrated to Canada in the early 1970s and was the resident lighting designer for Les Grands Ballets Canadiens from the 1970s until his retirement in 1995. His first work for the company was for their highly successful production of Tommy, for which he received many accolades for his outstanding lighting design concepts. His design for the production of The Nutcracker continues to be used to this day. While in Canada he also designed the lighting for several ballets for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, Le Groupe de la Place Royale in Ottawa, Le Ballet Jazz in Montreal, Margie Gillis and numerous shows for the Québecois singers Gilles Vigneault and Robert Charlebois.
He was my mentor, a person who thought and acted outside of the box.
Beverly Emmons
Emmons graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1965 and then worked as an assistant to Jules Fisher. Her first credit as a lighting designer was with the Off-Broadway play Sensations in 1970. Emmons’ first Broadway work was A Letter for Queen Victoria in 1975. She has been the lighting designer for many Broadway plays and musicals since then, most recently the revival of Annie Get Your Gun in 1999 and Stick Fly in 2011. She earned 6 Tony Award nominations.
She has worked for ballet companies, including the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and also for choreographers such as Martha Graham, Bill T. Jones and Trisha Brown. Her work for opera includes the Robert Wilson and Philip Glass opera Einstein on the Beach in November 1976 at the Metropolitan Opera House,[7] and the Robert Wilson opera The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, performed in 1986 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
She was on the graduate theater faculty of Columbia University, was the artistic director of the Lincoln Center Institute from 1997 to 2002, and is currently on the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College. She is the Executive Director and Founder of the Lighting Archive at the New York Performing Arts Library. Together with William Hammond and myself, it was Beverly’s idea to form the Technical Assistance Group (TAG), a not-for-profit service organization for dance and theater. Its services included: information on rehearsal and performance space, equipment sources, dance floors, technical specifications of theaters; referrals supplying employers with names of qualified production personnel; consultation based on the cumulative experience of the TAG staff and other professionals; and workshops and seminars on company and stage management for dance. TAG (1971-1981) also was the producer of the DANCE UMBRELLA and the NEW YORK DANCE FESTIVAL. We first met at Jacob’s Pillow; she was a scholarship student when I was stage manager at the Pillow.
Tom Skelton (1928-1994)
Tom was wonderful fun. He learned his craft by practicing it. Asked about his training, Mr. Skelton would usually say simply that he had served as an apprentice to Jean Rosenthal and had read Stanley McCandless’s “Manual for Lighting the Stage.” A genial, witty man, he asked his students at the Yale School of Drama to study everything from French to Picasso to cooking. His first work was with dance companies. He designed the Joffrey Ballet’s repertory lighting system, and created the lighting and the billowing film-screen set for Robert Joffrey’s “Astarte” in 1967. One of his best-known assignments was Jerome Robbins’ “Dances at a Gathering.”
Mr. Skelton also created lighting for American Ballet Theater and for nearly every major modern-dance choreographer, including Martha Graham, Paul Taylor and Jose Limon. He worked with the ballet choreographers Agnes de Mille, Sir Kenneth MacMillan, Antony Tudor and Heinz Poll, with whom he founded the Ohio Ballet.
He also designed lighting for some 63 Broadway productions.Mr. Skelton’s most recent work on Broadway was last season for Lynn Redgrave’s Shakespeare for My Father. He was nominated for a Tony Award three times, for the lighting of The Iceman Cometh, Indians and All God’s Chillun Got Wings. Among his other Broadway credits were A Few Good Men, Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music, Coco and Mame.
By the 1950s Dance Magazine published articles on a regular basis about with lighting methods. He taught at both Yale University and New York Studio and Forum of Stage Design. His method was published as ‘The Handbook for Dance Stagecraft’ between October 1955 and December 1956 in Dance Magazine.
According to the New York Times: “Mr. Skelton was equally at home in two very different art forms. His lighting brought extra texture and body and jewel-like color to dance stages in an era when lighting usually emphasized airy, open space. His theater designs often added a feeling of light and air to a stage picture while strengthening the dramatic quality of a production.”
In 1982 Tom asked me to be his assistant on the Broadway revival of Peter Pan staring Sandy Duncan. When we were touring it was impossible to get the show focused because the flying component always took priority over focus — it was a mess. Later my company TAG asked Tom to do the lighting for the Dance Festival at the outdoor Delacorte Theater in Central Park. I happily brought Tom and Craig Miller together when Craig first moved to NY to become Tom’s assistant and later a designer in his own right.
Craig Miller (1951-1994)
Craig Miller designed lighting for dance, opera, and theatrical productions, as well as musical concerts on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in experimental venues, and regional theaters, primarily in the United States.
Miller attended Northwestern University from 1969 to 1972. After graduation, he taught lighting design at Barat College in Illinois, designing lighting for student productions there and working professionally as a lighting designer for dance and theatrical performances in the region. In 1976 he moved to New York City and began working on Broadway dance and theatrical productions, initially as the assistant to lighting designer Thomas Skelton.
Miller served as resident lighting designer for the Lar Lubovitch, Alvin Ailey, Laura Dean, and Elisa Monte dance companies and, for fifteen seasons, at the Santa Fe Opera. He also worked frequently with the Boston Ballet, the Dallas Opera, the Pennsylvania Ballet, the Spoleto Festival, the Goodspeed Opera House, the Long Wharf Theater, and the Tyrone Guthrie Theater. His Broadway theater credits include: Black Comedy/White Liars, The Most Happy Fella, Safe Sex, On Golden Pond, The Wind in the Willows and Take Me Along. His work on Barnum in 1980 earned him a Tony nomination. In 1992 and 1993 he collaborated with artist David Hockney on Die Frau ohne Schatten staged at the Royal Opera House in London and at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. I met Craig when he was teaching at Barat College and encouraged him to come to NY, I told him I would find work for him which I did happily, in the dance world of NY. I introduced him to Tom Skelton. He was a guy who loved theater would know all the show tunes. He always wore red sneakers, his trademark. Enthusiastic and hugable.
Jules Fisher is an American lighting designer and producer. He is credited with lighting designs for more than 300 productions over the course of his 50-year career in Broadway and off-Broadway shows, as well extensive work in film, ballet, opera, television, and rock and roll concert tours. He has been nominated 20 times for Tony Awards (as a lighting designer) and won nine Tony awards for Lighting Design, more than any other lighting designer. He has been in a professional partnership with lighting designer Peggy Eisenhauer since 1985, and they formed Third Eye Ltd, a firm specializing in entertainment and theatre lighting. He is also a principal in the theatre consulting firm Fisher Dachs Associates, architectural lighting firm Fisher Marantz Stone, and teaches at The New School. Fisher was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts degree from Carnegie Mellon University in May 2013.
I was lucky enough to be his assistant on Bob Fosse musicals, an unforgettable honor.
I always picked the musicals over the dramas.
Tony Tucci
Residing in Austin, Texas, Tony Tucci designs lighting for ballet companies in Austin, Houston, Washington, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Monterrey. He designed the lighting for the video Baryshnikov, The Dancer and the Dance. He also created lighting for The Lady in Waiting with Cleo Laine and the Houston Ballet. More recently, Mr. Tucci designed Carmina Burana for the Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre, for Cynthia Gregory’s Swan Lake, new works with Fernando Bujones and the Ballet de Monterrey, and Suzanne Farrell Stages Balanchine in Washington. In Europe, Mr. Tucci designed Christopher Bruce’s Kingdom for the Geneva Ballet, Lucifer’s Daughter in Denmark, and Flemming Flindt’s Caroline Mathilde for the Royal Danish Ballet produced in Denmark and recently at Covent Garden, London, and televised in Denmark.
Other companies for which Mr. Tucci has designed the lighting include the Harkness Ballet; Boston Ballet, Pittsburgh Ballet, BalletMet, Ballet Arizona, the National Ballet of Canada, the Royal Danish, Winnipeg, and Swedish Ballets, the Hong Kong Ballet, Singapore Dance Theatre, Ballet International, and Nuevo Mundo de Caracas.
In addition to ballet, Tucci has designed or supervised productions of the Rocky Horror Show, Gemini, Extremities, Pericles, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, The Tempest, Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, the Van Cliburn 1989 Awards Ceremony, the Plymouth Park Baptist and First Baptist of Ft. Lauderdale Pageants, On Stage with Bob Hope, John Gabriel Borkman, and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach.
I had the pleasure of working with him in the early years when Lar Lubovitch first formed his Dance company. He is quiet, thoughtful and always a gentleman. Never heard him raise his voice.
Nicole Pearce
Nicole is an international lighting designer for Dance, Theater, and Opera based out of Queens New York. Her work has been seen across the United States, Europe, Siberia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, and Cuba. Recent works include GARDEN BLUE / EN with Jessica Lang and American Ballet Theater / Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, DAS RHINEGOLD with Brian Staufenbeil and Opera Montreal, and DETROIT 67 by Domonique Morriseau and Directed by Jade King Carroll at the McCarter Theater, NJ. Collaborations in dance include work with choreographers Mark Morris, Jessica Lang, John Heginbotham, Aszure Barton, Brian Brooks, Kyle Abraham, Robert Battle, Alexander Ekaman, Sonya Tayeh, Andrea Miller, Jorma Elo, & Annabelle Lopez-Ochoa along with companies including Joffrey Ballet, Atlanta Ballet, Houston Ballet, Boston Ballet, Finnish National Opera, Gallim, Mark Morris Dance Group, Dance Heginbotham, Jessica Lang Dance, Aszure & Artists, Hubbard Street, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Birmingham Royal Ballet, The National Ballet of Japan, Malpaso Dance of Havana Cuba, Nederlands Dance Theater, & American Ballet Theater.
I met Nicole at Juilliard when stage managing for their Spring Concert. I find her brave taking on new artists. Her creative set and lighting ideas have development into masterful works.
Jack Mehler
Based in New York for over 25 years, Jack Mehler designs lighting and scenery for a wide variety of Live Events. He received 2013 & 2014 Korean Musical Theatre Award (Korean Tony) for lighting and 2019 Broadway World Connecticut awards for both scenery and lighting. Nominations include IRNE (Boston), Gypsy (Seattle) and Broadway World Orlando. Dance lighting includes Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre, Atlanta Ballet, Austin Ballet, Ballet Florida, Ballet Memphis, BalletMet, Ballet West, Buglisi Dance Theatre, Donald Byrd/The Group, Houston Ballet, Hubbard Street, Jose Limon, Joffrey Ballet, Lar Lubovitch Dance, Martha Graham, San Francisco Ballet, Spectrum Dance Theatre and many others for choreographers including Nicolas Blanc, Jacqulyn Buglisi, Donald Byrd, Edwaard Liang, Lar Lubovitch, Andrew McNicol, Matthew Neenan, Yuri Possokhov, Andrea Walker, and Stanton Welch. Theatre designs include Cleveland Play House, Manhattan Theatre Club, North Shore Music Theatre, Ogunquit Playhouse, Paper Mill Playhouse, Riverside Theatre, Seattle Rep, Syracuse Stage, Walnut Street Playhouse, Westport Country Playhouse, The Working Theatre, and The WPA Theatre, among many others. He is a founding board member of ACT of Connecticut and provides owner’s representation for organizations building and renovating performance and rehearsal venues. He also connects funders with both commercial and non-profit arts projects.
Jack is a very comfortable person to work with, everything he does is on time and carefully worked out. He is the father of three children and his wife Marquerite Mehler is the Production Manager for New York City Ballet. It is a hard working family. We have shared experiences working with Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, and Buglisi/Foreman Dance.
Clifton Taylor
For over 34 years, Clifton Taylor has created lighting, projection and scenic designs for theater, dance and opera companies around the world. He has also designed a number of unique concert music events for major orchestras, solo musicians and large-scale venues. His work has been commissioned on Broadway, Off-Broadway, regionally, and in seventeen countries outside the US, including for the Royal Ballet, Rambert Ballet, Maggio Musicale in Florence, the Aix Festival, Hong Kong Ballet and many others. Long-time collaborators include Karole Armitage, Lar Lubovitch, Pam Tanowitz, Luca Veggetti, Septime Webre, Elisa Monte and others. He is the recipient of many awards for his designs including the prestigious U.K. based “Knight of Illumination” award which was given to him in 2019 for his designs for the London production of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a ballet by Pam Tanowitz at the Barbican. Clifton is on the faculty at UNCSA with extensive prior experience lecturing at NYU, the New York Choreographic Institute, and LDI. He has also had academic appointments at the Juilliard School, The University of Iowa, and the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh Cambodia.
In addition, he is the author of the defining color book for lighting designers: “Color and Light, Navigating Color Mixing in the Midst of an LED revolution” (available on Amazon and directly from the publisher at silmanjamespress.com).
Clifton and I have a long-time relationship with Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, Trisler Danscompany, Buglisi/Foreman Dance, and Juilliard. He has always been a very creative over-achiever. We have a warm friendship develop over many years and I treasure it.
