Speaking of Times Square, I grew up in New York City. IBDB (Internet Broadway Database) archive is the official database for Broadway theatre information. [8], Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Play, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lighting Design, Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Musical, "She’s Lighting Stages from Oberlin to Broadway", "Tony Awards 2017: The Full List of Nominations", "Olivier Awards 2017: the full list of winners and nominees", "Natasha Katz Broadway Credits - Playbill", "Natasha Katz — People — Royal Opera House", "TEAM - OFFICIAL SITE- An American in Paris", "Ballet-Dance Magazine - Pennsylvania Ballet PAB - Christopher Wheeldon's World Premiere of 'Swan Lake' - Review", "Dutch National Ballet – Cinderella – London", "The Nutcracker, Joffrey Ballet - 59 Productions", "Abt Dashes Off A Vivid, Spirited Don Quixote", "Long-Nosed but Handy With a Pen and a Song", "Review/City Opera; Madness, Lust and Militarism in 'Die Soldaten, "Date confirmed for An American In Paris cinema screenings", "Making a New American NUTCRACKER - PBS Programs - PBS", "Working in the Theatre: Lighting Design in Working in The Theatre", "A.C.
Natasha Katz is a lighting designer for the theatre, dance, and opera.[1]. I think I do believe more women directors and more women writers is a really, really important thing. [7] She has subsequently recreated her designs for many of these productions around the world. These are LEDs. This year she is nominated for Best Lighting Design of a Play for the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of A Long Day’s Journey into Night, where her lighting adds another dimension to the storytelling. I don’t know about it, I don’t want to know about it. Theatre was having all sorts of problems. Do you do a lot of research for projects? How do we decide it? It’s lost a softness, which actually completely relates to film versus digital. Laura Osnes and her husband, photographer Nathan Johnson, open up about setting boundaries when it comes to romance onstage. When I was asked to do the lighting for Beauty and the Beast, a lot of people, other lighting designers, told me not to take the job because theatre was going to change forever. I don’t think that’s just denial on my part. They all talk about the fog, but really Mary Tyrone talks about the fog the most, which is in the play, we all kind of believed that it is a metaphor for the fog in her mind clearing, coming, clearing, coming. We’re all thinking about it together, but is the color of the light a light blue? They are extremely energy efficient, and that’s why we’re not able to buy light bulbs anymore, because the government wants us to use this because they’re so energy efficient. I struggle with that all the time on every show that I ever do. Do you find it’s different working on a play like this, a very classic play that uses symbolism in, I would say, a way that’s different than a lot of contemporary pieces? The warmth around that is contrary to all this—everything’s gone wrong for him. Her work may be seen in filmed performances of The Winter's Tale, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland[9] and An American in Paris[20] as well as the PBS documentary "Making a New Nutcracker"[21] and the American Theatre Wing documentary Working in the Theatre: Lighting Design. I try really, really hard to look at each preview with baby eyes. I wanted to talk about when you were starting out in your career. He said—this is just a couple days ago—he said, “I’m really sorry Natasha. A big part of it is each character’s point of view is, in a funny way, reflected in the light. Hammershøi, all his paintings are of a woman sitting by a window. It becomes a whole other thing that women have to think about that their male counterparts don’t.
If I think about a lot of the theatre that I’ve seen in the last couple of years, even plays, there tends to be a lot of visual movement in them. ALADDIN also boasts an incomparable design team, with sets, costumes and lighting from Tony Award winners Bob Crowley (Mary Poppins), Greg Barned (The Drowsy Chaperone), and Natasha Katz … [8] She has also designed concert acts for Shirley MacLaine, Ann-Margret, Tommy Tune, and most recently Prince’s 2014 SNL appearance.[8].
I don’t know why, though. Talking about it more. Some people think it’s because there’s so much technology involved.
Does that affect how you do your job in terms of what you were saying about how the lighting can have an arc to it? These quick cuts and everybody on their phones and things like that, I think that that does affect concentration a lot. There is a whole subset of women in our business that are extremely supportive, and there are a lot of them. How do you determine when, “Okay, the lights are going to be from this person’s point of view, and now we’re switching to this character’s point of view,” and making sure that it’s still a cohesive whole? How that all happens? I went to the theatre all the time as a kid. It led me by the nose, honestly. There it is right there: all those issues where it’s okay for a man to do one thing and not for a woman. You could roll a bowling ball down 42nd Street, when I was a teenager, and the only people who would wake up would be the hookers. About two months after our meeting at John Barrett, we visited Natasha in her midtown studio to discuss Long Day’s Journey into Night, storytelling through light, how the field has changed, and more. In this country, as lighting designers and designers, we have to make a certain amount of money in order to be able to qualify for healthcare. She has also worked with The Royal Opera on Cyrano de Bergerac, directed by Francesca Zambello.[9]. Ultimately, I feel it is my role to take all these thoughts that they have and make them come true, but then also essentially add my point of view to it collaboratively.
Biography ... She won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Play for her work on Long Day’s Journey Into Night. I think a couple things. Like a big Broadway musical.
And that’s the point of good lighting design: it adds another layer to the audience’s understanding of the story. There are very few women in our business who have children. Every single show I’ve worked on has been like that. They move around a lot.
I just want to start from my gut and see what all of that means,” too. But keeping a blank slate all the time because I didn’t know what the set was going to be like. In this case it does, because it starts so optimistically at the beginning that maybe she’s actually finally not going to be a morphine addict anymore, and then by the time it’s done it just goes to the depths of complete despair. What else? That warmth is in counterpoint to the symbolic idea of regret and a life—the life he could have had. Lighting supply and install lighting at new NikeTown store in London", "Tony Award-Winning Lighting Designer, Natasha Katz, Accepts The 2018 Apple Award", American Theatre Wing's Working in the Theatre Episode on Lighting Design featuring Natasha Katz, Tony Award for Best Lighting Design in a Musical, Tony Award for Best Lighting Design in a Play, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Natasha_Katz&oldid=983632248, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Friends of New York Theatre Awards for Outstanding Lighting Design, Ruth Morley Design Award for Outstanding Career in Lighting Design, Live Design - Design Achievement of the Year for Sustained Achievement in Theatrical Lighting Design, BroadwayWorld UK Awards for Best Lighting Design of a New Production of a Play or Musical, Sarah Applebaum Nederlander Award for Excellence in the Theatre "Apple Award", Justin Townsend (play) / Justin Townsend (musical) (2016), Heather Gilbert (play) / Justin Townsend (musical) (2020), This page was last edited on 15 October 2020, at 10:04. Then I met with Jonathan [Kent], the director, and he told me about his feelings about the scenery, and then I met with the set designer, Tom Pye, who brought a model over to New York. It’s that little spark in the unspoken thing that happens so often in art for anybody. Also, it’s the first time I get to sit back and watch rather than do, because I have to do all the time during tech. From actors and producers to historians and architects, scenic designers to costumer designers, each person contributes a unique perspective on Broadway’s enduring legacy. Probably. He sits at the table, but Jessica Lange is like a moth moving around that stage all the time. Dancer. A performer who plays music in any performing arts work. It’s like that old trick that they started doing on The West Wing, where you could have people give the long speeches if they did them while they were walking. A New York City native, Katz trained at Oberlin College, and early in her career was mentored by Roger Morgan,[2] a lighting designer and theatre consultant. I know I keep interrupting you.” I just learned this expression, it’s called manspeak. Copyright 1991-2020 © Playbill Inc. All Rights Reserved. It’s got a kind of womb light, a very nice feeling around him. There is that, there just aren’t a lot of women designers for some reason. Actors [do], but not a lot of designers because we travel a lot and things like that. They’ve done all sorts of studies and stuff.
Actually my father was a psychiatrist, so I have a huge Freudian background in my growing up. One light through a window.
Watch the full interview above! From your perspective, how has the industry changed in the last 20 years?
I think it all goes back before us, in a way, too. The set designer and the director had this idea that this particular Long Day’s Journey into Night would be based on a particular artist whose name is Hammershøi. Yes, I do [use literature] a ton. There were still some porno houses and stuff like that. Once you have the child it does become really, really hard to work in this business. They’ve been amazing. I think the pay scale went up, and had a lot to do with that. How do you balance the points of view in the lights of the different characters? People have asked me in the past why is it so male-dominated now. We need a seismic cultural change, really, I think is the best way to look at it. When I was researching this I found out that one of the very famous historic lighting designers was a woman, which I didn’t know. I was doing an interview a couple of weeks ago where someone was saying that they actually thought a good thing about TV and film getting better and more complex is that it teaches more people how to watch complex stories. I think it could just be the way the world works. An Interview with Set Designer Rachel Hauck, Costume Design x3: Catherine Zuber, Emily Rebholz, and Kaye Voyce, An Interview with Set Designer Christine Jones. But what they’re not great at is what they look like on skin color. There is, actually. Those three guys completely disappear into almost complete darkness, because that moment is about her, the destruction, [snaps] and the ghost is gone. The worst thing that’s happened with technology is there’s a kind of alienation of the character to the audience, because there’s something unreal about the color of the light.
The other 10% is the same thing, sometimes I say, “You know what, just leave it alone.” Like Aladdin, which I did. I think that the lighting does too. Like yes, Disney changed things, but Times Square doesn’t sound like a lot of fun back before its revitalization. Then Jean Rosenthal changed the whole shape of all of that. The one thing I can do to help that is make it feel more like it has to be here in the theatre through lighting. I think that Long Day’s Journey into Night has been affected by that in the sense of the lighting probably has more movement in it than I might have done 15 years ago, because the idea of static, restful… it’s just not a part of our vocabulary today. This is a bigger set, I think, than most Long Day’s Journey into Nights, because it’s a family that’s cramped; there’s a whole issue about how much money they have in the family and things like that. I feel that lighting design as we know it today was started by a woman.