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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African-Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and I call this episode Razzle Dazzle, A Brief History of Lighting Design on Broadway, part 2. This is the second half of my recent conversation with lighting designer Ken Billington, who so far has created the lighting for an incredible 105 Broadway plays and musicals, including the original productions of Sweeney Todd, On The 20th Century, The Drowsy Chaperone, The Scottsboro Boys, Waitress, and the long-running, still-running Revival of Chicago, for which he received a Tony Award.

If you missed the first part of our discussion, you may want to catch up on that episode before listening to this one. As we ended that previous episode, Ken was sharing with us how he came to a life-changing realization. He knew that he had to stop working as the assistant to other lighting designers, including his mentor, Theron Musser, who he still considers to be the greatest lighting designer of all time, and instead venture off on a career of his own. Here we go.

[1:19] Ken Billington: What made Theron Musser the greatest lighting designer of all time? If you look at Peggy Clark and Gene Rosenthal, who were also brilliant, and Abe Fader, they were inventing it. When Theron showed up, it had been invented. People accepted a lighting designer. Most directors accepted the lighting designer as a contributing artist to the show, and she had very strong opinions about the design. As I say, you look at a program, you read the title page. That's the creators of the show. Yes, there's both music and lyrics, if it's a musical. Yep, they wrote it, and the director guided it to where it needed to be. But with equal helpings from sets, lights, costumes, sound, orchestrations, vocal arrangements, choreography, I always think we're all together.

The title page crowd is all together in creating the show. We have something to say, and a smart director, smart authors listen. You have to find the right time to say it, obviously, but just say, you know, do we need to get rid of the leading man, or we don't need scene two, or whatever it might be, and that you've been there and everyone accepts your opinion. By the way, the director may not go with it, who knows, but I just learned that from Theron. She had good opinions, good artistic things, and she, at the correct time, would talk to them and get things changed that made things better. The shows looked wonderful. She was beloved by every stagehand in New York. She did not suffer fools at all, but she would never lose her temper in a theater.

Never once did she lose her temper. That I saw, she would go walk around the block and then come back. She never wanted to lose it in the theater, because then you lose the respect of everyone there. I just thought, oh, the way of working, of being a collaborator, of being an even-tempered, good person who cares about the show and cares about all the personnel. Like when I'm lighting something and I need everyone to stand around while I'm focusing automated lighting onto people, you know, I'll always say to the actors, hey, guys, I'm sorry, this is going to take me 10 minutes, but you sort of need to stand where you're at. I respect that the actors are standing on stage bored while I aim lights at them.

They know it's necessary and needs to be done. They're not complaining, but you have to be aware of everybody. You have to know that the stagehands have been working since 8 a.m., so can we go home at 11 o'clock at night? Yeah, let's go home at 11. I have the ballet to light, but if I start lighting it at midnight, everyone's too tired. We'll light it tomorrow. Right. And I learned all that from her to respect everybody in the room, including the ladies that are trying to clean the theater when you're trying to light.

[4:13] Ken Billington: Now you've made this jump or you're making this jump. You decided that it's your time to have your opinions on your shows. What's the first jobs that you get? None. Don't get any. Interestingly, I've spent too long as an assistant. Theron tried to get me to leave a year earlier than I did, but I would go into one of the theatrical hangouts and I knew everybody. I knew all the managers. I knew directors, actors. I go into Joe Allen's and I couldn't get to the end of the bar with everybody saying hello to me. Nobody was hiring me, but everybody knew me and I was a known entity in town. I knew the crews. You couldn't have asked for a better life except there I was not working. By the way, I think I'm all 24.

And then I got some regional theater stuff, a couple of off-Broadway shows, but then the New Phoenix Repertory Company, which had gone through numerous changes, but they had reorganized as New Phoenix. And they did a two-show season the season before that Hal Prince had directed and Theron had lit both shows and they were doing their second season. And I had done what we would now call off-off-Broadway that the Phoenix had done. Some new plays. I'm doing a Christopher Isherwood play, going out to dinner with Christopher Isherwood. Anyway, we're doing these new plays and Theron couldn't do the season. So she said, you like Ken, why don't you have Ken light it? And I said, okay. So they called me and asked me to light three plays in repertory on Broadway without an interview with anybody. But they knew you. The management knew me, Hal Prince didn't know me. And so my first Broadway show there was The Visit, Durnmont's The Visit, directed by Hal Prince. And I got a Tony nomination.

[5:54] Ken Billington: Wow.

[5:55] David Armstrong: And that was 105 shows ago on Broadway.

[5:58] Ken Billington: 105 shows on Broadway.

[5:59] David Armstrong: Yeah.

[6:00] Ken Billington: What kind of record is that?

[6:02] Ken Billington: Theron Musser and Jules Fisher are ahead of me, but that's it.

[6:05] David Armstrong: That's it. That is truly amazing. So let's just talk about some of the highlights. Obviously, 105 shows, we'd have to do five podcasts to go through the entire history of Ken Billington on Broadway. But out of all the memorable moments, which ones stand out?

[6:19] Ken Billington: Well, it's interesting. People say, what's your favorite? I don't have a favorite. I can give you favorite musicals and I can give you favorite plays. I can also give you the worst. But my first show was thrilling and it looked good, I think. I didn't win the Tony, but I got the nomination. But the first musical that I did that I thought I did a great job on was a musical called Working Man. I did that the same year I did On The 20th Century, which also looked pretty good. Then going along, other shows that I thought I did a good job on that looked great were Grind, a Hal Prince musical that was not a hit. And then I get to things like The Red Shoes, Sweeney Todd, The Scottsboro Boys, Chicago. Those are shows I think I did a really good job on.

[7:08] David Armstrong: And why? What makes those stand out for you as being exemplary work by Ken Billington?

[7:14] Ken Billington: Let's look at something like Grind. You know, the set designer, the lighting designer, the costumes designer, the director, the choreographer, we all were in it together, fully committed. And everybody was creative. The show ultimately didn't work and ran a couple of weeks. But it was such a committed group of people. The director wasn't telling me how to light it. I was lighting it. But the director would say, how about this or that? We talked. I mean, it wasn't that I did it in a vacuum. And the set designer would come over and say, you know, when the set revolves, what if we... And it just would happen. Those are the things that are fun. I don't want to work in a void. I don't want people to not tell me that doesn't look good.

I mean, I love praise and say, hey, that looks pretty good. But I like it when they say, hey, can we make that any better? How do we do that? And it's those shows I've just mentioned, everybody was talking to everybody. Right. A collaboration really worked on those shows.

[8:10] Ken Billington: They really, really did work. And, you know, wanting to be involved from the beginning. One of the best plays I ever lit was a thing called Foxfire with Hume Cronin and Jessica Tandy. The producers and the general manager wanted another lighting designer. David Mitchell had designed the set and the set was brilliantly complicated that nobody knew was brilliantly complicated. It looked effortless. And David said to the producer and the general manager and the director, the lighting designer they wanted had a couple of Broadway credits. And he said he didn't think that designer was a bad designer, but he said we need a grown up who really knows what they're doing to be able to do this. Otherwise, we're going to get into trouble.

And so I was brought on and I solved all the problems. I got a Tony nomination, by the way, as did David. But it looked effortless and simple. It was so complicated. I don't know a lot of people today, a young designer who could have figured that one out.

[9:10] Ken Billington: Nobody noticed because you did your job right.

[9:12] Ken Billington: Nobody noticed. You know, it's true. I always think the best review is no review. Yes, I love winning prizes. I love seeing my name when it's wonderful. But, you know, if I've done my job well, who knows? Nobody knows. I think one of the best examples of that is A Chorus Line. When you watch A Chorus Line, you walk out of the theater going, oh, my God, what a show, not what a performance, what a score, the scenery, the costumes, the lights. Even the choreography, it's all, it's all of one. You know, the set is a periactoid upstage that has a mirror, a black wall and an art deco thing at the end. The lighting is wildly complicated, looks simple. You know, how many songs in that show are standards?

One, basically what I did for Love. You didn't walk out of it whistling the scenery or the lights. You walked out of it whistling the show. And that proves how good a show is. That doesn't happen often. Sweeney Todd, that happens. And on the current production of Chicago, it happens. It does happen, but it doesn't happen a lot.

[10:40] David Armstrong: Don't go away. Ken Billington and I will be right back with more of his insider's view of Broadway lighting design when Broadway Nation returns right after this quick break.

[11:09] Ken Billington: How have things changed? What's the biggest change you've seen since that first show in 1968?

[11:23] Ken Billington: Well, what I've seen is we have technology, as much technology as we want. You almost have to have an IT guy on the show. We used to take big musicals. If you look at the schedule for My Fair Lady, a big musical, two turntables, it loaded into New Haven on Sunday. They teched Act One on Wednesday. They teched Act Two on Thursday. They did a dress rehearsal Friday afternoon and performance Friday night, a day for each act. And this is manual, no electronics involved. Now, on a simple musical, if you don't have 14 days of tech, you're probably not going to make it. What has slowed us down? All the technology.

[12:07] Ken Billington: Supposed to simplify our lives. Why does it take so much longer? Well, because I can move every light every place. So we have to wait for me to move the lights. It used to be, if you wanted a piece of scenery to come on that was winched on, it was a guy cranking a handle to number 42. Oh, now bring it on another foot. He'd crank it to 43. Yeah, that's good. And he'd write down 43. I mean, it was that simple. Now, if you get it on there, then you have to say, oh, bring it on a foot. It's probably 15 minutes of programming. If it's simple programming to get it one foot on. Now it always goes the same place. Sometimes the guy could crank too fast and go past it. But all of this technology adds time.

Time is money. So it costs more money. But you know, I still do encores. I did Follies at encores. I had two hours of lighting and we started at 8 a.m. and we went home at six o'clock. The show was finished. Last show I did there, Mack and Mabel before lockdown, it was a full production of Mack and Mabel and they had on stage five hours of tech and we did it. So it can be done, but the technology I had involved was not fussy. The other thing is directors. This goes into a whole other thing, but directors who were the assistants in the 60s and 70s, the production assistant or the assistant director.

[13:30] Ken Billington: The people that should have been the directors in the 90s, we were decimated by AIDS. So we lost a generation of up-and-coming directors, choreographers. And we get to newer directors and choreographers who came along, men and women. I mean, it's just going along and you get there and they didn't grow up in the manual world of the theater. They grew up in the electronic world of the theater. So they don't know about calling me and saying, it's nighttime, we're going to need a blue light at the door. They just assume if they'll sit in the theater and say, oh, they're dark at the door, put a light on them. And we have the tools to manipulate to get a light on the door. I'm not saying they're bad directors.

They just didn't know where it came from. So they will often say, why don't we just go red here? Okay, we can go red here. We can do that. As opposed to talking about it in a production meeting. So once upon a time, because of the manualness of the theater, the creatives had to think of everything before they got to the building. And sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. And you change. But now sometimes people just get there and it's a whimsy. A choreographer now may want a light cue on every four counts. Light cue, two, three, four, light cue, two, three, four, light cue, two. Well, with a computer, we can hit the button. We can do one on every beat if you want. Once upon a time, if you could get 10 light cues into a ballet on Broadway, that was a big deal.

Now you could have a hundred light cues in that ballet. And you go and see something like six, which is brilliantly lit. There's 1,500 light cues in an hour and 10 minutes. And it's brilliant. I mean, it looks brilliant. It is what it should be. So that's where we have changed. And I think it was the up-and-comings disappeared and the new up-and-comings weren't part of an earlier era. We sort of had to keep up with them.

[15:27] David Armstrong: Right. You had to jump to their way of thinking and sort of doing it all in the room on the spot.

[15:34] Ken Billington: Absolutely. And the lighting designer works with an audience. Usually when you start to light, you have a full acting company. You have the full creative staff, directors, choreographers, set designers, costume designers, all their associates. You have the music department, you have the general manager and the company manager, the production manager, and the producer stopping in to see what's going on. And I'm saying, turn one on, take it to half, put two full. I'm making my pictures. I'm creating my art with an audience and I have to do it quickly because they lose interest quickly. It's because it's boring. The pressure of being a lighting designer during a tech rehearsal is not to be underestimated. And I think it's also part of why you're able to achieve this and some people may not be able to. Being under that pressure is something you have to learn to figure out how you're going to do it.

[16:30] Ken Billington: Right. And many of my colleagues take more time, but when they are hired, everybody knows that. They do a good job. They do a brilliant job, but they maybe are not quite as fast. But I learned from Hal Prince who had no patience at all. He'd say, Ken, change that. I'd say, okay. And I start talking and changing. About 15 seconds later, he'd say, are you done yet? I said, I'm still working on it. Okay. At 30 seconds, he'd say, we're going forward. You finish it on your own time and we move forward. So I could finish his musicals in time or his plays. I just learned how to relight a whole scene in 30 seconds.

[17:02] David Armstrong: Wow. That's amazing. So because this podcast is focused on musicals and you've done a lot of plays, but you've also done a lot of musicals. What are the kinds of things you have to be able to do as a lighting designer in a musical that would be completely alien to somebody just doing a play?

[17:16] Ken Billington: Well, I don't know if it's completely alien, but the one thing we need to do is we need to focus where the audience is looking. Because a musical, you might have a lot of people dancing, but you still need to watch the person singing the melody. You have scenery changing. I have to focus where your eyes go. Sound is probably amplified and coming from all the speakers. So it's not telling you to look stage left particularly, and all the scenery may be going off stage right. I'm the one of us to get the audience to know they're supposed to look stage left. And we do that a lot with follow spots. I can isolate an actor or two at any given moment, even if there's a lot of people on stage and there's bright light.

The lights could be full, but the star in the middle of the stage singing the song is twice as bright. So that's one of the main things we do is we focus where you're supposed to be looking and what is important. We also have to grab you emotionally. Is it by what's coming through the window? Is it the backdrop? People don't normally during real life start singing a song that continues the story with that sort of fake to begin with. How do I make you believe it? So do we soften the lights around them? Does the background go darker? Does it go blue? Do I change the ambiance for the song? So you listen to the song and you know what the song is saying. And at the end of the song, you come back to the reality of whatever the book scene is.

That's in the world of focusing, but it's also in the world of telling you what the show is saying, what to feel. I've often thought lighting design and orchestration, we're doing the exact same thing. Both work in our subconscious, whereas the sets and the costumes, they have elements of that as well, but are very much more tangible. And this is something that's telling the story on another level.

[19:20] Ken Billington: Right. And the other thing I can do is I can make the audience applaud. I may need to do this with the orchestrator, but at the end of a song, if I bump the lights up on the banana bowl, and they've sung the song, well, I will give you a bigger hand. I used to say, before everyone stood up for standing ovations for everything, I used to be able to get audiences to stand in the curtain calls by manipulating light cues. If you ever go see Les Mis, the director, when they did the curtain call, they are all upstage, and they rush down to the footlights. Oh, the entire company. If the audience isn't standing, they're on their feet at that moment. Nothing happened. The actors just moved about eight feet. We can do the same thing by taking the lights from 70% to full. So we manipulate a lot.

[20:08] David Armstrong: Yeah, it's amazing. Well, you know, you just hang around long enough, you figure everything out like this. When we were talking back and forth via email to set this up, you made a point that you'd work with everybody, with the possible exception of Maude Adams.

[20:23] Ken Billington: Right, right. It's just interesting. Again, it goes back to women being involved in this profession. That goes back to the earliest days of lighting, doesn't it?

[20:27] Ken Billington: Absolutely. But you know, those ladies of that era knew what made them look good. They really did. They were not fools. Eva Le Gallien would have little inky spots in the footlights, and she knew that she did the big speech down left, and you got lit down left, so you look good. They knew what made them look good. The other one was Claudette Colbert. I did a show with her on Broadway. It was successful, called A Talent for Murder. She spent a lot of time behind the desk. One day, I think we were about to go into a dress rehearsal or something. We had been out of town in Washington. We were now in New York, and Miss Colbert comes on stage, and she goes, Mr. Billington. I said, yes, Miss Colbert, because when you dealt with stars of that magnitude from that era, I was Mr., they were Miss.

Gloria Swanson was always Miss Swanson, and I was always Mr. Billington. She said, Mr. Billington, would you put the lighting at the state it would be in when I sit behind the desk? I said, certainly. She had her maid with her, her dresser, who I think had been with her for 50 years. She was in full makeup and costume. She sat down behind the desk, and I put the light cue up. Her maid handed her a mirror, and she held it in her left hand. She watched that mirror, and she took it all the way around, all the way to the right to see what she looked like. She looked at me, and she said, lovely, Mr. Billington. Thank you. She got up and went back to her dressing room. She knew she wanted to look good.

I worked with Mary Martin and Ethel Merman. One of the plays I was doing with Mary Martin called Do You Turn Somersaults? Again, not a success, but it was a two-character play with her and Anthony Quayle. I put footlights in, and the footlights weren't used, but when she made her entrance, as she came in upstage and started to walk downstage, the footlights came up. I remember we were in tech rehearsal, and she came in, she walked down, got to the platform, and just looked at me and said, thank you, Ken. She knew exactly what I had done to make her look good.

[22:32] David Armstrong: So talk about, Jaisal, why did you know? Because footlights were out of fashion by this point.

[22:36] Ken Billington: I still use footlights all the time because nothing beats them. But talk about why.

[22:41] Ken Billington: What it does is it softly fills in under the chins. It fills in those bags. It fills in under the eyebrows. It fills the shadows in. So it flattens it a bit so you don't see lines or wrinkles. Simple. Doesn't work alone, but in conjunction with everything else, it fills in a lot. And I was doing a concert with Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, and Ethel Merman had written into her contract the gel, the pink gel that would be in all the follow spots. The pink gel she liked was closer to magenta than pink, and I was doing a concert with her at the Broadway theater, and I had her in the pink that I like to use on the ladies. And we stopped for whatever reason. I think it was musically. And she turned to Mary Martin, who was standing next to her.

They were both in the follow spots. And Ethel Merman said, not very pink. And her mic was on, so I heard all this. And Mary Martin stepped away, looked at her and said, Merm, you look great. And she said, it's not very pink. And she said, Merm, Ken knows what he's doing. You look good. And she said, well, I'd rather have magenta. Ethel Merman thought she would look better in dark pink. It just made her look a little odd. I made her look beautiful.

[23:59] Ken Billington: So do we know what the 106th Ken Billington Broadway musical is going to be?

[24:05] Ken Billington: Yes, but it hasn't been announced yet, so I'm sad to say you will see it next spring.

[24:10] David Armstrong: Thank you, Ken Billington, for being my guest today on Broadway Nation. This has been absolutely fantastic.

[24:40] Ken Billington: Well, thank you for having me. This was fun.

[25:32] David Armstrong: If you enjoy this podcast, I feel certain that you will also enjoy joining our Broadway Nation Facebook group, where you'll find daily postings of images, videos, articles, and links that relate to and enhance each and every episode of this podcast. Just Google Broadway Nation Facebook group and join the more than 2,000 other fans of Broadway Nation.

[25:36] David Armstrong: Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Pals Mox for his help with editing this episode, to KVSH 101.9, the voice of beautiful Vashon Island, Washington, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.

[26:36] David Armstrong: Let's go on with the show. Let's go on with the show. Let's go on with the show.