ETC Illuminates Powerhouse Performances in Days of Wine and Roses on Broadway

A precarious dance between true love and tragic addiction took center stage in Days of Wine and Roses on Broadway. The dark, jazzy musical, based on a 1962 film of the same name, starred Broadway stars Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara as a couple who are brought together and torn apart by their mutual struggles with alcoholism. The show, staged at the legendary Studio 54 theatre, was lit to moody perfection with ETC fixtures by designer Ben Stanton and run on an ETC Apex programmed by Alex Fogel.

The musical’s jazz-oriented sound made Stanton right at home, citing his background as a jazz drummer as an influence on his process as a lighting designer. “When I started studying lighting design, I realized I was using the exact same collaborative and creative techniques that I used as a drummer, controlling the tempo and visual dynamics of the play,” he says. “I didn't realize it at the time, but being an improvisational musician gave me a lot of tools I use everyday as a lighting designer. It's all about creative response, listening to the source material and the creativity around you, and responding to it on the fly.”  

To keep an intimate feeling for the production, Stanton refrained from using a single full stage look throughout the entire show. “It was always a slice of light and a little bit of face light. It was always about carving space and then giving just enough access to the actors to tell the story,” he says. That access arrives in the glow of ETC’s Source Four LED Series 3 fixtures with a Lustr X8 array. The Series 3 delivers unparalleled brightness to the stage in nuanced tones that make performers’ skin tones glow with depth. Describing the Source Four LEDs used on the show, Stanton remarks simply: “they’re beautiful.”

The first act utilized rectangular light boxes that went through a variety of color shifts from scene to scene. Backdropping the characters’ early love story, the panels lent an intentional feeling of artificiality surrounding the romance. “The bright, colorful light boxes were there to create a world of artificial beauty. When Joe and Kirsten first meet and fall in love, their lives are full of excitement and possibility,” Stanton explains. “Kirsten starts drinking, Joe has been drinking for a long time, and for a time everything about their lives seems wonderful — but we're aware that there's something artificial about it.”

A central motif of the musical was of water and the feeling of being lost in the sea of addiction. The set featured a small pool of water downstage that Fogel programmed moving lights to shoot into, filling the stage with the reflection of real rippling waves. Using Apex, Fogel had to be extremely deliberate with the movers to align the reflections with the show’s blocking. “We had to shutter a moving light to a very small box from a very strange angle, which was challenging,” says Fogel. Using Augment3d’s XYZ positioning system, however, adjusting moving lights became as easy as tapping a finger. “I find the XYZ positioning system to be extremely useful as a programming tool,” Fogel says.

Overall, Stanton says, “I felt a strong responsibility to make sure the audience was staying 100% connected to the two lead performers Brian d’Arcy James and Kelly O'Hara. In many ways, they were the reason to make this piece: two stellar performers wanting to embrace this dark and challenging material in song, so I wanted to do justice to the script and to the music.”

One of the best ways to do justice to a powerful piece of theatre is to ensure that it can run smoothly, all eight shows a week. With ETC’s world-famous technical support just a call away 24 hours a day, that peace of mind is a given. “All of us on Broadway enjoy the support that ETC offers,” says Fogel.

Photos by Joan Marcus.