A Chorus Line No. 24 - Tharon Musser
- Lauryn Johnson
- Jul 14
- 9 min read
Tharon won Best Lighting Design for a Musical in 1976 for A Chorus Line
Tharon: "I went to thousands of rehearsals down on 19th Street, where we went through many stages. At one point the line was going to be a light box in the floor. At another point, for what we know about snow in Puerto Rico, we were going to have all the kids in a sled in the background during Nothing. One day Michael leaned over and said, 'You know, we have to do something to help the audience know when the characters are expressing internal thoughts.' And I said, 'Well, the light won't be blue.' It was a very gradual process. Just watching it and watching the nature of the show organically emerge.
"I wanted to have a lot of lines on the stage. I brought Michael a picture out of David Duncan's photography book. A cue in the show became a reproduction of that picture -- magenta and green on a line of people. One day I said to Michael, 'I'm not going to use specials on this show, I want to do a Mondrian. I don't mean palette, I mean patterns on the floor. We'll use whatever is in that place when we need a special." He said, 'What do you mean, Mondrian?' 'Come over to the house,' I said. So he came over, I got down my art books and showed him a typical Mondrian.
"Michael and I always worked from art books. Lighting is such an intangible thing, you can't do sketches. Art books are a great way to demonstrate to a director the kind of color or texture you're thinking about.
Michael and I had an unspoken agreement. We just sensed. There were times when I would get a picture on the stage but it didn't work for the scene; but if Michael liked it, he'd change the blocking. We had a relationship that I've never had with anybody else and don't imagine I ever will again. It was very, very special.
"All 128 light cues in the show were on dance counts. We spent quite a bit of time with our original production stage manager, Jeff Hamlin, teaching him to count because it had to be that precise. He cued off score. I had cued opera off score so there was no reason a musical couldn't be cued off score. And it's the only thing Michael understood. It had to be on the music. The dancers were, so why couldn't we? And Jeff did a fantastic job.
"The computerized lighting board was a first on Broadway, but it evolved because of the Public Theatre. They had what we never had on Broadway — a preset board. I only brought in a special board because I needed a little more than they had, but otherwise that was how we did the show. So when the Shuberts said we could have anything we wanted, I said, 'Okay, Broadway missed one whole era of preset boards, which even colleges have. Let's skip to the next generation. We want to go to memory.'
"Well, believe it or not, there were none invented at the time. We told Frank De Verna, who runs Four Star -- where we rent equipment -- about the board we wanted. When they decided to move A CHORUS LINE uptown early, he couldn't produce it in time, and I said, 'Frank, if we miss this chance, it will be another ten years before Broadway catches up to snuff.' So Frank called me and said, 'Get packing! We're leaving tomorrow for Hillsboro, Oregon.' I said, 'What in the hell for?' 'They've got a switchboard I want you to see and they can deliver by our date.' We flew out to Oregon, looked at this board, and I said, 'Eeech! However, I don't think we have a choice. It's now or never.' Their prototype, which we named Sam, was brought in on the show and made history. We had Sam up until two or three years before we closed on Broadway.
—The Longest Line by Gary Stevens and Alan George
"I loved the final dialogue scene and the look we got there. When Priscilla went into What I Did for Love and starts down from upstage center, Michael asked, 'Aren't you going to give her a spot?' and I said, 'She's walking through the woods. Be sure she phrases so that she's singing the lyrics when she's in the light, not when she's walking through the darkness.' We gave her the spot when she got down stage. That whole thing was, to me, as if they were sitting out at a lake or a park saying what are you going to do when you grow up."
—The Longest Line by Gary Stevens and Alan George
View Tharon's A Chorus Line Lighting Charts
"Everyone wanted to please Tharon – she inspired that in people because she was such a consummate professional. She was a star, and if you were able to give her something useful a little bit of that stardust fell on you. For example, when we had a formulation change in a color, I kept a supply of the old color filter under my desk just for her so that she never had an unpleasant surprise. I also remember a time where we had decided to discontinue a color at the bottom of the sales statistics. The phone rang almost immediately after the announcement. It was Tharon informing us that we had just axed what was to be a fundamental color in Dreamgirls. Needless to say, the color was restored." --Margie Heymann
By Ellen Lampert-Gréaux Mar 1, 1999
Terry: Tharon, What convinced you that this was the show where you were going to jump off a cliff and deal with new technology? It not only had technological implications--would this board work--but also political implications--what it meant to put people out of work.
Musser: We had a preset board at the Public, and I knew that there was no way that their assistants could run this show the way we did it down there. So I started looking into other kinds of control, and I got into the LS-8. I just knew that a resistance board wouldn't work. Preset boards were already passe, so there was no point in thinking they were the next step.
Terry: Gary, what about the fear that people would be put out of work, or that this would change the paradigm of how you lit a Broadway show?
Shevett: The limitation on the number of lights that could be used on any show at the time was six boards, double-throws, which could double the capacity because you were one side or the other. The show was also limited to how many people you could use: three men, two boards each, plus all the paraphernalia.
I realized when talking with Tharon that, once producers or designers realized they could have as many lights as they wanted, and only one person was going to operate it, producers would think they were saving lots of money. Of course, they were forgetting how much time it would take to set all this stuff up. So I predicted that people would make a living setting these shows up, and then move on to set up another complex one--which has come to pass. It's the technology that produced the work.
Terry: Tharon, one of your structural alterations to the Shubert Theatre was the followspot. Can you talk about that a little?
Musser: That was important. You had to have a followspot where it wouldn't fall off before it hit the back wall. That was the big thing. The Shuberts were great. When we were going to move the show, they said from the beginning, 'You can have anything you want.' Once the board came in, I said, 'I want the followspot space.'
Terry: There were four followspots on the bridge. Now, mind you, the bridge had absolutely no protection. It was probably 45' or 50' in the air, three guys sitting up there, with four followspots. Because when there was a burnout, you dove for the spare followspot. And there were frequent burnouts because the lamps were being overdriven. With that followspot bridge, coupled with three of the most talented followspot operators in the theatre, you created what we would do now with moving lights--magical followspot pickups coming out of nowhere, where people's heads appeared out of total blackness.
Musser: Drove the operators crazy.
Terry: Was that a long training process, getting that look, or did it happen naturally?
Musser: Part of it. But the guys loved the show, and they really were about making it work.
Terry: I think that energy was pervasive. I sensed that it went down to every member of the crew.
Jacob: The laws of physics go out the window when Tharon is lighting the show. We made adjustments rather quickly.
Musser: The secret really is early, early involvement, especially with a script, if that's part of it. Because everybody talks about it, and nobody knows what it is. It's a very intangible thing. That was the wonderful thing about Michael. It was that marvelous instinct.
Munderloh: I have two collaboration stories. One is, when Kelly Bishop, playing Sheila, came downstage in 'At the Ballet,' she was in between two foot mics. She had the weakest voice of the three, and Abe said they were trying to get Michael to do something about it. So I had a confab with Michael and begged him, 'Isn't there any way you can move Sheila to be right on the foot mic?' He hemmed and hawed, but he did, in fact, move Sheila to foot mic number two, and no one ever knew that when she was strolling she was actually getting to the mic--but that's what she was doing. And the other is Michael saying to Tharon, 'This person's not in the light!' and Tharon would say, 'Move the person!' Then Michael would go up onstage and say, 'Where is the light coming from, Tharon?' And she would say, 'The left!' And he'd move the person and say, 'Is that all right, Tharon?' And she'd say, 'Yes.'
Musser: That's correct.
Munderloh: But it is correct. Michael was willing to listen to those around him. He was willing to take the best of people. It wasn't ever like a power struggle: 'No, no, it has to be my way.' He was willing to take whatever anyone said and make it the show, so that the show shone better than any one person.
Musser: Also, he could visualize, which few very directors can do. You'd explain something to him and he knew what you were saying and what it meant. He was a genius at collaboration.
Terry: Tharon, you said that the computer freed up the design team to have as many lights as they wanted, yet here was this amazing design done with very, very little equipment. That's what makes it such an amazing work.
Musser: Well, everybody says, 'You can have as many lights as you want,' but I keep saying, 'Yes, but you can't maintain them.' One man can run them, but you can't maintain them. This is the fallacy that we've gotten into.
Shevett: We were quite worried about backup at that time, too. What happens if this doesn't work? There were eight panels, 24 presets with an A-B master, and we put all the 96 controllers there, but there's no one master. So if anything went wrong, it would take four people to run it--four people reading their individual cue books. One night Tharon, myself, Richard Winkler, Dermot Lynch, a few other people were there, and the computer didn't happen. So we rushed into this mode, which we'd never practiced, and we ran the entire show with six people doing hand presets. Tharon, out of her head, directed all six people on all the 96 channels, doubled that with the double-throws, and we did the entire show out of our head.
Musser: We got about 95% [of the cues].
Pearlman: That second board ran the show for the next 13 years. After the show closed, I had stored it in our warehouse. About three weeks later, I got a call from Mrs. Bell, who was the wife of the man who started Digital Electronic Corporation [the company that provided computer parts for the board], and she said, 'I understand you've got this computer that ran Chorus Line.' I said, 'Yes, I do.' She said, 'I think we'd like to have it for the Computer Museum in Boston.' I said, 'You know, it still works.' She said, 'Don't tell me that. I don't want to know it still works, because if it does, I'll have to keep it running.' So Steve and I made a deal with the Computer Museum: he provided them with some dimmers and I provided them with an access control console they could hide underneath the LS-8. You can still see it today; there is this cartoonish rebuild of the booth of the Shubert, and it's not too bad. The most unrealistic thing is that there's a woman running the board! But other than that, it's a pretty good representation of the Chorus Line booth, and it's still part of the permanent exhibit.
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