“A lot of the musical numbers in Oliver are theatrical, and those are my favorites,” Gretchen Burke, ‘14, said. Burke works with the light crew in setting up how the lights work in the plays done at City High.
“We use grays and blues for some of the creepy scenes, like the funeral home and the orphanage. Sometimes we use ambers and pinks to get a rosy color in the bar. For the main bad guy, we use red because he’s kinda creepy, so his opening color is black and red,” Burke said. They use “gels” to change the colors of the lights, which are actually plastic sheets that are manually inserted over the lights.
“We are lucky to be able to rent so many cool lights. We get a lot of our lights from the university,” Burke said. There are 5 different kinds of lights, almost 100 normal lights, and eight intelligence lights. Only two intelligence lights are owned by City’s drama department, and six rented. Intelligence lights are programmed to move at certain times during the play, on cue. When the cue is received, the lights can shine on a certain spot and change the color automatically. Working on programming the cues for the intelligence lights and the normal lights takes a lot of work, causing the tech crew to stay late until school closes every day of “tech week”.