The Scenic, Lighting and Makeup Designer

The most well designed sets and costumes still need good lighting to look their best. The lighting designer makes choices of intensity, color, and angle to create subtle shades of mood. The design of light and shadow bring the sets and costumes (and the actors who inhabit them) into three dimensions.

On stage, an actor’s features must be clearly visible to the audience sitting in the back, middle, and front of the house.  Both male and female actors use stage makeup and techniques to enhance their natural features, diminish other features, and change their appearance.  The use of light and shadow on stage greatly supports the theatricality of the highlighting and shading effects of the makeup.  The use of stage makeup can help reveal aspects of an actor’s character, including age and state of physical as well as emotional health such as: old age, youthfulness, illness, fantasy, animal-likeness, sadness, happiness, excitement, worry, and ethnicity.