Word: musser
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...little credit goes to Tharon Musser's inspired lighting throughout. The show opens with Richard delivering his celebrated soliloquy in pitch darkness. Only as it continues do the lights come up to reveal a steeply raked stage with an oppressive, gray two-level set, and Richard (Douglas Watson), with a big cross hung about his hypocritical neck, sitting on the floor until he begins to crawl like an animal. Only gradually are we aware of his ugly visage, hunched back, deformed right hand, and a misshapen leg that necessitates the strapping on of an artificial foot...
...again and again, Seale has grouped his players to form attractive pictures. I have only two complaints here. Herman Chessid's music is too squealy, his fanfares too insipid. And, at the very end of the play--a blaze of glory--it is ridiculous for light-designer Tharon Musser to give us a long slow fadeout instead of a quick blackout...
...small help comes from Tharon Musser's lighting, which extends to the use of real on-stage flambeaux. In one scene (the fake trial of Lear's daughters) she effectively uses orange underlighting through a trapdoor in stage center. Conrad Susa has composed fitting music for woodwind, brass, and percussion; its discords reflect the play's dissonant world...
What Shakespeare did work at creating is the romantic, sunny gaeity that pervades the fairy-tale forest of Arden (which is only one phoneme away from both Eden and ardor). At Stratford, currently, the idyllic glow is enhanced by Robert O'Hearn's scenery, Tharon Musser's lighting, and some of David Amram's music...
...American Shakespeare Festival has a great many virtues. Fortunately, director Jack Landau seems to have gotten most of the nonsense out of his system in his Twelfth Night and has, for a change, approached Antony--given its cast--with a welcome sense of responsibility. Enormously aided by Tharon Musser's lighting, by Rouben Ter-Arutunian's basic but effective settings and stunning costumes (which range from a black-and-gold tent-like shroud in which Cleopatra commits suicide to the sketchiest of breechclouts worn by her Egyptian slaves), and by an extraordinarily precise crew of stagehands, Landau has achieved...