The Great Gatsby

The July issue of PLASA's LSi Magazine features my interview with the incredible creative team behind the West End production of The Great Gatsby at the London Coliseum. It was an honour speaking with Cory Pattak (Lighting Design), Paul Tate dePoo III (Scenic & Video Design) and Brian Ronan (Sound Design) who gave me so much of their time and some fascinating insights into the vision, the collaboration and the illusions they create on stage. Thanks also to production manager Lloyd Thomas and the UK team for their input and assistance!

A few of my favourite quotes from the interviews:

Paul Tate dePoo III: “My first passion in life was magic and stage illusions. So there is this deep inner desire to make it look like three tons of scenery appears effortlessly out of thin air!”

Cory Pattak: “Throughout the course of the scene, we start from early morning, to a storm approaching, to a big musical number, to the storm actually happening, to the sun coming out after the storm. All of these changes in colour, mood and temperature must perfectly match in the video and the lighting to sell the illusion. Paul and I spent hours refining that scene, matching custom colours, adjusting fade times, changing beam angles in the haze. I even changed the direction of the sun after realising we weren’t totally aligned on Broadway. If the colour of the leaves, or the colour of the sun hitting the roof doesn’t match in all areas, the illusion is broken. None of it is easy or fast, and it requires a lot of patience to work through it all, but the payoff is huge.”

Brian Ronan: “Ah, London’s Coliseum. You national treasure, you grand old gal. You with your inherent 3.5 second decay time … Your impossible dome, so appropriate when Frank Matcham designed you in 1904 … Your beautifully ornate walls that have restricted, for 120 years now, any stagehand from drilling a useful hole in your beautiful façade ...”
Yes, the transition from Broadway to London’s Coliseum did present Ronan with some acoustic and architectural challenges …

Cover photo courtesy of Cory Pattak