Lighting the Comedic Highlights of Oh, Mary!

By Marshall Bissett

If stage lighting can be said to have a sense of humor, then designer Cha See exploits it to the full in the current production of the hit Oh, Mary! now playing at New York’s Lyceum Theatre until Jan. 2026. Described by its author, Cole Escola, as “the stupidest play,” See’s lighting sets the tone during the overture. “I just wanted to blast the front curtain with the most garish, awful colors you could imagine, greens, purples, yellows to let the audience know this wasn’t a straight historical drama,” says See. The play then opens in a brightly lit naturalistic set of the Oval Office. With the Oval office walls set at a diagonal, See explains how she “really had to do my math” to avoid obtrusive shadows while still lighting faces.

Understanding that comedy can only work in bright lighting, See describes the move from a tiny off-Broadway production to a more fully formed, higher budget production on Broadway. “We kept all the elements that made the show work when we only had four moving lights, only now, with a rig of ETC Source Four LED Series 3’s, it’s a lot brighter and more colorful.” 

Without issuing spoilers, she describes how she kept her heavy artillery for the final three scenes. “That’s when I needed an explosion of brightness and color and the hundred-plus ETC fixtures came into their own,” she says. With only a two-week technical build up, the show benefited from having the same design team, cue structure, and documentation from Off-Broadway to on. “We knew the show worked, so everything we do on Broadway is like the cherry on the top.” 

The team resisted the temptation to over-produce the show when it transitioned to Broadway. “I wanted more brightness onstage, but I didn’t want it to look like a comic sketch,” says See.

The Disney Factor

See and director Sam Pinkleton, who at one time worked on a cruise ship, used many Disney analogies to articulate their common goal. “We imagined the prelude to a film you might see at El Capitan, Six Flags, or the castle at Disneyland, with successive ugly bright greens, fuscias, pinks, and yellows,” explains See. “These colors make a re-appearance later in the play.” The contrasts between Mary’s life in the Oval Office and her later aspirations and fantasies following her husband’s death are fully expressed in dramatic shifts in lighting. “After Abe Lincoln dies, we turn on every lamp in the rig to show that this is a new chapter in Mary’s life,” says See.

The theatrical humor extends to the set design where, even in the naturalistic White House settings, the walls don’t quite fit together and the double doors open onto black drapes instead of garden vistas. The bookcase on stage left is clearly a one-dimensional painting and the props look flat and unrealistic. Even the Ford Theatre set is a simple booth. “I have a lot of fun with the set reveal at the end – but I don’t want to be a spoiler,” jokes See, “Matt and I created a lot of great effects on the ETC Eos Ti console.” 

Raised in the Philippines, See moved to New York in 2014 for her MFA at NYU, where she graduated in 2017. But despite the city training, she brought rich experience from her hometown where she lit shows, concerts, and corporate events.

Asked if she has a recognizable lighting style, she is quick to point out that she always comes fresh to a project be it Broadway or a corporate event. “I like to come into shows not knowing anything. But I also always want to slip into the light plot something personal that says, ‘Cha did that’ – even though only me and the electricians will notice. I’m always challenging the norms of American lighting design.”

Programming – A Layer of Abstraction

Matt Steinberg, the Oh, Mary! programmer, aptly describes his role as “a layer of abstraction” between the designer and the console. He encourages designers to express their ideas in words, allowing him the chore of turning those ideas into keystrokes on the console.

An alum of ETC’s Fred Foster Student Mentorship program, Steinberg studied computer science at Brown University before concentrating on programming. “ETC were generous enough to sponsor me to go to LDI where I met the contacts that set me on my career path,” he says. 

Time spent in pre-viz at ETC’s New York office proved invaluable to Steinberg, who used an ETC Eos Ti to program the show. “There was a tight schedule with many complicated sequences we had to work on,” he explains. The original Off-Broadway show used an Ion console and four moving lights with a handful of ETC Source Four LED Series 2 fixtures with the Lustr array. “Almost anything you can do on a flagship console you can also scale down to a smaller console like an Element and vice versa, so we were able to size up the show files and adapt to a larger rig when we moved uptown – that was an exciting moment for us,” says Steinberg. He describes his relationship with Cha as very symbiotic: “I know which version of a few dozen colors she likes, so I come prepared with my Cha-specific palettes.”  He looks forward to many more happy collaborations.