Lighting Up Stories on Stage: Spotlight on Naomi Shanson

Spotlight: Naomi, tell us a little bit about yourself. How long have you been involved with theatre, with PYT and what areas of theatre do you enjoy most because you’ve done them all —performing, stage managing, lighting design, and even directing!

Naomi: I have been involved with PYT since I was 5 years old performing in their summer camp: Theatre in the Park, and since then, I have been onstage and backstage in both Mainstage and SOS productions. In order to audition for my first Mainstage musical, Seussical The Musical in 2010, my parents made me read for 20 minutes each day because I dreaded reading (I have dyslexia, but we didn’t know that then). Since then, I have been involved with somewhere around 15 Mainstage shows. (No, I do not have to read for 20 minutes each day in order to do them. Homework takes care of that!)

By the end of this year, I will have done 25 SOS shows with my first one playing “Chester” in the 7-person-all-female-cast of Bunnicula in 2014. In 2017 I had the honor to stage manage Officer Buckle and Gloria and have stage managed a total of 3 SOS productions (the others are The Ugly Duckling and The Cat in the Hat) and 3 teen productions (She Kills Monsters, Au Cabaret 2018, and Check Please). Some of my favorite SOS productions include Those Darn Squirrels (Nutsy Squirrel), A Little Princess (Sarah Crewe), The Talented Clementine (Over 10 roles—and I got to learn how to play the harmonica!), Raggedy Ann and Andy (Camel Butt—I know right!), and Oskar and the Eight Blessings (Oskar).  My mom’s personal favorite will always be Judy Moody Gets Famous (Jessica Finch) as that was one of our favorite books growing up and any show where I tap danced (which was quite a few). I love all aspects of theatre, especially since every part is vital to putting on a show, but if I had to pick my favorite positions, I’d have to say that I enjoy stage managing and lighting designing the most.

Naomi: I’m so excited to be the lighting designer for the season! I was first exposed to lighting at PYT when I was the light board operator for Sweeney Todd in 2016 and since then I have been the light board operator for 9 productions at PYT (Mainstage and SOS) but it wasn’t until I was the lighting designer for Role Reversal (Directed by Andie Chan) in 2017 that I really considered being a lighting designer. Not going to lie, being the lighting designer on Role Reversal was extremely daunting mostly because I didn’t know much about lighting design to begin with as I had learned entirely by watching other designers work. Additionally, Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts (MVCPA) had changed its light board between my previous show in the SecondStage and Role Reversal so I didn’t even know which buttons to press! Hint! If you want to be a lighting designer: know your equipment! As I learned from Role Reversal, it doesn’t matter what lighting you want if you don’t know which buttons you need to press to make it happen.

Last year, after working more with MVCPA’s light board over a couple of years, I was asked to step in as the lighting designer for the SOS show: Al Capone Does My Shirts. The Lighting Designer scheduled for the show was tied up in another PYT project and had to step away from it. Things went very well and in the end, I received a very nice letter from PYT asking me to come back next year.

Spotlight: What’s the process you go through when designing lighting for a show?  Whom did you learn from or how did you gain the experience?

Naomi: The person who I say taught me about lighting design is Broadway Associate Lighting Designer, Travis McHale who has designed lighting for numerous PYT MainStage productions. Some of my first lightboard operator jobs were working for Travis here at PYT and we would just talk about lighting and the technique of lighting all through tech night (which is long!). While he taught me about the art of lighting design, I created my own sort of style for creating my design. Evan Lola was the lighting designer for SOS’s Pinocchio in 2017 where I was his light board operator and he did this unheard-of thing for SOS: he preprogrammed the cues before tech! Pinocchio was one of the fastest techs I have ever seen at SOS (And I’ve been here for a while—The Legend of Sleepy Hollow will be my 19th SOS show), so I knew that I wanted to pre-program all of my cues. In order to do this I start by scribbling very notes all over my script of tones, colors, styles, times, and locations of the scenes as I watch the designer run-through (basically, a run through is where a designer (like me) comes to see the show before tech). Then I go home and create a spreadsheet of all my cues: when they happen, their number, and what the cue will actually look like. With there being a day between the designer run and tech, the director and stage manager can go through the spreadsheets and point out anything that wouldn’t work with the show, or add something that I’ve missed (remember, I’ve only seen the show once). After they look through it, I start programming the show in the ETC Nomad App on my laptop. This way, when I get to tech, it’s smooth sailing with only a few minor changes.

Spotlight: You’re a senior in high school, what’s in store for you next? College? Gap year? Work? What major/career are you interested in pursuing?