By Eleanor Corbin, Peninsula Pulse — July 24th, 2025

Guy Rhodes, a lighting designer who works with Peninsula Players Theatre, at a light board. Photo by Justin Kase Conder.

In live theater, lighting does more than just allow viewers to see the actors’ faces – it also sets the mood and immerses the audience in the world of the show.

Lighting designers like Guy Rhodes use light to convey subtle information about a scene and accompany the emotional beats of a show.

“Just changing the color of the light in a home can completely change the way you feel about being in that space,” he said. “And of course, that carries over to on-stage.”

Rhodes, based in the Chicago area, has designed for eight shows at Peninsula Players Theatre, including this season’s run of Little Women: The Broadway Musical. 

Lighting designers are typically hired on a show-to-show basis and brought on four to eight months before the show’s run, according to Jimmy Balistreri, Door County-based lighting designer.

Balistreri, who has designed for both Northern Sky Theater and Third Avenue PlayWorks, describes lighting as “the sparkle on top of the direction.” Creating that sparkle is a process that involves conversations with other members of the creative team, like costume and set designers, to ensure that the various elements come together cohesively, Balistreri said. For instance, the layout of a set can determine where lights need to be positioned.

Basic lighting is often sufficient for some shows, such as Peninsula Players’ recent run of Barefoot in the Park. The play’s lighting designer, Stephen R. White, explained that many comedies require a simple, well-lit stage so the audience can see the performers’ faces, rather than complicated light cues.

Other shows use lights as a transformative element, like Third Avenue PlayWorks’ recent run of Buyer and Cellar. Balistreri, who designed for the show, said light became an important way to communicate new locations and draw focus to a certain part of the stage.

“It [lighting] can be something that is fully transportational, and take the audience into a new location, into a new world, and immerse the folks that are watching the show in the actual show itself,” Balistreri said.

White, who has worked on 69 shows with Peninsula Players and teaches lighting design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, explained that his “tools” as a designer are line, shape, color, texture, space, balance, rhythm, proportion and emphasis.

Changing just one of these elements can change the audience’s perception of a scene. White uses the iconic kiss between Tony and Maria in West Side Story as an example.

“Tony and Maria kiss. How quick is the fade out? Is it a hard, intense kiss, and so we hold it and then we black out, or is it a lingering, gentle kiss, and then we just slowly fade out on them?” White said.

In White’s perspective, lighting should blend seamlessly into a scene.

“Oftentimes, I don’t want the audience to be aware of my work at all,” he said. “Yeah, maybe they can feel it with their bodies, but not with their minds.”

Light can also help preserve the magic of live performance. The human eye is naturally drawn to the brightest thing in front of it, Rhodes said, so using a spotlight or a bright flash in one corner of the stage can allow stagehands to make necessary scene changes elsewhere without drawing attention.

The vast majority of a lighting designer’s job occurs before opening night. They design, hang and program lights for the theater’s backstage crew to operate for the duration of the show’s run. Programming in this context means assigning certain lights to buttons on a light board.

Designers use tech week – a week of full-scale dress rehearsals before a show opens – to fine-tune their setup and practice timing cues.

“You see exactly what’s working and what isn’t working, and then you can spend the rest of tech [week] fixing and cleaning with the overall 1,000-foot view of the show in mind,” Balistreri said.

By the time the show’s curtains open to the public for the first time, the lighting designer is often gone. White, who does not generally stay for opening night, does make an exception for Peninsula Players because of the company’s short turnaround time between productions.

“I never watch my shows opening night,” he said. “I’ve watched the rehearsal usually, like, six or seven times in a row at that point. Players is the one place I do tend to still watch it because it’s only like the third time we’ve run the show.”