Cory Pattak, Lighting Designer

Cory Pattak: I think collective joy to me is what I get sitting in a theater with a group of people. I think audiences are living, breathing organisms that only exist in that state for this two hours. It will never ever happen again in the history of the universe will all those people be together watching this show.

Monica Holt: Welcome back to Arts Unscripted, a capacity podcast. I’m your host, Monica Holt. My guest today is a lighting designer, Cory Pattak. You’ve seen his work on Broadway in Spamalot and The Great Gatsby, which recently passed a thousand performances. He’s also designed in theaters across the states and around the globe. But long before any of that, Cory was a kid in Pittsburgh running his own magic business, complete with business cards. That idea of magic has stayed with him ever since. Now, Cory walks into a dark theater and builds his design live, cue by cue in front of the entire room. In our conversation, he talks honestly about that pressure, the leadership lessons it’s taught him, and that feeling of creating an experience that can never be repeated quite the same again. Cory and I first met at the Kennedy Center when we were both working on the Broadway Center stage series.

A lot of what I know about theatrical design and creating work on stage, I learned from Cory and that team. If you’re listening and you’re currently working at a nonprofit arts institution, here’s my ask. Take the time to get to know the artists and designers who come through your building, even if you’re not required to be backstage or in tech. Their connection to your organization is a big part of what makes our institution’s stories what they are, the memories, the artistic risks, and the successes that happen inside the walls. And it’s the care from those artists, these creative forces like Cory, that help create the community your audiences keep coming back for. Let’s dive in. Cory Pattak, welcome to Arts Unscripted. It is so nice to see your face bright and early this morning. Thank you for making the time to hang out.

Cory Pattak: Thank you. I’m very happy to be here.

Monica Holt: I am so thrilled to see you. Cory and I have worked together on a number of projects, particularly when I was at the Kennedy Center, and we will talk a little bit about that today. But to start, would you tell me how art first came into your life?

Cory Pattak: Well, art was a really big part of my life when I was young. I don’t even know what my earliest memory is, but if I had to try and think it’s sitting in theaters watching children’s shows or young youth entertainment kind of things, I remember we used to go to the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum and there would be puppet shows and we would watch those. So we could call my mom and ask her for specifics, but I’m just going to give her all the credit and say that she used to take me to sea shows as a kid, and then very quickly I was like, “Oh, I want to be on stage.” And then I started taking all sorts of theater classes that one could take, including acting, singing, dance, all of that. And then very quickly I started performing on stage and then I did that all through high school.

So I did that for 10 plus years and that’s what I thought I was going to do.

Monica Holt: Okay, I love all of that and it makes sense. And at some point I would love to call your mom and ask her all of her thoughts on young Cory. But I also know that magic maybe was a part of your life young and a fascination there in addition to musical theater and all that good stuff. So can you talk a little bit about how did that catch your eye and come to you? Because I think as we then start to tell this story of Cory as lighting designer, it feels like that kind of understanding of what it means to witness magic can have a lot of different entry points. And so I’m curious for you what that experience was like growing up or when you found the in there.

Cory Pattak: Yeah, when I was younger, it was literally I was just obsessed with magic and magic shows. And there was a magic shop on the south side of Pittsburgh called The Cuckoo’s Nest. I don’t believe it’s there anymore, but deep cut for any Pittsburghers from the ’90s. And I would take magic classes there on Saturday mornings and watch every magic special on TV. And then I had my own little magic business where I had business cards.

Monica Holt: Magic business with business cards?!

Cory Pattak: Yeah. And I would go do kids’ birthday parties and do all the sort of classics and make no money. But I think there was always a connection between that kind of magic, sort of like silly illusions and theater magic. We used to see all the national tours that would come through the Benedum Center in Pittsburgh. I would see the tour of Phantom or Cats or Miss Saigon or Les Mis, and it was magic. What I was seeing on stage was magic. And I think I didn’t draw too much of a distinction between that kind of magic and cups and balls and linking rings and magic wands. It all was meant to elicit a feeling, an emotion from the audience, but there was always sort of a method or a secret behind it that was maybe quite mechanical or not particularly sexy, but the end result of that was a really exciting experience for the audience.

And so I think that’s where those two things blended, which is a little bit how I ended up in lighting.
Monica Holt: Yeah, no, I love hearing that because also thinking of you as the actor on stage or the magician, at some point clearly you shifted gears. And I think what I’m always really curious about, particularly in roles like yours, which end up then requiring such a level of technical expertise too, is when did you know that the career or the job of lighting designer first existed? How did that pique your interest?

Cory Pattak: I don’t actually know. I wish I had a better memory. Obviously at some point in high school, because I’d been doing theater all through middle school, high school, I had lots of friends who were older than I was who were graduating and moving to New York and whatever. And I feel like I have a memory of assuming they were all going to come to New York and just be giant Broadway stars because in our little world they were the stars. Hearing that no, they were just pounding the pavement with every other actor in New York and being like, “Huh, that seems really hard.” Also, I think by the time I was in high school, I was self-aware enough to be like, “I like doing this. I’m okay at it, but I’m not good enough to really be successful at this. But I also like this other part of theater, and that seems a lot maybe easier to have a career in because it didn’t matter how tall I was.
It didn’t matter if I looked right for the part.” And I was like, “There’s a lot less people vying for these design jobs than there are for acting jobs.” And so I think that was actually the biggest thing that changed my mind, which I don’t know, seemed quite smart at 16 or 17 or whatever it was. It was always going to be something in theater. And lighting was the one thing I was like, “I actually do think I’m good at this.” And so I think that’s probably why I ended up there.

Monica Holt: This is fascinating and I love putting the puzzle pieces together. You’ve kind of walked us through how you arrived there, but maybe I’ve skipped the most important thing, which is for someone who maybe has no idea what it is that lighting designers do or hasn’t really though about lighting beyond whether they could see the people on stage or not, could you describe what a lighting designer actually does?

Cory Pattak: Yeah, so I learned about these principles of lighting design. It’s what everyone is kind of taught now. This was sort of all coalesced by a light designer named Richard Pilbrow. His textbook was sort of like the grandfather of lighting design education when I was coming up. And so there are these principles of lighting design. Why are we there? What is our job? First and foremost, visibility. Every theater is a dark room. Unless you’re doing outdoor theater in the daytime, every theater is a dark space until you turn on some lights. So first and foremost, we make sure that you can see, that you can see the people. And that is actually in fact our number one job, which some people forget. The second thing we call revelation of form, which is simply like sculpting the space, sculpting the bodies, sculpting the scenery, making sure things look interesting and three-dimensional and not flat.

The third thing is called composition, which is simply creating an aesthetically pleasing look on stage, making sure that everything is balanced right, good contrast, brightness, things like that. The fourth thing is information, which is not particularly sexy, but is a really important thing, which is where are we? When are we? Is it morning? Is it evening? Is it hot? Is it cold? Is it in the future? Is it in the past? An audience doesn’t have the script in front of them with all the stage directions, so we are helping to tell that story. And then the last thing is the most interesting thing is maybe the thing that people think about the most with light design, which is the mood. We are helping to convey the mood of what’s happening on stage, and that is an infinite possibility of moods, whether that’s happy, sad, depressing, exciting, optimistic.

But we are assisting the actors, we are assisting the costume design, the music, the staging, anything that’s happening there, we are working in conjunction with that to create a mood so you as an audience feel a certain way. We are essentially emotional manipulators and of all of those principles of lighting, the mood is the one that I think people spend the most time thinking about and working on and playing with because it’s the most fun.
Monica Holt: And when you think about how you approach lighting design, what is the kind of artistic inspiration behind that as you are kind of cultivating your own perspective and do you have influences that you think about as you start to approach a project?

Cory Pattak: So I’m going to give this as an analogy about a hero of mine because it’s something I’ve been thinking about in the past couple years. So go with me on this journey. I promise that this is going to make sense. So one of my heroes is John Williams, maybe one of the most prolific film score composers of all time. I think John Williams, there are two things about him that I find to be singular and amazing. Number one, there’s a thing in music that people talk about, which is an inevitability, which is to say that when you hear a melody or when you hear music, it doesn’t feel like that the composer made a choice with those notes. It feels like that they were the only choice available. If you listen to a John Williams score, da, da, da, da, the only thing I can hear is da, da, da, is the end of that sequence.

And he could have picked any other notes, but now over time, years later, it has become such a part of our DNA and such a part of the DNA of Indiana Jones that there are literally no other notes that could have followed that first set of notes. And there’s this notion that really amazing songwriters write these melodies, that it feels like the notes have always been there. They just were there waiting to be discovered by the right composer and that they didn’t actually make those choices. Those notes had to be the notes for that melody. And so moving that to lighting, one of the ways that I try to approach lighting is that it is so intensely ingrained in the story that’s being told that that was the only way that this could have ever been lit, which is obviously we know is not true.
Hire 10 light designers, they will light a show in 10 different ways. They will light a song in 10 different ways. But if you can make the lighting design feel like that is the only option that could have been there, then I think you’ve succeeded in your job. The second thing, they sort of blend together, but the second thing that I think makes John Williams so incredible is that you cannot separate the music from the IP or from the story. There is no Star Wars without John Williams. There is no Jaws without John Williams. If you’ve ever heard Chris Columbus talk about John’s score for Home Alone, he literally credits John Williams with making Home Alone the movie that it is and the movie that it became because his score is so good and it’s so emotional. And at this point, you cannot separate the movie from the music.

They are not two different things. They are fused together. They are one thing and they feed each other. And without the Star Wars music, Star Wars doesn’t exist. And so again, I try to think about that in lighting in the sense that the lighting is so integral to the storytelling that it doesn’t feel like it’s its own independent department. It feels like the playwright wrote the lighting in the same way that they wrote the words or wrote the music. And that’s always the goal for me. I’ll give an example. The Top of the Great Gatsby, which is a show I lit that’s still currently running on Broadway, which is past a thousand performances. The opening of act two is a number called Shady. It looks like nothing else in the show. There’s not a ton of scenery in it. It’s mainly told in a black void sort of space, and it has a really, really specific lighting approach that is unlike anything else in the show.
The whole number is built out of a series of boxes and squares and rectangles opening and closing and revealing different characters. Okay, so that did not exist anywhere on any page. No one said that’s what it should be. No one came to me and said, “I think it should be like this.” There was just a number on a page. There was words and choreography and music, and that’s just all it was. That approach for the number was just something that came out of my head that I thought would be a cool way to do this number. The first time we did it at Paper Mill Playhouse, Mark Bruni was like, “Yeah, I think this is cool. Let’s keep doing this.” That became the look of that number. I suspect years from now, when people go do their own production of The Great Gatsby, I wouldn’t be surprised if I see some high school kids’ version of Shady and it’s a bunch of white boxes.

And I’ve talked to a lot of people about this and young line designers, when they talk about having seen the show, that’s a number that really speaks to them. At this point, I don’t think Shady exists as the Shady that we all know without the visual vocabulary and the style that we introduce to that number. I’m confident in saying that you can’t think about Shady without thinking about how the lighting affects it. And that’s what I’m talking about. That’s what I’m after, is that it doesn’t feel like a separate added on feature. It feels like that it was in the playwright’s mind when they were writing it, and now you cannot extricate the two from themselves, just like all the amazing music that John Williams has written for his scores. So that’s why he’s my hero. That’s why I think about him a lot when I’m doing my work, because that’s what I want lighting to achieve.

If I’ve done my job right, it should feel like that it’s always been there and it couldn’t have been any other way.
Monica Holt: I love that analogy. And you touched on a few things there, including as you think about what the next generation or what a young lighting designer might do having seen your work or others’ work, and as we’re thinking about leadership and those who we learn from, I’m curious what role mentorship has played in your career, because I think in some of these behind the scenes creative careers, that can be instrumental in what a real education actually means in working in this field. Could you talk a little bit about what that experience was for you?

Cory Pattak: Yeah, so when I was in high school, I was mainly aware of a couple lighting designers, but the main lighting designer I was aware of was a guy named Ken Billington. Ken had lit the original Sweeney Todd. He had been famous for lighting the Chicago Revival, which is still running to this day. And at the time, remember, this was the late ’90s, you didn’t have access to these folks the way that you do now. Anybody around the world can send me a message on Instagram and they do. And I think for the most part, that’s an amazing thing. That was not the case in the late ’90s. There was barely the internet. Ken Billington to me was the same as Tom Cruise, right? Do you know what I mean? He might as well have just… It was just a famous person who did a famous thing who was like, “I had no way of having any sort of relationship with them.” So by the time that I graduated college and was coming to New York, I was like, “I want to work for Ken.” That was my goal.

It just so happened that I had been an intern for another lighting designer in Pittsburgh who knew Ken, and I got him to write me a letter of recommendation. And so I can’t remember if I mailed it to his studio. Anyways, long story short, that letter did arrive at Ken’s office, and then I participated in something called the Hemsley Portfolio Review, which is still a thing, and I try to go every year, which is when a bunch of students from different schools can present their portfolios to people in the New York lighting community. And so I met Ken at that portfolio review, which was amazing. Again, it was like meeting a movie star. And so we had a great chat, and then a couple months later, I got a phone call to come in and interview to be a studio assistant for three months, to fill in over the summer for someone who was leaving for a couple months.

So I came in and I interviewed for that, and I got the job. And so what started out as a three-month gig essentially turned into a year-long gig, and so I spent a year doing exactly the thing I had wanted to do, which is I was the studio assistant for KB Associates, which was Ken’s company, which is a thing he still does to this day. And he’s now been doing it for, I don’t know, four decades, so there’s quite a long roster of us who have all come through this position. But I worked in the studio for a year. It was a nine to five job, five days a week, and I would do everything from opening the mail and returning phone calls to starting to do some drafting and learning how to draft at the Broadway level. I would liaison with the lighting shops, and so I got to start to learn the different lighting shops and who worked there, relationships that I still have to this day.

I literally spent a year there immersed in the world of Broadway lighting design or Broadway caliber lighting design, the arts, the logistics, the practical stuff, and Ken was my mentor in that way. And full circle, a couple years ago, we did the Great Gatsby at the Broadway Theater, and Ken came to one of the previews, and to be able to stand with him at my own Broadway show and say, “Thank you for everything that you gave me and taught me,” but I think he was really proud and I was really happy for him to be there. And so yeah, that mentorship meant so much to me and was huge, and I don’t believe I would have the career I have today without that mentorship, and he’s given that to so many people in the industry over the decades and decades.

Monica Holt: I love hearing that, and I think giving Ken his flowers is so important too, because that’s how we make sure that all of this good work can continue, even bringing in new perspectives. As you were telling that story and thinking about your work independently as lighting designer, I mean, you’ve worked all across the country, you’ve worked internationally too, but certainly I first encountered you when you came to work at the Kennedy Center as part of the Broadway Center stage series, and that was a series produced by executive producer Jeffrey Finn, but you became really a part of the core design creative team for those shows that helped them become what they were. Can you talk a little bit about that series and maybe even just some of the relationships that were developed through that series? And I’m curious, did that experience impact how you were thinking about your own career and what changed maybe from working on those shows?

Cory Pattak: Yeah, I’m going to answer that, but can I back up and tell you how I ended up at the Kennedy Center? Because this really exemplifies, I think, one of my principles, which is why I try to say yes to everything. Essentially, I can trace my Broadway career exactly back through a handful of shows. So here goes, it’s like Kevin Bacon, but it’s for how you got to Broadway. So a couple years after I moved to New York City, I started working at a theater called the Engeman Theater. It still exists. It’s on Northport, Long Island. The very first show I worked there was choreographed by a guy named Marco Santana. Fast-forward a bunch of shows, a bunch of years. Ultimately, he became a director about seven years later. His first directing gig was a production of In the Heights at the Olney Theater just outside of DC.

He said, “Will you come light In the Heights for me?” I said, “Yes, I loved In the Heights. I was obsessed with the show on Broadway. I went to the Olney Theater. I did a production In the Heights. It went great.” About a year after that, Jeffrey Finn was putting together the Broadway Center Stage series. Stephanie Klemons was directing In the Heights, which was the second production of the Broadway Center Stage series, and she was working on the Hamilton tour with Howell Binkley. Howell knew that I had just done In the Heights for Only, and Howell said to Stephanie, “You should call Cory. He knows the show really well.” Lo and behold, it all worked out. I got the job doing In the Heights at Broadway Center Stage. It went well. Jeffrey hired me for the next one, and we started doing more and more and more.

What happens working at Kennedy Center? I meet Marc Bruni. I had already met Josh Rhodes doing something else, but we did Spam a lot at Broadway Center Stage. That led to Spam a lot on Broadway, that led to Great Gatsby on Broadway. That was, what, four shows? Literally over the course of over a decade, just from –
Monica Holt: But that’s over a decade. Yeah, exactly.

Cory Pattak: But just from working on that show with that guy, to that show, to that guy, to them knowing that I had worked on this, you know what I mean? And I can trace that all the way back through there. So that’s how I ended up at the Kennedy Center, and that’s when I felt like things started to shift for me. I started getting to meet these amazing directors. Mark Bruni came down, Mark Brokaw came down, Michael Greif, all of these amazing folks. And so then I was like, “Oh, this is really starting to feel like it’s taking off a little bit.” But it was a real gift. It changed my life. I mourned for it every day, but we won’t draw on that right now. But yeah, it was the biggest turning point in my life, and I feel like without that, I don’t know that I would be where I am right now.
And it brought you to me, which also was lovely a thing.

Monica Holt: Well, can I also say for me, I joined the theater team right at the end of In the Heights as well. And so my knowledge, understanding, appreciation, and education about all things creative design work really came from you and Paul and Bruni and Josh and all of those same amazing people that you said. It was all about how do we create the most magic if I can be so away and saying it that way. And you really did, and that’s what made those shows special, those teams that were created there that cared so much, not just for that singular work, but for the whole organization, and it really felt like a connection.

Cory Pattak: Yeah. Also, I think that the pressure that I endured on all those Broadway Center stage shows, because it is really, really high pressure, meant that when I was actually doing it at Broadway theater, I felt like I had been under the gun like that before. I think back to being 25 or 30 and being like, “I want to do a Broadway show,” and now I look back and go, “I’m actually glad that didn’t happen because I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t have the skills to do that yet.” I think I honed a lot of those skills at the Kennedy Center because it was such a high pressure environment, because we were trying to do things really, really quickly at a really high level that once I was doing it in a Broadway theater, I felt like, “Oh, I’ve been here before. Oh, and I have two weeks, so I got this.”

Monica Holt: Well, and let’s talk about that for a second because you alluded to this earlier. For a lighting designer walking into a Broadway theater or any theater, a blank stage, a black room, it all has to happen there. Can you give some insight into, and let’s use Broadway for an example, what the timeline for you for lighting design really looks like and means for a Broadway production?

Cory Pattak: I mean, the actual timeline obviously can vary from show to show. I might know a year out that I’m doing a show, I might get hired three months before a show. So that can vary. Obviously, there are meetings that happen, meeting with the director, meeting with the other designers, coming up with stuff. Ultimately, what I’m working towards is a light plot, which is just like a blueprint, just like you would give to a builder to build a house. I’m making a light plot, which is ink on a page that’s telling a group of electricians where should the lights go, where should they be pointed, what kind of light should it be, et cetera, et cetera. That’s a very kind of sterile approach to lighting. There’s not a lot of art that necessarily is involved in that part, but that’s really all that I’m doing before I get into the space.

Now, I might’ve looked at research, we might’ve talked about artistic ideas, but I’m not someone that does previs, which is something that is popular in other forms of the industry, like in the concert world where you’re using a computer to 3D represent what the lighting will look like and try to make artistic decisions that way. I don’t generally like working like that. So it really is that I’m walking into the space for the first time with nothing designed. And this is why I think lighting is particularly unique of the whole process because a set designer has sat in their studio and done lots of different sketches and thrown things out and tried things and showed it to the director and we like that. No, try that. They’ve had weeks, months for that. Same thing for costume. Everyone is taking their time over a series of weeks and months.

No one is having the right answer the first time. I’m essentially just watching all of that happen because I haven’t really started my part of the design process. So when we do finally get into that theater, I am writing Q1, and then I’m writing Q2, and then I’m writing every other queue until Q500, 600, whatever it is, and I’m doing that in front of everybody. And that’s the thing that I always try to remind to some of my fellow designers or creative team members, if they walk over very early on in the process and have a comment or a note or a though or whatever, sometimes I might remind them when you were designing the set, you were alone in your room, in your studio, and it was like a safe space and you could come up with the worst idea in the world and throw it in the paper shredder and nobody would ever know about it.

My worst idea in the world is seen by everybody in the room. And if it’s a terrible idea, someone might whisper to someone else, “This doesn’t look good. Is this what the show is going to look like? This is not right.” You know what I mean? I am finding my sea legs in front of the entire room. If the situation allows itself, obviously I try to get a couple of days to myself before that’s all happening. A lot of times directors are really eager to dive into a dry tech, which is when we’re writing light cues or setting design elements without the cast there, kind of out of time. And a lot of times the director will be like, “Cool, what time do you need me there?” And I’d be like, “I need you not here actually, because I’ve never turned these lights on before.

I think I know what they’re going to do. I have an idea, but I have never seen the stage and the set under the lighting. And the first time I do that, I would really prefer it not be in front of you because I think that I need to see how it all works. And so if I’m lucky, I’ll get a couple days of that beforehand. But even with that, for the most part, I am lighting the show live in real time as we move through it. And so it has taken me a couple decades to learn how to deal with that stress and deal with that pressure and internalize certain things that you’re feeling or that you’re wanting to say and externalize a different version of that because everyone’s just trying to do their best and they know that the clock is ticking and they know that the money counter is running.

And so everyone wants to give you that time, but they also need to move on. There’s a story I love about some TV writers. When they were writing Breaking Bad, they would always write themselves into a corner at the end of a season and they would be like,” I don’t know how we’re getting Jesse and Walt out of this, but we’re going to figure it out when we come back this summer. “That’s how I feel as a light designer. It’s like,” I don’t know how I’m getting from point A to point B necessarily, but I know that I will figure it out, and I’ve been doing this for long enough that I will figure it out. And so I will just write Q5 and then I will figure out what Q6 is. And that takes a lot of trust in myself and it takes a lot of trust from the team of me, which is why certain directors hire the same lighting designers over and over again, because once you have someone who knows how to do it, you’re just going to keep hiring that person.

But yeah, it can be really, really stressful.

Monica Holt: Sure. Well, and I mean, you might be making it up as you go, as you say, but you do it very well. I think I am also curious because of your position in that space, and you started to talk about this a little bit, there’s this broader collective vision. There’s what the director is looking for or the overall feel of a show from the playwright. I’m curious how you balance your own expertise and artistic inclinations with that larger collective vision, particularly as you’re coming in essentially as one of the final pieces of creating the whole

Cory Pattak: I mean, I would think that the directors that I work with the most, people like Mark Bruni, Josh Rhodes, Denis Jones, people we know and love, I think one of the reasons that they hire me is because they know that I will just do my thing. I don’t need to ask them in every moment, “What do you think this is? What are you trying to go for? Blah, blah, blah.” And I think that is what most directors want. Directors don’t want to sit and talk about every idea. They want a lighting designer who just understands what they’re going for, understands their vision, and then just helps create that on stage. And so my approach ultimately is to just put something on stage that I think will be right. And hopefully the director will agree with that 80 to 90% of the time. And when they don’t, they will turn around and say, “I’m not sure this is working.” And then we will have that conversation.
So it’s about giving them things that they don’t need to talk about, that they’re just happy with, and then finding the moments that need to be discussed. And then also for me, it’s about deciding what hills I’m willing to die on and which ones I’m not. And I will say the longer I do this, the less hills I’m willing to die on. When you’re young and you’ve lit five shows, you don’t have a large body of work. And that cue or that number from that show, that represents a fifth of your entire career. That means a lot to you and you will fight for that idea. The more you do shows, you start to realize the ephemeral nature of what we do. And it all starts to gather into perspective and you realize that one moment, one cue, one idea, it’s just like a speck of sand on a beach of an entire career.
And none of that is really worth flipping a table over or getting in a ruckus with the creative team about. So it’s like sometimes there are things I feel strongly about and I will fight for them, but I find myself more and more saying to a director, “This is what I think, but I’m not married to this and I’m not dying on this hill. If you think that it should be this, I’m going to give you that and let’s just move on.” And the other thing, to answer your question, is I have a natural instinct to quickly say no to things if I think that they won’t work. And I will say that more and more I’m trying to get better at instead of saying no, go like, “Yeah, we’ll take a look.” It doesn’t matter what they say like, “Hey, could every light fly in three feet?” It’s like, “Yeah, we’ll take a look.” You come back two days later and you’re like, “Yeah, we can’t do that.” But trying to be open to any ideas that come to me because I trust that with a little bit of time and thinking about it, I might actually find a way to give them what they want and I need to not just shut things down right away.

Monica Holt: Cory, these are beautiful leadership lessons too that you’re sharing here. And I do think they come with time. I mean both the things you’re saying obviously have a very different job than yours, but are things I can relate to with time, with perspective, knowing what hills you don’t need to die on. And certainly the idea of even if in your experience what you are being asked for you don’t believe is possible or you don’t think makes the most sense, not starting with those, starting with possibility and figuring out where it goes. Those are beautiful lessons to share.

Cory Pattak: And often I will find, particularly with directors or choreographers, they understand if the answer is no and if there’s a good reason. They want to be heard. They want to understand that you listened to their question or idea or note and considered it and explored whether it was possible. There’s an appreciation of thank you for exploring it and trying as opposed to just shutting it down.

Monica Holt: And that’s universal.

Cory Pattak: And I ask the same thing of the people that I work with. If I go to an electrician and say, “Can we hang a light there?” And they go, “No,” I go like, “Okay, well can we try?” So if I’m asking that of the people that I work with, it’s only fair for me to give that to others.

Monica Holt: I love that. So we’re talking a fair amount about Broadway, which I love, and you have some fun off-Broadway projects also coming up, but you also are looking at a bigger scope of what your work means. I’m curious, what else piques your interest or what are the projects that continue to get you excited about the other possibilities of the work that you can do? And are there any that you want to tell us anything about?
Cory Pattak: Well, I always want to do the thing that I haven’t done before. So I don’t do a lot of plays, but I would love to do more plays and I would love the opportunity to do very sort of still plays, the opposite of a big giant musical. And then on the other end of that, I love spectacle. I love giant spectacle. So I want to do those kinds of shows. I want to do big themed entertainment shows. And a big part of that is doing theme park stuff, which I really love. And I was probably 13 maybe or high school the first time I saw Fantasmic! at Disney World.

Monica Holt: An all timer.

Cory Pattak: And it was one of those shows that changed my life and I was like, oh my God, I want to do stuff like this. Fun note, Ken Millington designed the original Fantasmic! at Disneyland. So that was a fun full circle moment. Anyway, I always wanted to do that. And I’ve recently gotten that opportunity. I’m currently working on a new show for Hong Kong Disneyland. I’ve been on it for about a year and a half and we will be opening next season, next year. And it’s been thrilling because I finally get to work in that world where it is entertainment for entertainment’s sake. No one goes to a theme park for any other reason than to have fun. And so that is also really freeing as a theater maker to know that that’s what they’re there for. That’s all they expect is a great fun time in the theater.
It’s been really fun and exciting to help create that show because I’m given the opportunity to talk about so much more than lighting. We sit in meetings and we talk about the story and the script and the characters and the story we’re trying to tell, and we talk about the emotional journey we want the audience to go on. And nobody ever says to me, “You are the lighting designer, you just do the lights.” I am invited to be a part of those conversations about how we tell the story. And so that’s been really thrilling because I don’t usually get those opportunities in a theatrical show to necessarily have so much of a say in creating the actual show. So that’s been really fun and I’m having a great time.

Monica Holt: I love hearing about that. This is going to be the reason I have to go to Hong Kong, obviously. Thank you for sharing a little bit of that with us because I think it’s all very exciting, certainly. As we round the corner into our final moments together, I’m curious if there are things you think of now that you wish you knew when you were first starting out or things that you wish that some young designers would know as they are getting their feet under themselves for a career in the arts.

Cory Pattak: I always really try to push people about building those director relationships because I do think that what we do, that’s kind of the only way in. No one hires a lighting designer before they hire the director. I say that, but I suppose that actually has happened a couple times. But for the most part, there is an order in which people get hired and the director is generally the person bringing on that design team. So I encourage young designers to develop director relationships as fruitful and as early as possible. If you talk to a lot of directors and designers who have worked together for years, they’ll tell you about how they did summer stock together 20 years ago in a barn and now they’re big Broadway collaborators. So look for those moments, look for those moments to get in a barn with a director and build a relationship and a vocabulary and a shared love of techniques and things like that.

Monica Holt: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, we have reached our quickfire culture section, so rapid fire questions.

Cory Pattak: Have I ever done anything rapid fire in my life?

Monica Holt: No, I almost laughed as I said it. If you could go back in time, what is a live performance that you would’ve wanted to attend? I

Cory Pattak: Mean, obviously I’m going to give you a bunch of answers because I couldn’t pick just one of them. We’ve sort of gone past the heyday of big Las Vegas spectacle shows, but I really wish I could go back and see the original Jubilee, which was a show that played at Bally’s. There’s like a hundred chorus girls and Bob Mackie did these amazing costumes and there was a huge Titanic that would sync every show. And then there was another show in Vegas called EFX, which was a show that I think Michael Crawford was in. It played at the MGM Grand. He was battling a giant dragon. It was this crazy cheesy musical theater, meets magic, meets special effects, meets all the… It was just crazy. And again, we don’t really do shows like that anymore. So I would love to go back and see those big heyday Vegas shows.

I would love to see the original Parade from Lincoln Center. It’s my favorite show. I think the Beaumont is one of the most coolest beautiful spaces in the world. And to have seen Parade in that space, I think that would’ve been amazing. And then the last thing I’ll say going back to my magic obsession is I’m always obsessed with stories of Victorian magicians when you would gather a bunch of really posh people in top hats and you would sit in a drawing room and there would be a Victorian magician doing closeup magic and doves. I think it would be so cool to travel back in time and be in one of those situations where it was considered posh high class entertainment.
Monica Holt: Okay. You just ran the gamut and everything as good as the last. No, great. Fabulous. Okay. What is one free resource in any field that everyone should check out?

Cory Pattak: The best free resource I’ve had in New York in the past 20 years is the New York Public Library. I think libraries are amazing. For years I’ve gotten musical theater albums or any kind of albums out of the library. I literally just did it today. Wait, I’m going to show you right here. I’m holding the CD from the New York Public Library. This is the revival to Falsettos. I’m lighting the Falsettos reunion at Carnegie Hall that’s coming up, but the New York Public Library has got to be maybe the best library in the world, and I just think it’s fantastic. I love the library and everyone should love your library, support your libraries.

Monica Holt: Preach it. We are New York Public Library’s number one fan. Okay, last question. Our podcast is built around the idea of promoting collective joy. What does collective joy mean to you?
Cory Pattak: I think collective joy to me is what I get sitting in a theater with a group of people. I think that it is a really, really unique experience. If you’ve ever been at a show and you feel like you can hear a pin drop, when you feel like that the entire audience is breathing together, and I think that it can happen in all genres of theater. There’s nothing like going to see a great comedy and just feeling like a thousand people are laughing around you. I will never forget seeing Cynthia Erivo sing that song at the end of Color Purple that makes everybody cry and sitting in that theater all together, singing I’m Here, and you could just feel everybody just emotionally drenched and that is an experience together. I love going to see scary theater. Please, we should be doing more horror theater. I love jump scares in a live theater show.

And when you all feel that together, I think audiences are living, breathing organisms that are… I mentioned the word ephemeral earlier. That group of people only exists in that state for this two hours. It will never ever happen again in the history of the universe will all those people be together watching this show. And when you’re in those shows and the audience is just all on the edge of their seats together, to me, that’s my version of collective joy.
Monica Holt: A perfect answer. Cory Pattak, thank you so much for spending time with me today. I can’t wait to see you soon. Thank you for the brilliance.

Cory Pattak: Thanks for having me. Go see some theater.

Monica Holt: Thank you for listening to Arts Unscripted. If you enjoy today’s conversation, please take a moment to rate us or leave a review. A nice comment goes a long way in helping other people discover the show. And if you haven’t already, click the subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts. We’ve got some great episodes coming your way and I don’t want you to miss them. A huge thanks to our team behind the scenes, including Karen McConarty, Yeaye Stemn, Stephanie Medina, Jess Berube, and Rachel Purcell Fountain. Don’t forget to follow Capacity on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube for regular content to help you market smarter. You can also sign up for Capacity’s newsletter at capacityinteractive.com, and I hope you’ll reach out to us and let us know what you think and who you’d like to hear from next on Arts Unscripted.

I’m Monica Holt. Thanks for listening.