Lyric Opera 2025-2026 Issue 7 - A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 64 What is your role here at Lyric? I’m one of the two Assistant Lighting Designers — and depending on the show I’ll function as either the first or second assistant. When you’re the first assistant, you are essentially the backup lighting designer, there to know all the things that the lighting designer does, but you focus on supporting them to a successful execution of their design and making their time in our house smooth. We work with the crew for them and say, here’s how we can make things function better, faster in this house. Something unique to assisting in opera — we’ll stay with the show through the run to maintain the the artistic integrity of the piece as set by the designer and team for every performance. What was your path to working at Lyric? I was a woodwind player – clarinet, saxophone, and mainly oboe — and was going to go for music and theater as an undergrad, but I took a lighting class and I thought it was fascinating. I’ve been in it ever since. After grad school I was in New York for eight years, doing a huge variety of freelance work as well as a five-year gig with the Tribeca Performing Arts Center as lighting supervisor. I worked the Tribeca Film Festival while working that job. I did a Porgy and Bess tour. And when I saw the ad for Lyric, I applied. I was tired of the New York scene and I really wanted to work on opera full-time. How did you know it would really be opera? I would say that the bug really bit hard when I was working one summer at Chautauqua. One day during a sitzprobe , I was sitting in my office off stage right, just preparing colors for the next day’s call. And I was listening, and thought, Oh, my God, this is amazing. I want to do this. I want to listen to this music every day. Any favorite productions or moments at Lyric? I did really love working on Fidelio , and a lot of that was because of the designer, Yuki Nakase Link. She’ll do our Butterfly this season. She was fantastic to work with, and it’s always fun to sit with a colleague who thinks about things in a way that maybe you don’t. I loved Cendrillon . We had all these little chimneys, with little individual smokers, and it created a kind of fairyscape, like in Mary Poppins before they do the chimney sweep song. What is something about your job that would surprise people? Lighting can just be basically functional, just showing you where to look, but a lot of what lighting does is support the emotional storytelling. When I tell people what I do, and then they ask, What is that? I always say, Have you ever gone to see a show? Well, the reason you can see the show is because of me. It’s my job to make sure the lights are on. Our job is to be seen but not noticed. It’s an understood rule that if you are noticed, you have done your job wrong. If they’re paying more attention to the lighting than to the show, then something’s gone sideways. You try not to make it a blunt instrument. It’s a very subtle art, honestly. Some people will call it the brush strokes, painting with light and stuff like that. And if you’re equating it to a fine art like that, it is the watercolor of the theater world. People of Lyric A behind-the-scenes conversation Hometown Logan, Ohio When did you start at Lyric? July 2017 Favorite opera? The Consul , by Menotti Favorite opera? I always love a good comedic foil or a fun villain. Like Leporello in Don Giovanni or Scarpia in Tosca . What do you enjoy outside of Lyric? I have my own millinery business, City Mouse Adornments, which keeps me busy. I also enjoy going to the symphony or taking in other shows around the city. Sarah Riffle Assistant Lighting Designer Kyle Flubacker