The checklist lives in my phone. It has been revised about thirty times. And the first item on it, the question I ask before anything else when I am booked for a show, is not “how big is the stage?” or “how many people will be there?” or “what time do I go on?”
It is: what is the lighting situation?
This was not always the case. In the early days of putting together shows for corporate events, I had a checklist that started with logistics — how many people, what time, how long, what is the event schedule. Lighting was somewhere near the bottom, lumped in with “other technical details” alongside questions about electrical outlets and whether there was a coat rack for my jacket.
It moved to the top of the list through a series of experiences that taught me, with increasing clarity, that lighting is not a technical detail. It is the foundation on which every other element of the show rests. Get the lighting wrong and it does not matter how good your material is, how sharp your scripting is, or how well-rehearsed your effects are. The audience will have a diminished experience, and they will not know why.
The Klagenfurt Wake-Up
The event that crystallized this for me was a performance in Klagenfurt. A mid-sized corporate event, about eighty people, in the conference room of a lakeside hotel. The client had been generous with the production budget and had arranged a proper stage, good sound, and what they described as “full lighting.”
I arrived, did my sound check, set up my props, and was satisfied that everything was in order. I had not asked about the lighting in advance because the client had mentioned “full lighting” and I had assumed — wrongly, as it turned out — that this meant theatrical lighting aimed at the stage.
What “full lighting” actually meant was that every light in the conference room was on. Every recessed ceiling panel, every wall sconce, every accent light in every corner. The room was lit like a department store. Even, flat, bright illumination from every direction, casting no shadows, creating no contrast, establishing no visual hierarchy whatsoever.
When the houselights went down for my show, they did not go down very far. “Down” meant reducing the overhead panels from full blast to about seventy percent — still brighter than most offices during working hours. There were no stage-specific lights. No spots aimed at the performance area. No dimmers that could bring the audience area darker than the stage area. Just… flat brightness everywhere.
I performed. The show was competent. The audience was polite. But there was no atmosphere. No sense of occasion. No visual separation between “we are at dinner” and “we are watching a performance.” The lighting told the audience they were in a meeting room, and their behavior matched that message — attentive but reserved, engaged but not transported.
Afterward, I talked to Adam about it. We were in the early days of Vulpine Creations, and these conversations about what went right and wrong at shows were how we learned. Adam’s assessment was immediate: “The lighting made it impossible. You were fighting the room the entire time.”
He was right. I had been fighting the room. Not because the audience was hostile or the venue was wrong or my material was weak. Because the lighting was telling the audience something fundamentally different from what I was trying to tell them. The lighting said: this is a normal, well-lit, nothing-special room where normal things happen. I was saying: something extraordinary is about to happen. The lighting won that argument.
Why Lighting First
Here is why I ask about lighting before anything else: because lighting is the hardest thing to fix on the day of the show, and the easiest thing to fix in advance.
If the stage is smaller than expected, I can adapt. I can reduce my movement, rearrange my props, adjust my blocking. If the audience is larger or smaller than expected, I can adjust my energy, my projection, my material selection. If the time slot shifts, I can shorten or lengthen. These are all things I have learned to handle in real time.
But if the lighting is wrong — if the room is too bright, or too flat, or lit from behind, or impossible to dim — there is almost nothing I can do about it in the moment. Lighting infrastructure is fixed into the ceiling, wired into the walls, controlled by panels that may or may not be accessible. By the time I am standing on stage in the wrong light, my options have narrowed to essentially zero.
However, if I ask about lighting two weeks before the show, I have time. I can request adjustments. I can suggest that the venue’s facilities team program the lights differently for the performance portion of the evening. I can recommend that the event planner rent a few simple uplights or LED spots for the stage area. I can ask for specific fixtures to be turned off or redirected. These are small requests that most venues can accommodate easily — but only if they know about them in advance.
The leverage is in the timing. The earlier you ask, the more can be done. Wait until the day of the show, and you are stuck with whatever you find.
The Five Questions
Over time, my opening lighting question has evolved into five specific sub-questions that I ask in the same conversation, usually during the initial planning call with the event coordinator:
First: what kind of lights are in the performance area? I am looking for the specific answer — recessed ceiling panels, chandeliers, track lighting, theatrical spots, LED wash fixtures, or some combination. Each type tells me something about what is possible and what is not.
Second: are the lights on dimmers? This is the most important binary question. If the answer is yes, everything becomes workable. I can ask for specific intensity levels for different parts of the evening. If the answer is no — if the lights are on switches, on or off, with no middle ground — my options shrink considerably.
Third: can the performance area be lit differently from the audience area? This is the question that separates venues with theatrical capability from venues without it. If I can have brighter light on the stage and dimmer light on the audience, I have the basic ingredients for a theatrical experience. If the entire room has to be at the same brightness level, I need to plan for a different kind of show.
Fourth: is there a lighting operator, or are the lights controlled by a fixed panel? An operator means flexibility. Real-time adjustments. The ability to bring lights down for a dramatic moment and back up for an applause break. A fixed panel means whatever I set before the show is what I get for the entire performance. Both are workable, but they require different approaches.
Fifth: who can I speak to about the lighting, and when? This is the question that makes all the others actionable. I want a name and a contact method for the person who actually controls the lights — whether that is a hotel facilities manager, a production company technician, or a venue AV coordinator. And I want to speak to them at least a few days before the event, ideally more.
What the Answers Tell Me
The answers to these five questions give me a remarkably clear picture of what the show will look like before I have ever set foot in the venue.
If the answers are “theatrical spots on dimmers, separate control for stage and house, dedicated operator, happy to discuss” — I know I am going to have a good night. Not guaranteed, but the infrastructure is there for a great visual experience.
If the answers are “ceiling panels on switches, same brightness everywhere, no operator, the hotel manager can show you the panel” — I know I need to adjust my expectations and my approach. I am going to have a functional performance in a well-lit room, and my job is to create atmosphere through energy, scripting, and connection rather than through visual environment.
Most venues fall somewhere between these extremes. For those middle-ground situations, the early conversation gives me time to push toward the better end. Can we rent a couple of LED uplights for the stage area? Can we turn off the wall sconces during the performance? Can we position the audience so the stage naturally gets more light while the seating area is dimmer?
These adjustments compound. And because I am asking early, they feel like collaboration rather than last-minute demands.
The Harlan Framework in Practice
Dan Harlan’s lighting framework — color, focus, intensity, distribution, and movement — has become my mental checklist for evaluating any performance space. When I walk into a venue, I run through all five: Is the light warm or cool? Where is it concentrated? How bright is the room, and can it be brought down? Where are the sources positioned? Can the lighting change during the show?
One point Harlan emphasizes: light should come from in front of the performer, never from behind. Back-lighting creates silhouettes, washes out your features, and can reveal things you do not want the audience to see. Every time I walk a venue, I check what is behind the performance area. Windows get covered. Wall fixtures behind the stage get turned off. A lit exit sign directly behind where I will be standing means I reposition the performance area.
These are small things. Collectively, they create the difference between an audience fully immersed in the experience and one subtly distracted by visual noise they cannot even identify.
The Consultant’s Approach
My background in strategy consulting taught me that the best time to influence a decision is before the decision has been made. Lighting works the same way. If I call the event coordinator two weeks before the show and say “I would love the stage area slightly brighter than the audience area, and the overall room dimmed to about fifty percent during the performance,” the answer is almost always yes. They have time. They can coordinate with the venue. It feels like collaboration.
If I arrive an hour before the show and say “these lights need to change,” the answer is often “sorry, this is what we have.” The room is set up. The facilities team has moved on.
Early intervention. That is the principle. The earlier you engage with lighting, the more control you have over the audience’s emotional experience.
What I Cannot Control
I cannot always get what I want. Many venues have fixed lighting. Many event coordinators have never thought about lighting as a performance variable. Many corporate events are in multipurpose rooms designed for meetings, not performances.
When I cannot change the lighting, I adapt. Higher energy to create the sense of occasion that the lighting is not providing. Stronger scripting to build atmosphere through words. More direct audience engagement to create intimacy through connection rather than through the separation of light and dark. These compensations work. I have done shows in fully lit conference rooms that got strong reactions.
But the shows I remember most fondly — the performances where everything clicked and the audience was truly transported — those always had good lighting. Not elaborate lighting. Not expensive lighting. Just intentional lighting. Warm rather than cold. Focused rather than flat. Lower in the audience than on the stage. Set in advance with care and attention.
And every one of those shows started with the same question, asked early and asked first: what is the lighting situation?
It is a simple question. It costs nothing to ask. And the answer shapes everything that follows.