Catch Me If You Can
Directed by Gavin Mayer Assistant Directors: San Barao & Nicole Morgan Choreographed by Tuan Malinowski Assistant Choreographed by Ignacio Torres Borges Music Direction by Christopher Zemliauskas Dramaturg: Mo de Poortere Photos by Simon Wheeler Scenic Designer: Cady Loeb Costume Designer: Jules Elcik Lighting Designer: Maddy McCarthy Assistant Lighting Designer: Brady Fiscus Sound Designer: Don Tindall Production Stage Manager: Isabelle Ktenas
During the production process, I was able to meet with my Programmer, Jackson Leuenberger, multiple times a week in order to pre-viz the entire show. This made the teaching process go smoothly and allowed me to focus on making detailed edits. This also helped my director understand the design as a whole and allowed him to give more refined notes to me as the tech process occurred.
Catch Me If You Can is and fast-paced musical, based on a true story, about a young man named Frank Abagnale Jr. who cons his way through life. He feels as through he cannot be his true self and therefore sets off on a journey, scamming people left and right. He struggles with finding his own identity while his home life falls apart, but finally finds peace when he meets a young doctor named Brenda. Brenda helps him realize there is more to life than just running, and eventually Frank Jr. gets caught by the FBI, serves jail time for his life of crime, and starts a new life helping the FBI catch men like him.
From the start, Gavin came in with a strong concept: we were to tell Frank’s story as if it were a 60s sitcom show. Cady Loeb, the set designer, curated a set of platforms reminiscent of a sound stage from the sitcoms of the time. After hours upon hours of watching 60s sitcoms for research, our creative team was able to pull together a colorful pallet of 60s inspired designs and concepts which came together on the stage to create a cohesive cinematic world.
I really wanted to be able to make that contrast and emphasize the isolation so the audience could really get pulled out of Frank Jr.’s world with him and build the empathy for Frank Jr. needed to get the message of the show across effectively.
Front February 2024 to November of 2024, I worked as the Lighting Designer for Terance McNally’s Musical Catch Me if you Can, Directed by Gavin Mayer. This Show tool place in Ithaca College’s Hoerner Theatre, a 535 seat proscenium theatre.
Our team wanted to tell this story to talk about the importance of being yourself, and finding comfort and safety in your own identity. We wanted to emphasize the significance of being able to trust those around you and be supportive on each others’ journeys to find oneself. Within these journeys, we believe that it is important to be able to experience the bad moments of life straight on on order to make the good moments feel even better.
A main design goal we had for this show was really depicting when we were in Frank Jr.’s colorful, showy world and when we were getting a glimpse into his vulnerable, isolated reality. In order to depict this, Mayer and I talked much about plucking out characters from the saturation of color to emphasize the isolated feeling, and filling the stage with warms and texture to lure the audience in and believe Frank Jr. was getting on well.
To start my design process, I made research board for each scene and each song to lock in the colors and textures of the show, as well as locking in important ideas and motifs in my lighting. After this process, I went song by song and sketched out storyboard so I would have a general idea of the progression of light in each song. This helped in the pre-programming process to remember big ideas of each number and implement them into my design.