As the spring 2025 semester comes to a close, the Oberlin Musical Theater Association (OMTA) will present Legally Blonde, a musical version of the 2001 movie. The show, which follows sorority girl Elle Woods during her first year at Harvard Law School, opens on May 2 in Wilder Main. I sat down with lighting designer Reka Ladanyi to talk about what it’s like behind the scenes.
Ladanyi first became involved with theater as a freshman in high school, which offered technical theater as a sport. They also took theater classes, where they designed lights and sets for school productions. Their Oberlin credits include assistant lighting designer for the musical All In Your Mind, as well as other OMTA/OSTA and Theater Lab productions.
Asked what a lighting designer does, “Oh, all the fun things,” Ladanyi said. “We get to figure out how we want to tell the story with lights.”
The lighting designer works closely with the director, who generally has an idea of how they want the show to look, but opinions on lighting can vary from one person to another. “It all depends on what field of theater they’ve had experience in, and how their brain works,” Ladanyi said. “Some of them come into it with a very strong vision, and some of them are like, ‘I’ve never thought about lights before. Do what you want.’ And so you do have to adapt to the director that you’re working with.”
“The directors for Legally Blonde were just kind of excited to see what we could come up with,” Ladanyi said. “They had the vision that it needs to be big, needs to be pretty and flashy, but not specifics of that. So a lot of the decision was brought to us.”
In addition to the big, flashy lighting, one of Ladanyi’s favorite techniques is to represent individual characters using different colors. Unsurprisingly, Elle Woods is pink. “But then there’s more subtleties to it, like we have Emmett be this really nice cotton candy blue. It’s a color that looks nice with pink, like when the sky lights up from the sunset and you have that blue and the pinks with the clouds.”
The coordination extends to Elle’s ex-boyfriend, Warner, as well. He is associated with teal, which is like Emmet’s blue mixed with the yellow used to represent Elle’s home. This subtly shows the characters’ relationships — while Warner’s teal is familiar, “it just doesn’t quite work with the pink.”
Although the actual lights won’t be used until tech week, Ladanyi goes to rehearsals regularly. “With such a big show that’s so lights-heavy, it’s good to go to a rehearsal at the beginning of the process and just introduce yourself,” they said. Later, they record rehearsals to see where exactly the actors are standing.
The actors influence the lighting design beyond just the practical level. “Sometimes you can read the script, but you don’t see it, and you don’t feel the vibe until you see them run it. And then that really changes how you might do the lights for it.”
Ladanyi said the most valuable thing about the student theater organizations is that unlike in professional productions, the student crew is involved every step of the way. “Professionally, the designers are not involved that heavily. They do the design ideas. They give the plans to somebody, who then puts those plans into the real world. And I think that it’s really valuable to be able to experience the entire process and learn how the two work with each other.”
For students who want to get involved in theater at Oberlin, Ladanyi suggested either responding to crew calls in the OMTA/OSTA newsletter, or going to the student theater meetings on Saturdays, which are open to the public. “It’s a really good thing to do if you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m not sure that I want to, but I’m really curious about set design,’” Ladanyi said. “And then you can assistant set design a show and learn how to do that.”
When I asked what Ladanyi was excited for people to see in Legally Blonde, they said, “Everything!” Their personal favorite songs are “Blood in the Water” (sung by Professor Callahan) and Warner’s song, “Serious.” “Warner,” Ladanyi said. “He’s just so silly.”
Tickets are available online.
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