Tharon Musser

Dean Of American

Lighting Designers

When they dimmed the lights on Broadway Tuesday night to bid farewell to a beloved friend, the dark was especially poignant. Tharon Musser, a longtime resident of Newtown, was the legendary woman of the theater who pioneered modern stage lighting.

She died Sunday, April 19, at home, in the company of her life partner Marilyn Rennagel, at the age of 84 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.

Lionized, and loved, as the “Dean of American Lighting Designers,” Ms Musser had an unerring sense of what actors, directors, and playwrights intended to be seen and she considered it her job to help the audience see it. The theater was her life and the folk of the theater were her family. All who worked with her were dazzled by her vision, steadied by her certainty, and grateful for her generosity, for she was a woman they could count on for both the mundane and the spectacular.

 Born in Roanoke, Va., she graduated from Kentucky’s Berea College in 1946, took her master’s in fine arts at Yale University, and started working in New York at the 92nd Street Y. The first of some 150 Broadway shows she lit was Jose Quintero’s 1956 staging of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

Tharon Musser won Tony Awards for lighting the musicals A Chorus Line, Dreamgirls, and Follies. She was nominated for seven more: Applause, A Little Night Music, The Good Doctor, Pacific Overtures, The Act, Ballroom, and 42nd Street. She also designed the lights for modern dance productions, opera, Off-Broadway theater, and repertory theater around the world. She pioneered the memory board for the first time on Broadway in 1975’s A Chorus Line and was instrumental in making lighting a separate art form in the theater. Her apprentices were legion, each studying for a year with the master, then told to spread their wings and fly.

Modestly, she would protest, “The audience does not come to see the lights.” In fact, to imagine Tharon Musser’s shows without her lights would be to imagine Titian’s portraits without the paint.

The Newtown Bee        April 24, 2009