enlighted® by Janet Hansen

Be More Chill

Enlighted was commissioned to create costume lighting for the Broadway musical Be More Chill, playing at the Lyceum Theater in New York through August 2019. The show tells the story of Jeremy, a high school student who takes a pill (aka a squip, containing a mind-controlling supercomputer) in his desperate quest to be cool. As you might expect, there are some negative side effects.

The voices in Jeremy's head are represented in human form by Jason Tam, who wears a series of futuristic outifts. By the finale, his trench coat includes an illuminated brain on the chest, and stripes of light running down the arms. The animation patterns and colors are controlled by wireless DMX, and synchronized with key parts of a battle scene.

We built the lighting with individual RGB LED pixels joined by short wires and mounted on a flexible substrate, ready to be installed in the jacket at the costume shop. 

In the Halloween party scene, Jeremy is wearing a robot costume (as pictured in the NY Times review of the show). We created an assembly of lights with an LED driver for that prop as well.