1.  If the blacklight elements onstage are not as reactive as clothing worn by audience members, your audience will focus on each other instead of the show.  Especially the flouoescent style blacklights are designed to spread their light as far as possible, so you will light the audience no matter how hard you try. 

 

2.  You will probably need multiple coats of reactive paint to get a bright enough effect, so buy extra.

 

3.  The actual theater lighting made for blacklight effects is the best, but it's also the most expensive.  If you go will less expensive you will be disappointed.  Read the guidelines about those lights and how many you should use to cover your area, and then follow those directions for the best effect.  Trying to get away with less will leave you disappointed.

 

4.  ANY light leaks in the space will drastically handicap your effect.  Real light is your enemy here. 

 

5.  Make sure your costume department uses a more all-natural kind of laundry soap on costumes you don't want reacting under the blacklight.  Residue from many laudry detergents will react.

 

6.  Certain kinds of fuzzy dust shows up really well under blacklight, so a good sweep and mop pre-show is very important.

 

With that said, blacklights can be very fun and provide your audience with wonderful surprises.  Have fun.

 

 

 

 

1. If this is just a small production and you are not getting into stage fixtures, definately buy flourescent tubes, not incandesent bulbs. You can do this low budget from a home improvement store and cheap garage type flourescent fixtures (painted flat black) and you can get the tubes there also.

2. White teeth and t-shirts are your second worst enemy, next to light bleeding in from outside sources as theaterhelper mentioned.  It can't be stressed enough that the darker the better.

3. The audience on stage with the lights creates a LOT of issues. Their clothing, teeth, etc. reacting to the light, and the safety issues could be considerable.

4. You will have to experiment with what gives you the best luminescense. It all depends on  the material and the paint. Getting a white that works usually requires true phosphorescent theater paint, most store bought neon colors work if you use several coats and outline them in flat black. Don't paint your neon colors on top of the black though, you'll never get them bright enough if you do.

5. A few hard learned "secrets"- Neon colored poster board is highly reactive if you can use it, do!.........White gloves popping in and out of the light are a great effect and work well, just make sure they are clean, or they won't reflect well........stage hands dressed in all black will disappear completely if they wear a black hood............scotch tape glows under blacklight, be careful with it............this one is worth $$$$ so you owe me, there are several theater supply sites online that sell flexible neon tubing that you can cut and shape, we stitched it onto a black cat suit to look like a stick figure, the actor stood frozen for the first half of the act and then jumped out and started dancing, them went back to their frozen position. To the audience it looked like a neon sign came to life.....blew them away. Have fun, let us know how it goes.