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Jeremy Chernick ’94 Creates Broadway’s Most Dazzling Special Effects
If you’ve attended a Broadway show sometime this century and were amazed by the special effects on stage, then there’s a good chance you saw the work of Jeremy Chernick ’94. For more than 25 years, he’s been designing special effects for some of the most famous productions on the Great White Way.
Chernick has been a special effects designer for more than 50 Broadway productions, as well as at prominent theaters around the world. His work has been seen on Aladdin, Beetlejuice, The Book of Mormon, Fiddler on the Roof, Frozen, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and much more.
Chernick has designed just about every type of special effect on stage throughout the years. He can make it rain, create explosions and fire, or even stage a bloody murder scene.
He worked hard to get to this point in his career, but when he entered Queens College, he could have never foreseen the life he has today. In fact, it was his decision to attend QC that set him down this unlikely path.
“I had a few wonderful accidents,” noted Chernick. “Destiny took hold of me.”
Chernick grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, and by his own admission, was not a great student in high school. After high school, he wasn’t very motivated to pursue his studies further, but his parents pushed him to attend college. He enrolled at Queens College and moved to Flushing.
“I had lots of friends who were going to Queens College,” recalled Chernick. “That was the honest reason why I chose it. But it was the absolute perfect place for me.”
The first class Chernick took at QC was interpersonal communications and it opened his eyes to the possibilities outside of traditional education. He ended up majoring in communications and performed well in his classes. He also took an interest in theater, taking many courses and working on the college’s theatrical productions—both on stage and behind the scenes. It was there he also met his future wife, Annacatherine Rutledge ’96, who was a house manager for one of the performances. That was Chernick’s first taste of working behind the scenes in theater.
Mentoring Matters
One of his QC mentors was the late Lawrence Rosenfeld, a professor in communications. Chernick credits a lot of his success to Rosenfeld’s teachings.
“He really inspired me to have better confidence in my abilities to communicate and understand what’s happening in group environments. And theater is nothing but a collaborative group environment. It’s a big part of how I’ve done my work since.”
Chernick went on to graduate school at University of Illinois at Chicago where he would earn a master’s degree in communications. While in Chicago, he worked part-time and freelance jobs backstage at local theaters to make extra money, which helped him gain further experience in theater.
After graduate school, Chernick was offered a few different jobs in the communications field, but none of them particularly interested him. So Chernick, Rutledge, and another Queens College, friend Ronit Schlam ’97, decided to take some time to explore the country and theater a little more deeply. They drove around the country to experience art and theater and used it as inspiration for their own productions.
“The three of us just got in an old beat-up car of one of our grandmothers and started driving around the country. We wanted to experience something different, take what we learned, and put it up in a city where it might be considered original,” recalled Chernick.
They eventually settled in Austin, Texas, which was not the bustling tech hub it is now. It was a college town with a music and art scene. The group put together about five or six theater productions over a three-year period. They did most of the work in each theatrical area—producing, directing, designing sets, etc.—and they hired actors and people in the local community.
“We made these really silly, wonderful comedy shows—bawdy comedy, blood and guts, high concept art (or what we thought was high concept art in our early 20s),” joked Chernick. “It was joyous.”
After about three years, the group decided they had done all they could do in Texas and came home to New York. Upon returning, Schlam and Rutledge landed administrative jobs at Lincoln Center, while Chernick ended up taking a position as an associate prop master at the Juilliard School. Juilliard put on about 60 productions a year, which gave Chernick plenty of opportunities to gain valuable experience and meet lots of people in the industry.
He also began developing a reputation for doing unique and complex theater projects. One day, a person he was working with asked if he could make 2,000 gallons of fake blood for $1.75 per gallon for the play, The Orphan of Zhao.
Even though he had no idea how to do it, Chernick agreed. He spent the next several weeks making a variety of blood samples and testing them.
“We essentially came up with a recipe, and then we made a 2,000-gallon pool of blood,” he explained. “From that point on I pretty much exclusively did special effects.”
Collaborating Careers
Around that time, he began collaborating with special effects designer Gregory Meeh, who had been working special effects in theater since 1973. Meeh mentored Chernick and first brought him into Broadway shows. From there, Chernick’s career took off. The two worked together at their company J&M Special Effects until Meeh retired in 2019. Chernick is now a partner and co-owner of the company.
Chernick is typically involved during the early stages of a production. He spends his days in meetings with the set designer, director, and some of the technical management in order to understand what is needed for the show. He then gives demonstrations of the effects he designs and spends about four to six weeks implementing them. Once the show opens, a crew executes his work on stage on a daily basis.
Chernick is in high demand these days. His latest project is a revival of the musical Sweeney Todd starring Josh Groban, set to debut on Broadway in just a few weeks. Chernick is also working on the United Kingdom-based show Misty; Disney’s Hercules; The Outsiders, which is set to come to Broadway in the spring; and Peter Pan Goes Wrong, a comedy based on the premise of the Tony-award winning hit The Play that Goes Wrong.
“I am actually very good at understanding the story that is trying to be told on stage and coming up with a variety of ways to tell that story, through both super simple theater tricks and very complicated, expensive theater tricks," he concludes. "I am very diverse, but the thing that I really do is communicate and tell stories. And I honestly started down that path at Queens College with a communications degree. In the end, that’s the reason I am here.”
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