For their 10th Anniversary, Musical Theatre Crew, a musical theatre training school for young people based in Hobart, decided to stage Les Misérables at Hobart’s Theatre Royal. The show was the largest production the school has produced to date and GK Productions supplied the majority of the lighting rig.
“I was engaged to join this show very late in the production process (on Christmas Eve!) and this severely cut down my usual pre-production processes,” commented Gareth Kays of GK Productions. “The brief was brief – create a large impact on a very even more limited budget than usual especially with Covid-restricted audience sizes.”
Gareth only saw a single run of the show prior to drawing up the design. With very limited plotting time and a finite amount of time from bump-in to opening night, it was a balancing act between time constraints and the flexibility and benefits of bringing in some of his own hire inventory to undertake the job with minimum stress and effort.
“From the moment I was engaged I knew the priority for this design was going to be flexibility,” said Gareth. “Especially as I had limited knowledge of spacing, blocking and costumes and set etc! The biggest challenge was the budget which meant no follow spots! This resulted in a large amount of programming to draw the audience’s attention where it was required using a reasonable number of generic specials and wash while containing the amount of front of house wash on stage.”
Gareth utilised the Theatre Royal’s stock of tungsten halogen profiles to undertake FOH duties and a provide a number of specials on LX1 downstage. The rest of the gear he supplied himself including six Strand PLFresnel1 RGBW Fresnels, a fixture Gareth loves, located in a box booms position in the Royal’s ornate Royal Boxes. Four Showline SL Wash 350 provided overhead and colour in-front of a downstage scrim as well as set lighting when the scrim was out. Overhead there were eight Showline SL Beam 300FX for wash and eight Showline SL LEDSPOT 300 supplying lots of gobos.
Eight Vari-Lite VL800 EVENTWASH provided a strong backlight from upstage and gave Gareth some great beams to use so much so he wonders why they aren’t called an EVENTBEAM!
Six ShowPRO Quad-7 Pars were used to backlight some windows in the set. As there was zero space available in the wings for booms, eight ShowPRO Fusion Par Q XII were vertically rigged as side-light from the panorama bars downstage. Despite being a very narrow shot they certainly added some nice punchy side-light to a limited area downstage.
“I had four ShowPRO Fusion Wash Q XLVIII (48) as footlights which was a quick and dirty solution,” added Gareth. “However the diffusers on these fixtures are excellent, a little overkill perhaps – I don’t think they went over 5%! 16-bit dimming would have been a bonus – hint hint ShowTech! They are reasonably new fixtures to my inventory but they have proved themselves incredibly useful and I certainly intend to purchase more into the future.”
A Showline SL510 Nitro Strobe was used for effect and atmospherics came from a Lightwave Research F100 Fog Generator and two Smoke Factory Tour Hazer II.
“I refuse to use oil crackers around my fixtures, the Tour Hazer’s have been an excellent machine,” added Gareth. “I usually would use more fog generators but increasing these to a high output when required minimised bringing in more equipment.”
Control was Gareth’s compact and very powerful Avolites Quartz console with two LSC Nexus 5 Port Nodes.
The programming was mostly undertaken in a single day, with a run of the show in the middle, followed by two part-days to complete and refine it. Gareth ended up with around 275 cues for the show which he also operated.
“Despite the challenge of not having follow-spots for a production such as Les Mis, I felt there was still some really nice transitions between scenes within a scene with a lot of people still on stage nicely complementing the blocking and direction,” he said. “My favourite moment was probably the end of the barricade sequence when everything slows down including my lighting. I had backlight beams doing a very slow searchlight style effects across the barricade which produced some really nice tableaus as the lights hit various characters.
“It was great being back in the Theatre, it’s almost 12 months since lighting a large production of Mamma Mia last January.”
