The Lovers, a brand new musical by Laura Murphy and directed by Shaun Rennie, is a contemporary pop musical based on A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
“Our creative brief was to find the smash between contemporary and traditional styles and honour the music and story through a creation of saccharine romantic vignettes and neon forest,” revealed lighting designer Trent Suidgeest. “As we move through the musical Shaun wanted to create the feeling of a drug-fueled love fest – an intense trip – where we weren’t sure how we arrived there, what we did, or whose clothes we’ve got on at the end of the night.
“The show has been receiving huge audience responses and reviews suggest we ended up succeeding in our missions.”
Trent particularly wanted to honour the energy and spirit of the music as it has so much detail and punctuation, is very poppy and is full of exciting orchestration.
“So I wanted to try and populate the songs with lots of life: sharp hits and big bursts of colour supporting a messy love fest with fairies and magic flowers,” he said. “I wanted to get a lot onto the click track giving us great consistency and sharpness. Notwithstanding our timelines and staffing, we managed to get many of the larger lighting songs triggered by OSC commands from QLAB. The band often play along to additional synthesised stems to create the pop sound, which was perfect for me to also populate them with cue triggers.”
Trent happily admits that he really challenged the whole Bell Shakespeare team with this design saying he’s very passionate about realising dynamic, expressive and supportive designs that continue to push companies to be putting their money on stage for the audiences. He adds that he has left a trail of big new designs behind him this year, edging past the restrictions of parameters.
Making a musical is a huge new territory for Bell Shakespeare and according to Trent, without question the largest and most complicated lighting rig they have ever realized. He also believes it is the biggest design The Playhouse has seen.
With that came challenges of time in pre-production, build and then as a consequence: the plot, teching and fixups.
“We were working within a standard play schedule for Bell Shakespeare, and of course, I went well beyond their traditional play designs, so we were always up against it,” he said. “I’m continuing to realise that lighting design in this current moment is proving to be even more pressured than it ever has been. We grow up accustomed to sitting in the hot seat, the final piece in the puzzle, scrutinised with expectation around generating our creativity rapidly without much space or resources for re-conceiving or drastic changes, let alone gentle experimentation.
“However it’s a precarious time out here in this “post-Covid” industry! Generally speaking, the scenery is coming late, lots of great crew have left us, rosters are harder to fill and don’t even try for late notice staffing if things are going south or an idea hasn’t worked, equipment supply/demand, rising costs, and sickness upsetting schedules.
“Snowballing this is the gentle escalation in lighting fixtures becoming more complicated to manipulate and cue, yet the appetite from us and our fellow creatives and producers – and I suspect the audience – continues to grow for more spectacle and dynamism.
“However, our time allowance to realise these desires doesn’t increase, in fact, it’s continually crunched in all directions by the aforementioned Covid “new normal”. Pressure, what pressure?
“Not to make toooo many excuses, because I’m immensely proud of where we got to, with all things considered, but I do think us lighting folk can be a little bit more forgiving of ourselves with where we get to, knowing we have determined the priorities along the way and worked as hard as we could. Perhaps we also need to recalibrate our expectations a little more.
“Us technical creative folk need to continue to be proud of our achievements and for sticking with it to provide entertainment and escape whether through a thoughtful colour combination or a perfectly cued surprise blackout.
“The whole team really rallied behind this enormous design compared with usual expectations.
It’s a very dynamic first smash at it, and I really hope we get another chance to bring it back to life again.”
Most of the set elements have been electrified including a roaming heart with LED pixels, the first ‘hallmark’ style romantic vignette and used a lot throughout the show to articulate the potion’s effects.
Then a couple of swings come down with another variety of pixel strung through their flower-laden ropes, for more fun, although could be brighter!
Spoiler Alert: the electrified forest of 30 Pink Trees is saved for Act 2! Each tree has 200 x RGB bullet-style pixels, some are on wireless and batteries as they get wheeled around and pushed over in the chaos. They get lots of gasps when they come to life. Trent says it’s certainly fun to play with the 6000 pixels, although another week with them in situ would have been delicious.
Chameleon supplied:
6 x Martin MAC Encore Performance CLD for front light specials
4 x Martin MAC Viper Profile for aerial and lots of gobo backlight
8 x Martin MAC Quantum Wash for backlight and high side
12 x Robe Spikie for aerial fillers and scenery highlights
6 x Claypaky Mini-B for face light booms
9 x GLP Impression X4 Bar 20 for backlight curtain
16 x ShowPRO LED Hex Par 12 for low-high sides
14 x ShowPRO LED Hex 16 strip for light curtains
6 x ShowPRO LED Fusion Wash Q XLVIII (48) for blinders)
2 x Look Solutions Viper NT Fogger (1 x Quick Fog, 1 x Regular Fog)
2 x JEM 365 Haze
2 x Wireless Solution BlackBox F-1 G5 DMX transceivers
4 x Wireless Solution BlackBox F-1 MkII G4 DMX transceivers
Bell Shakespeare supplied:
16 x ETC Lustre series 2 for mostly dapple air fillers
20 x Coloursource Par for downlighting each tree
1 x Confetti whizzer
In-house Sydney Opera House:
10 x Martin RUSH MH6 Wash for booms and front light washes
30 x ETC Strand SL 15/32
20 x ETC Source Four Junior 25/50
23 x Selecon Rama 1.2k Fresnel
9 x Cadenza 2k Fresnel
“Everything was spread everywhere!” exclaimed Trent. “Crammed into every overhead space that a fixture could fit, avoiding trees and other scenery, right up against the dreary weight-loadings for the grid in that theatre, lots of booms and droppers to bring as much down as we could with limited floor space with band onstage and lots of large props.
“The moving heads are very strategically placed for best vantage. I love a pixel-able curtain of light, so GLP X4 BARs are still a big favourite and I also love a Mini B; tight, bright, discrete: they just look super cute! The Spikies nearly cut it, just a bit too dim in the end. We punch with the Fusion Wash Q XLVIII (48) for mega strobe / blinders. They do great little hits in lots of songs and some powerfully energetic (and a bit divisive) sensory smashing blinders.”
The lighting is programmed and run by Lachlan Hogan on EOS family consoles including the in-house 24k GIO @5 as the main console, 24k GIO Back Up as well as Bell Shakespeare’s ION XE as Programming Client, together with an additional NOMAD dongle providing a couple of extra screens alongside. Statistics are 20,530 attributes across 9,668 channels, 391 presets.
“To be honest, some of my favourite lighting moments are in a song called Hiss, Hiss Bitch a nightmare ahead of Hermia’s famous speech “Help me, Lysander, help me; do thy best
To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast. We finally got to plot it on the morning of opening night, then put the cast into it quickly that afternoon. I had the sequencing and OSC triggers in place and firing through previews: I was watching them run and knew it was aligning. So it took us a couple of hours to get the states in but it’s very precise and looks a treat. Green, Orange and hits of Red. Punchy!”
The show is a huge hit with audiences, so Trent is really hoping he’ll get another round of refining and detailing. It’s, unfortunately, a rare occurrence in this country for anybody to work on a brand new musical, it’s a gift to be pouring creative juices and inventing original ideas to tell a new story.
“In lighting a musical there’s usually a need to have excesses of ideas to keep a journey of light progressing through the story arc; giving each individual song dynamics and a new expression, often hinting motifs or creating short reprises, managing FX and atmosphere, while supporting choreography and complicated staging (this time amongst a hanging forest),” added Trent. “There’s a lot more to keep track of and build with focus and beam presets, colours, effects and extraordinary cue tracking and updates.
“We dream up a rig and imagine cues, then we get a week to put it all together and finally see it in the darkened room. Inevitably there are some big successes, and sometimes you’d love just a few more sessions. Our quasi-out-of-town-tryout happens to be in the most recognisable building on the planet!
“It was a huge feat and I’m totally thrilled. Get along to see it if you can snag some of the final remaining tickets. We can’t wait for what’s next for this baby!”
CREW:
Lighting Designer: Trent Suidgeest
Head Electrician: Sam Wylie
Lighting Programmer: Lachlan Hogan
Account Manager, Chameleon: James Williams
Thanks To: Tony Davies
Technical Manager, Bell Shakespeare: Todd Hawken
Head Electricians, Sydney Opera House: Ben Willcocks, Lucia Haddad, Jasmine Rizk
Set And Costumes: Marg Horwell
Choreography: Yvette Lee
Cast: Natalie Abbott, Blake Appelqvist, Stellar Perry, Monique Sallé, Brittanie Shipway, Jerrod Smith. Understudies: Tomáš Kantor, Sarah Murr, Laura Murphy.
Photos: Daniel Boud
