From the team that brought you Dusty – The Original Pop Diva, comes a brand new, multi million dollar production of SHOUT! – The Legend of the Wild One, Johnny O’ Keefe. This fabulous production has just finished playing a highly successful run at Melbourne’s State Theatre opening this week at Sydney’s Lyric Theatre.
With sets and costumes by Roger Kirk and fantastic lighting by Trudy Dalgleish, this production is a visual treat. This is the third production of Shout; the first was in 2000 touring lyric theatres around Australia whilst the second in 2002/3 toured regional areas in a tent.
”The script of this version is very similar to the tent production,” revealed Trudy. “It’s leaner and meaner. It’s a totally new set design and therefore a new lighting design too as the set really tells you what positions you can use for your lights. Roger has designed a really nice set which is multi-leveled and allows a whole lot of different scenes out of the one area. The last one was a big blue box where I had to make every scene – from intimate family scenes to big, stadium rock scenes – work. But with this one we have scenic elements to help which is great. It’s really nice to be able to place lights at different levels of the set; basically we have moving lights hitting all over the back cyc at different levels. I like Roger as a set designer, he’s very clever and he thinks about the lighting as he designs the set.”
The production uses Martin LC Panels hung in six metres by three metres format, an idea that was neither Trudy’s nor Roger’s but the directors, Stuart Maunder, who had used them at the APEC conference. Apparently he was very impressed by them and incorporating them into the show was the only suggestion he gave to Roger Kirk.
”We don’t use the LC Panels extensively,” said Trudy. “We wanted to resist using them as a background for every scene preferring to use them sparingly. That way, when they are used the effect is even greater. I don’t use them in an Australian Idol way; they’re used to display things like newspaper footage and stills of old television footage. They’re used in a documentary manner not an abstract way which works well. It also means we only use them in black and white.”
Trudy had used the LC Panels at the Schools Spectacular in November and she was keen to use them again.
”I really love them,” she exclaimed. “The possibilities they offer are endless. I love the way that you can do intensity in fact in some scenes we’re running them at only six percent! I’d like to use them a lot more to see how much they can actually do. I’d like to use them as individual panels, rather than a whole screen, and have those panels run the same image through them all. Stuart is actually talking about designing an opera based around the LC Panels so that should be interesting if it ever happens!”
Trudy’s moving light rig includes eighteen Martin MAC2000 Performers, twelve MAC2000 Profiles, fifteen MAC2000 Washes and thirteen VL6b’s for set lighting. It’s a rig she describes as a nice mix.
Bytecraft Entertainment supplied the lighting equipment.
www.showtech.com.au
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