The musical comedy The Marvellous Elephant Man the Musical has been playing at the iconic Sydney Spiegeltent at Sydney Fringe’s Spiegeltent Festival Gardens before it hits Broadway and the West End.
Lighting Designer Matt Marshall has worked in Spiegeltents a lot so he has an understanding of the quirkiness encountered when working in one.
“It’s always important to light the tent as well as the show as the tent usually becomes a character in the show as well as providing an atmosphere for that kind of vaudeville-in-the-round world a tent provides,” he elaborated. “The music for the show is all new and original and I think the lighting needed to change with the different styles the show travels through. I wanted the lighting to be able to also add atmosphere, lots of big endings with big button cues that always cue an audience to applaud.”
Tents are always a very different beast to the theatre. Power is always an issue so Matt specified an all-LED rig with a bunch of coverage for the stage and the tent itself.
“Natural light bleed is another whole department in itself!” he added. “I was potting and teching the show with a lot of natural light around as different leaks of light were fixed during the week. Heavy rains hit one night during teching and that brought us to a halt to fix leaks and it was very hard to hear anything over the pelting rain on the tent roof.”
Matt was briefed by the two directors of the show; Guy Masterson who arrived from the UK in the tech week and Chris Mitchell with whom he had all his creative chats. Chris had a series of visual references that they used to communicate ideas with lots of reference to beamage and colour.
“I was new to the show so it’s always hard to get your head around a show that the rest of the team knows!” said Matt. “Eden Read the Choreographer became like a bible to me once we were in tech week.”
The rig, supplied by Res X Sydney, consisted of:
12 x Martin MAC Quantum Profile
11 x Martin MAC Aura XIP
10 x ShowPRO FusionPAR Hex XII
8 x ShowPRO Pluto 800 Wash
1 x Robe 400FT Haze
1 x MA Lighting grandMA2 light for programming and a command wing for playback
Matt says that the MAC Quantum Profiles work well in a tent as they are light, have low power consumption and have a great set of gobos to suit the show. They provide all the textures, beamage and movement. The Robe 400FT Haze keeps a constant fine haze in the air which is used from start to finish in the show, and gives the MAC Quantum profiles great beamage.
“MAC Aura XIP washes again are a great unit for the tent, small and weighing in at 9kg they pack a punch and I always find I can get nice warm tints out of them,” commented Matt. “ShowPRO Fusion PAR Hex XII are used as footlights around the stage with a heavy frost – always an essential to have uplighting colour options for that vaudeville look.”
ShowPRO Pluto Washes are used for tent roof dressing and entry points with two positioned as downstage footlights so Matt can reach further upstage and zoom down to narrow beamage for some footlight specials.
Matt used a grandMA2 for control as there are a bunch of effects in the plot with little plot time. He switched to a wing once the show was running as space is always at a premium and lighting and sound needed to fit in a booth together.
Matt Quince came on board to program the grandMA2 light. Matt is a whizz on the desk and set up a very clean new show file and organised everything to make touring and relighting as simple as possible. The lighting cues are triggered by the lighting operator (it’s not called) so there was a process of handing over to Oliver Calloway to run the season.
“For a few days there we had the MA2 light with Matt reprogramming and plotting and Oli networked in on the wing to be learning cue points,” explained Matt. “There were quite a few previews which allowed Oli to learn and the handover went very smoothly.”
Matt is now in rehearsals for The Ring Cycle with Opera Australia which opens at QPAC in December. He also lit Tim Finn who is touring Australia and NZ with his programmer Rhys Pottinger on the road relighting that.
