English comedian and actor Dawn French has just wound up a highly successful tour of Australia with her Dawn French Is A Huge Twat show.
During the show, Dawn reveals many of the excruciating gaffes and howlers she’s made across her forty-year career as a comedian and actress. The stage and lighting may, at first glance, appear simple but it is a work of precision. Central to the stage design is the large projection screen, showing a combination of of some her TV clips and old footage from her many years in her career. She interacts with the screen quite regularly during her performance.
For the Australian tour, Phaseshift Productions supplied the lighting and crew. Alex Saad is touring as Lighting Director and this is his third Australian/ New Zealand tour with Dawn.
The show has been running in the UK for quite some time now, and a very well-experienced crew runs the show. It’s quite a theatrical show, very scripted about where Dawn is on stage and when she’s delivering certain lines. Consequently, the lighting was very much specified for her. Key to the design was Phaseshift’s new Chauvet Professional Rêve E-3 multi-colour LED ellipsoidals positioned in groups of two with three banks stage right and three banks stage left. There are also two in the front and two in the middle.
“The Rêve E-3 are wonderful because they use an ETC Source 4 lens so they’re a new fixture but it’s just like I’ve been using them for 10 years!” commented Seb Brown, Phaseshift!’s Lighting Systems Technician. “We’re using our old Source 4 lenses on them, it’s great that we’re able to use all of their different degree lenses we already had in stock.”
Seb loves the Rêve E-3s saying that the colours are fantastic, they are easy to use and he’s had no issues with them on the road. Alex Saad added that they are ‘the brightest, cleanest fixture I have seen’.
Phaseshift also deployed eight Ayrton Perseos described by Seb as incredibly punchy. “They’re very versatile lights for us because they’re IP rated, so they get out and do festivals, but then you can take them into a theatre rig because they’ve got some very nice colours plus they’ve got framing,” he said. “Three Perseos reside on the front truss, three on the middle and then two at the back. We use the framing quite a lot in order not to light up the screen as it’s a rear-projector screen.”
Also in the rig are five Martin MAC Aura XBs hung from the upstage truss. They are one of Seb’s favourite fixtures and he describes them as robust and handy because you can put them almost anywhere.
At FOH, Alex ran his preferred Hog 4 console, running HogNet so the two Hog consoles (one on stage) speak to each other.
“Alex can update all his cues and everything from stage,” added Seb. “Then he goes out and also does some focus from FOH of course. If there are any issues with him or the FOH console, I can easily take over all the things from the stage where there is another Hog console.”
Alex reports that the gear and service from Phaseshift have been second to none resulting in a smooth, no-dramas tour.
