Northern Beaches Christian School (NBCS) delighted audiences with their spectacular production of Mary Poppins, staged in its renowned Marina Prior Centre. Red Globe Productions was thrilled to partner with NBCS, bringing advanced technical production elements to complement the school’s existing infrastructure.
The crew at Red Globe doesn’t just drop their gear off and say ‘see you later’; they are keen to ensure the school produces something of a standard and calibre that reflects the students’ skills and abilities.
“It’s important to us to create opportunities to train young people to be the next generation of theatre technicians and performers,” commented Andrew Yager, Director of Red Globe. “One of the essential things about our partnership with Northern Beaches Christian School is that it’s not just about supplying gear, but also about educating students on how to use it and allowing them to work with current fixtures.”
With this show, Michael Clewes, Red Globe’s Sales Manager, spent a lot of time bumping in with the students and educating them as they worked through getting everything set up. After all, it’s places like this where students build the skills that allow them to be the lighting designers, theatre managers and touring show operators of the future.
“We started in school, we learnt in school, and we want to see that next generation of students also have that opportunity and to nurture the technical talent and creativity that is as important to the arts as your musician, singer, actor or performer,” he commented.
Mary Poppins was the ideal show to bring out the big guns, eight Ayrton Rivale Profiles recently purchased by Red Globe specifically for their theatre-like features, such as being able to frame the light output.
“We needed something very bright to do our bigger theatrical setups, but also IP-rated for the outdoor gigs we are doing,” said Michael. “The Rivale’s IP rating and framing shutter made it the perfect addition to our inventory.”
Andrew says he particularly likes the colours, flexibility and effects offered by the Rivale. He adds that they are not a rock star company. Instead, everything is about creative and theatrical, and so having that ability to use the Rivale as a profile, but also to use them effectively and creatively for some of those other activities, like being able to do lovely gobo washes on the stage, lots of breakup effects and excellent colour rendering are important.
The Rivales were joined onstage by the school’s ShowPRO R3 Wash fixtures and some generic LED Pars.
Red Globe’s new ShowPRO LED RGB StarCloth provided a touch of magic, creating stunning visuals and vividly bringing scenes to life. The client requested the star cloth a week before show time, and Show Technology met the challenge.
The Starcloth created some stunning star field effects, particularly through the nighttime scenes. It generated great atmospheric depth on the stage, especially with the rolling low fog from Red Globe’s new Look Solutions CryoFog.
“We’ve used several dry ice and ice-based foggers over the last two or three years, and we’ve found their ability to hold the fog at a low level, particularly for long-running theatre shows, really suboptimal,” explained Andrew. “We would often get one thing with great low fog and then heavy fog for the rest of the time. We’ve loved our Look Solutions Unique 2.1, and the knowledge that we were working with a brand we could trust was essential. Plus, we had the support from Showtech behind us.
“I guess the technology difference of moving to CO2-based fog was quite significant, and we were confident from the research that we’d done, the videos we’d watched, the reviews and the evaluations we’d read online that it was going to be a big hit, and it was.”
Everybody was raving about the quality of the production and the kids’ performance; meanwhile, a new generation of techies was quietly emerging thanks to Red Globe.
