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Big MA Technology for a Postage Stamp Size Musical
The classical Sondheim musical Follies has returned to the London stage with Robert McWhir’s critically acclaimed production at the Landor Theatre in North Clapham. For those who know the show, or the Landor, it will come as a surprise that this has occurred at all, never mind the rave success generated by this sell-out production.
Why the surprise? Well the show was designed for a large Broadway theatre which, according to the plot, is due to be demolished to make way for a parking lot. Instead the Landor is a small fringe venue on the floor floor of a South London pub. With a small acting area, a seating capacity of 50 and no financial backing or budget, McWhir’s vision was to seat the audience on chairs and tables to be part of the party. The cast of 21 are joined on stage by projected images of their younger days, and the synchronization for this is done by a grandMA.
Andrew Tottle, production manager, explained: “We started looking for solutions ten months ago. The total power capacity for the lighting system is 63A single-phase so we needed very precise solutions designed to work. There would be no spare budget to buy our way out of trouble. The sound, pianist, cast, film and lighting had to be perfectly synchronised for this to work.”
The system recommended to Tottle that could frame and light synch ‘straight from the box’ was grandMA. He continues: “The projection distance is only 12’ and projectors that are bright enough with a wide angle are too expensive. So, we needed to combine two cheap projectors to get the width covered and soft-edge our media content. Again, grandMA does this. With the cheaper projectors there’s a blue output when you really want black – so two Rainbow scrollers with blackout gel as one of their frames were created by White Light so we could block the projector output when not needed.”
For the lighting solution, Entec were contacted. MAC300 and 250 fixtures were suggested for their low power consumption. This, combined with the in-house 24 channels of dimming, was the lighting solution.
For the ghost cast to come alive and join the party-goers on stage the old “smoke and mirrors” theatrical effect was brought up to date with a projected film image on a gauze with smoke behind – and critically timecoded control of film, smoke, fans and lights ensures a reliable stage entrance.
Martin Terry operates the show. During production he ran the cues from front of house on a grandMA light, networked into the director’s laptop running on PC which displayed the cue list. At the same time, the programmer created the on-stage looks on a grandMA full-size. The DMX link into the house system was via a Network Signal Processor (NSP) placed backstage on the network next to the media servers. Once the show opened the light console also went backstage to create more seating area and the laptop then became a full tracking backup system for the light console.
During Previews, the LD watched the Cue List and show live on a mobile phone (phone component switched off, of course!) using the free MA remote software. This also helped maximize the all-important audience capacity.
Robert McWhir said: “It’s been a tremendous project to integrate the technical components into this show. grandMA’s allowed this to happen seamlessly and reliably. MA Lighting and Entec’s support and technical advice was second to none in making this show a reality.”
5th October 2006
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