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Mary Poppins on Broadway with MAC 700’s
P.L. Travers' beloved story and classic Walt Disney film, ‘Mary Poppins’, is playing at Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre in New York with lighting design by Howard Harrison. A transfer from London’s West End, the Broadway show opened in November 2006 with a lighting rig that includes Martin MAC 700 Profiles and Atomic strobes along with a variety of other automated luminaires, LED’s and conventionals. Lighting supply is by Hudson Sound & Light of Yonkers, New York.
Associate lighting designer is Daniel Walker with Kristina Kloss as assistant lighting designer and Rob Halliday handling the lighting programming. “Generally, we were very pleased with the decision to use the MAC 700’s,” Daniel Walker stated. “Especially once we put them in ‘studio mode’, which made them much quieter.”
Rob Halliday, who has worked on both the London and Broadway productions, commented: “The previous version of the show, in London, used a different automated spot luminaire. We liked the units, but ideally we wanted a unit that offered color mixing rather than a fixed color wheel because the luminaire didn't fade from color to color very elegantly and the nature of the show is that a lot of moments benefit from a color dissolve. We never knew in advance which colors we'd be going between and the MAC 700 solved that problem. The other bonuses it gave us were the animation wheel, which turned out to be quite useful in a couple of scenes, and the low-noise ‘studio mode’, which allowed us to satisfy the requirements from the director that the rig be as quiet as possible.”
The MAC 700’s are located at various locations: FOH truss positions, proscenium booms, on-stage overhead electrics, SL & SR shins and side-stage ladders. “The lights have held up pretty well with very few reliability problems,” Rob says. “They are accurate, responsive and well behaved. When not much goes wrong, there's nothing much to say!”
Moving light technician, Andy Catron, continues: “I think the MAC 700’s have been a very solid light for this show. We got all of our units brand new from the factory, so I would expect that they would be pretty solid. I find that the MAC 700 is very user friendly in the respect that the gobo module and color module are easy to replace, should the need arise.”
11th January 2007
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