Designing Radiohead’s current tour is longtime visual designer and director Andi Watson, who says the design was a response to the band’s latest album with the knowledge that they wanted a single production design that would work in all the venues they were playing.
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PLSN spoke with production and lighting designer Butch Allen of Blame Funnel Creative about his work on Carrie Underwood’s arena tour earlier this year, in support of her Oct. 2015 Storyteller album. The tour sold out arenas around the country. Allen’s previous clients have included Eric Church, Metallica, Usher, Paramore and Van Halen, to name just a few. Allen spoke about working with the tour’s creative director Barry Lather, the production team and putting together Carrie’s first in-the-round tour.
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After 19 years, the renowned country music artist Garth Brook knew that his return to New York City needed to be on a stage worth the wait. Having played in Central Park to nearly a million people in 1997, Brooks this summer took the field, literally, at Yankee Stadium in mid-July, becoming the first country music act to play the iconic Bronx ballpark. Joined by his wife and fellow country music star Trisha Yearwood, the massive stage design suited the epic scope of the venue, the event, and the artist himself.
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The Production Designer Turns to Upstaging for Set, Lighting and Video for Weezer’s Co-Headlining Tour with Panic! At the Disco
Production Designer Robb Jibson was in a quandary at the start of the summer. He had a design for a Weezer tour in place with all of his production elements: the set, lighting and video. But he was short on time and stuck with a budget. Even so, if there’s one thing Robb is good at, it’s accumulating friends in his home in the Midwest. So with paperwork and a glimpse of a plan, he hopped on his vintage Italian scooter and trekked out from his Chicago home to the cornfields outside of town. More specifically, to the Upstaging shop in Sycamore, IL.
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The Country Artist Kicks Off an Epic Weekend of Music and Sports at Bristol Motor Speedway
Kenny Chesney’s 2016 “Spread the Love” tour officially ended the last week of August as this country artist normally does, with a couple of sold out shows at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, MA. The “No Shoes Nation” showed up in full force for a six-hour show that lasted late, bypassing the curfew that was extended by the local authorities to allow the artist all the time he wanted to perform.
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Ever since Bob Dylan “plugged in” at The Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the annual music event has been synonymous with both music tradition and innovation. Although Dylan once jokingly referred to the electrified style he helped to pioneer as “Folk rot,” roots or Americana music hasn’t disintegrated in the last 50-plus years. Instead, it has fused somewhat with rock and other genres to create a hybrid beast.
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What better place to stage the first North American production of a play about William Shakespeare than at the continent’s longest running Shakespeare festival? This was the thinking behind the Stratford Festival’s summer 2016 production of Shakespeare in Love, the glorious romp that brings the 1998 Oscar-winning film of the same name to the stage. Produced in Stratford, Ontario, by special arrangement with The Walt Disney Company and Sonia Friedman Productions, the show’s script, set and costume designs come directly from the Noel Coward Theatre in London’s West End, where it debuted in June 2014.
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They say it’s a “Long Way to the Top, If You Want to Rock and Roll.” If that entails playing in a garage band and spending years of your life trudging through every back alley loading dock and taking what they’re giving to make a living until you finally get a few breaks in life, you just may win a Parnelli award. LD Rob Koenig has paid his dues, with over 20 years of schlepping gear and banging faders he has worked his way up the ladder to become one of the most sought-after lighting professionals in the touring world.
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Trevor Ahlstrand Lit the Band with a Gemini LSV Rig for its Tour with Marilyn Manson
American heavy metal rockers Slipknot hit the road this summer with Marilyn Manson on a tour lasting from June through September. Trevor Ahlstrand of Ahlstrand Productions provided the production and lighting design with lighting, audio and video elements for the tour supplied by Gemini Light Sound Video out of Dallas. Both have worked with Slipknot on several tours.
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“My goal is that the audience can’t tell when I’m going from the pre-programmed parts of the songs to the improvised ones,” says Andrew Cass, LD for String Cheese Incident (SCI). Indeed, he has 90 or so songs programmed in his grandMA2 console, but with this band, there is a section in every song where they go on an improvised musical tangent, and the lighting needs to follow along. He has developed a system that lets him stray from his song cuelist during the “jam” sections and return to the song looks as smoothly as possible.
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Clearwing Provides New Fixtures for the Stage and Surrounding Grounds
More than 20,000 festival goers were treated to a weekend of memorable musical performances, art installations and light displays at the second annual Eaux Claires 2016. The two-day festival, curated by Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon, was held Aug. 12-13. The event has drawn widespread acclaim for its eclectic lineup and an innovative lighting design that turns the festival grounds — Foster Farm in Eau Claire, WI — into an extension of the stage.
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It was 1996 when two guys found themselves together in a room and were informed that if they wanted a particular gig, they had better start working together. The client was only interested in a package deal, it seems. As Mark Grega, one of the principals at SFX explains, “This wasn’t about two guys getting together and saying, ‘Hey, let’s start a company’.” Partner Ted Maccabee admits, “We weren’t really friends who set off looking for our dream job. It just kind of turned out that way.”
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