SYRACUSE, NY — After 30 years with J.R. Clancy, Bob Theis will step down from his position as chief executive officer on Dec. 31, 2011. Theis will continue until July 2012 as an advisor to the board of Wenger Corporation, the company that owns J.R. Clancy. Mike Murphy, who has served as president of Clancy since 2009, will become the company’s top executive on Jan. 1, 2012. He will retain the title of president.
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Lighting designer Bob Barnhart has 30 years of experience in the entertainment industry under his belt, including 17 years as an LD working on the Academy Awards, the Grammy Awards, the Miss USA Pageant and with performances by musical artists ranging from Barbara Streisand to The Rolling Stones. He also has a theatre background, worked for Flying By Foy for seven years. But no matter how much experience one has accumulated, there is always something new to contend with, and in the case of the well-received Andrea Bocelli concert in Central Park this past September — captured on the new live DVD, Concerto: One Night In Central Park — the unknown factor was Mother Nature herself. “It’s the wind that really did us in,” Barnhart tells PLSN when discussing his design work on the event. The show still looked great, despite the rain during the first half of the show that had umbrellas popping up everywhere.
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Katy Perry’s 2011 tour, California Dreams, began its 123-show run in Europe in February, ending in the U.K. in April, with May spent in Japan and Australia. The summer North American leg of the tour included stops in 51 cities from June to September. The tour’s last scheduled date was at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Nov. 22. On Nov. 23 — the night before Thanksgiving — Perry marked the end of the tour with an additional performance, “Katy Perry Gives Thanks.” Admission to the show was free.
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For Def Leppard’s 2011-2012 Mirrorball tour, show designer and video director Jonathan Beswick, who has been providing the band with distinctive video looks since 2006, worked with LD Kenji Ohashi to go beyond mere I-Mag to fuse lighting and video into rock ‘n’ roll looks that are even bigger than those achieved on previous tours. Higher-resolution video panels — and more of them — made that goal possible, and lighter-weight gear helped keep the production’s rigging, setup and tear down challenges in check.
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The Club Reopens with a New DJ, Roof and Memorable Visual Experience
Known as one of the hottest nightclubs in Miami back in the early 1990s when owners Gregory and Andre Boudou introduced house and trance music, huge foam parties and a European, open-ceiling grotto style layout to South Florida partygoers, Amnesia has returned in 2011 with the Boudous joined by DJ Bob Sinclair.
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If you’re just starting your career in the biz, please gather round the campfire. Perhaps more important, if you have children entering high school, college or a university — please read on. As I climb up on my soapbox, this is a subject that I’ve preached about for years, and in our harsh economic climate, it still rings true.
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“It’s been a helluva ride,” declares George Studnicky III, owner of Creative Stage Lighting (CSL). “We’ve had good growth throughout our history, and now we’re rebuilding from a 32,000 square foot space and adding another 75,000 to that, which will allow Creative Stage Lighting to create another 25 jobs.”
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Although Paul Simon’s So Beautiful or So What tour continues on into the New Year, LD Rich Locklin and lighting director Steve Fallon are already designing Simon’s 2012 run, which will celebrate the 25th anniversary of his Graceland album. Musicians who backed him on the album, including Ladysmith Black Mambazo, will be involved.
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Particulates are always in the air. They are so tiny we don’t even notice them. But it is these little specs of dust that make beams of light visible. In the world of staged beam effects, foggers and hazers also play a key role. They help to define shafts of light and provide effects. Germany-based Look Solutions has recently introduced the entertainment world to what has to be one of the smallest foggers I have ever seen. The Tiny FX Fogger is a compact, battery-operated fogger that easy fits in the palm of your hand. At first glance, the Tiny FX seems as though it was designed to be used primarily as a novelty item. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
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Say you had a bazillion dollars and it was your birthday. And you decided to have a party for, say, 1,000 of your buddies. What exactly would you do? I’d be that guy who hires Van Halen to play at my barbecue. I don’t count on it. However, I recently got to witness what happens when someone who could throw that type of a shindig actually does.
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