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The Substitue LD

The Substitue LD

This month I welcome a little change. I have no musical tours to design or program, but because I have a lot of friends who do the same thing as I do for a living, I have plenty of work as their substitute for a few gigs.

The music business is quite different from other sides of lighting. The main thing is that it isn’t consistent, and it often leaves holes in your schedule — and by “holes,” I mean time periods where we aren’t gigging and we ain’t making no cash. It pays to keep in touch with your fellow lighting brethren. Besides the fact that they are your friends, there’s an old adage that really applies to the music biz: “Out of sight, out of mind.”

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Holder Speaks with Holder

Doug Holder interviews his brother Don Holder, lighter of The Lion King

[The Lion King is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Having recently opened in the Montecasino Theatre in northern Johannesberg, South Africa, and another opening slated for Paris in October, the production will have played in 11 different countries worldwide. There are currently eight productions of the show, including Broadway, the West End, Hamburg, Tokyo, Seoul, two U.S. national tours and Johannesburg, making it a global phenomenon. In recognition of his stellar work lighting the show, we bring you an interview with lighting designer Don Holder conducted by his brother Doug.—ed.]

When we were kids, my brother Don (or Donnie, as I still call him) was always involved in a frenzy of activity. In high school, in Rockville Centre, N.Y., he was like a hyperactive Mickey Rooney, running from one project to the next. And now at 49, he hasn’t changed. 

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Expanding the Production Landscape

Muse uses video to blur the genre line.

If you took equal parts electronica, heavy metallica, music classica and rock progressiva, you might come up with something like the English rock band Muse. Combine their varied music influences with a penchant for telling stories of apocalypse, outer space, politics and religion, and you have a production landscape rife with design possibilities and themes. For their current world tour, the design duties landed on the shoulders of Oli Metcalfe, who has been designing and directing lighting for Muse since 2000 after they opened for the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the Californication tour, and on media director Tom Kirk.

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Torn Between Two Cities

Rick Baxter, master of electricity, is a sometime citizen of Vegas via Broadway.

While lighting designers create grand visions that bring productions to life, electricians are responsible for putting them together and making sure they work correctly. More often than not, they are faced with the challenge of taking a complex system with thousands of control channels and making it a reality. They are tireless workers and can spend months prepping a show.

One of the most well respected electricians in our industry is Rick Baxter. And in this month’s interview, he tells us about working on Broadway and in his home-away-from home, the importance of good paperwork, and offers a bit of advice for manufacturers.  

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Chauvet Colorado 3

Big-Boy LED at Little-Kid Pricing

There are two good reasons to get excited about Chauvet’s new Colorado 3. It adds a feature — affordability — not usually associated with an LED color wash fixture of this quality. And by “this quality,” we mean a well-built, big-boy instrument, not a child’s play thing.
 

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Vari-Lite VL3500 Wash

Attendees at last year’s LDI tradeshow were introduced to the newest addition to Vari-Lite’s flagship 3000 series of auto-mated lighting fixtures. The VL3500 Wash fixture fills in a gap in the very top echelon of Vari-Lite’s fixture offerings. Build-ing on the line’s already rich feature set, the fixture is an evolutionary step from its closest sibling, the VL3000 Wash, with at least one trick up its sleeve that’s not found anywhere else in the series. 

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Brad Paisley’s Bonfires and Amplifiers

Topping previous tours takes creativity — and a lotta video.

According to Dean Spurlock, lighting and video content designer for Brad Paisley’s “Bonfires and Amplifiers” tour, the concert “is in your face the whole time.” That’s not so hard to understand when you consider that Paisley threw down the gauntlet and challenged his team to put together his most spectacular concert yet. And he’s not just a man of words — the recent American Country Music Award winner for top male vocalist rolls up his sleeves and gets personally and actively involved in creating the show, even going as far as creating some of the video content in the form of a cartoon that accompanied an instrumental number. 

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Wicked Lands in L.A.

 

Photo by Joan Marcus

 

 

Updates reduce control footprint.

 

“We’re not reinventing the wheel,” says Brendan Quigley, head electrician of the Broadway hit Wicked. “But we are addressing unique problems presented by each venue. This is true for the national tour, as well as the specific designs for the Chicago and Los Angeles productions.”

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Coloring Curtains

A noir gumshoe draws focus in this all-out Broadway valentine.

It seems like old-school Broadway is becoming hip again, from the more traditional first act of Grey Gardens to the loving homage/satire that is The Drowsy Chaperone and now the musical murder mystery Curtains, which co-stars David Hyde Pierce and Debra Monk. The escapist Curtains stars Hyde Pierce as Lieutenant Frank Cioffi, a Boston detective assigned to investigate the murder of a play’s leading actress on opening night at the Colonial Theatre. While sequestering the cast and crew indefinitely, he seeks to ferret out the villain, woo the understudy for the lead and help the producers solve the dilemma of how to make their show Robbin’ Hood better. Sometimes Cioffi shows more passion and interest in his love for the girl and for theatre, and the show’s humor derives from his odd choice of priorities.

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The Future is Now: Are U Ready?

This morning I helped kick off the week of in-house training at Creative Stage Lighting in North Creek, NY. They are brining in a series of manufacturers and manufacturers reps to help get their staff up to speed on the latest technology and industry trends.

Everyone, it seems, has LEDs on the brain – and rightly so. They already figure prominently in our industry and we haven't even scratch the proverbial surface. Don't believe me? Check out the current Genesis tour when it comes to North America in September. They have over 15,000 Barco O-Lite LED panels – yes, that's right, there are three zeros after the 15. There are nine million pixels in total.

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Dance, Dance and EPD for you and me

What up everyone!? So I’m back and last time I ended with dance moves at the console. Almost every lighting director I’ve seen has some sort of movement while they’re running their show. Last time I said I do the hips left to right with a head-bob. I consider it a combination of Phish bassist Mike Gordon and my boy Colin the LD from Galactic. How do you like to dance at your console? I’m excited to get anyone’s input. If you don’t have any moves I suggest you get into the music more and invent your own. It goes a long way and people love the fact that you’re into it! I can honestly say the FOH engineer I work with gets down too. By the way it’s his birthday so…Happy Birthday Erik!

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