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“It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll” to LD Steve Cohen

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“It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll” to LD Steve Cohen

You may know Steve Cohen’s work through some of the mega tours that he’s designed lately – Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Justin Timberlake… But you may not know that inside the business-savvy exterior of the man beats the heart of an artist who sees his craft as an extension of the music, who approaches the console like a band instrument and his job like performance art. After running the gamut from the early days with Billy Joel to the over-the-top productions of late, Cohen is settling back into the groove of a pure lighting show and loving every minute of it. He’s currently on the road with Billy Joel again, running the console and getting back to his roots. We caught up to the tour at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas where we spoke with Cohen.

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The Rebirth of a Legend

America saw one of its most difficult economic eras in the 1930s. In the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, the Great Depression put an effective halt to the boom-time spending of the previous two decades. Oddly, the movie industry was one of few to not only survive, but flourish, during the thirties. Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org), the online encyclopedia, has this to say about the trend:

“The emergence of sound films in the late 1920s, combined with the escapism that film provided to a nation down on its luck, made the film industry one of the few that succeeded in profits and in setting a national mood.”

So it should come as no surprise that some of the most beautiful and ornate theaters were built during an otherwise pennywise period.

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Lestat Takes a Bite Out Of Broadway

As vampire musicals come and go on Broadway, they leave very little by which to remember them. This spring promises a new kind of vampire story in Lestat, based on the best selling books by novelist Anne Rice. Lighting designer Kenneth Posner, projection coordinator Howard Werner and visual concept designer Dave McKean, who have been involved with the project for the past two years, have brought a unique and powerful visual aesthetic to this dark dramatization, which has come of age on Broadway at the Palace Theatre.

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Biting Back

The true context to globalization is the intellectual property (IP) debate. As industries redistribute their sales and manufacturing throughout the world in search of both new markets and increased productivity, it’s inevitable that cultures are going to clash. That’s at the heart of the IP issue: from a Western perspective the need for IP protection is a no-brainer—the ability to protect ideas enables companies to move forward in developing and capitalizing them in anticipation of a return on that investment.

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ESP Vision 2.0

Zzyzx Inc. of Las Vegas has recently released version 2 of their ESP Vision visualization software program designed for programming lighting cues outside of the venue without using a lighting system. With this program, a lighting designer can make beautiful photo realistic renderings that depict what a show will look like, and convert these drawings to a video presentation of the event.

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Cue Theatre Vibe, and Go

Last winter, I got a call from a Chicago friend asking if I would be interested in designing the lighting and a set for a theatre tour. The artist is R. Kelly, a popular R&B singer, and he wanted to do something different. Robert (the artist’s real name) was used to playing arenas, but this time he wanted an intimate show in a theatre environment, complete with set changes and different themes for five sets of music.

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Hey, You, Get Off of My Cloud

“No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.” – Christian Nevell Bovee, author/lawyer

If ever you feel like the deposits in your self-esteem account are outpacing your withdrawals, you might consider letting your significant other loose with your ego credit card. That should take care of any excess balance you might have.

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Three Years After Rhode Island, Pyro Shoots Back

On Feb. 28, there was an explosion on the steps of the state capitol building in Nashville. It wasn’t terrorism; in fact, it was a politician who pushed the plunger. Rather, it was a wakeup call, a demonstration of the power—and the danger— of pyro, and it came almost three years to the day that nearly 100 patrons died in a pyro-induced fire at The Station nightclub in Warwick, R.I.

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Riders on the Storm

It was a day just like any other Texas day  at the Cotton Bowl: hot and humid. A crew from Showlites was making steady progress, and we were well ahead of schedule that day, putting up a fairly decent-sized lighting rig for a Journey show that was about to be unleashed upon unsuspecting Dallas residents that weekend. The rig was a 400-plus lamp system, not including audience lights and the Molefays that were to be used on the P.A. wings to light two enormous scrims on either side of the screens used for Eidophore (large scale) projections.

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