A New Kind of Worship Experience
I don’t spend a lot of time in church as I am booked on shows most weekends or flying home Sunday mornings. But it’s nice to visit various house of worships when I can. I like to see what experience these offer to people as well as check out the latest production equipment being used at these facilities. I will tell you this, if you want to check out some of the latest lighting and video technology on the market, you may not have to go very far from your own house to find it. It could be in use at the church on your corner.
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LD Mikey Cummings with Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit
TOUR DATES: U.S. to Oct. 15; U.K./Europe to Nov. 14; returns to U.S. in December.
THE DESIGN: “While there was some collaboration with the band and management, they have always expressed their confidence in us to translate the emotions of the music visually. Roger Gant and I had just three days of live programming and three days of rehearsal, in which we shot two videos.
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‘1984:’ Feeding The Machine
The play 1984 has shocked audiences on Broadway with a mind-bending stage adaptation of the famous George Orwell novel that predicted our grim future. Perhaps that is why, in these tumultuous times, it has resonated with people; that, and the graphic torture scenes which have allegedly caused heart palpitations for some audience members. A big part of the show’s intensity emerges through Tom Gibbons’ jackhammer sound design and Tim Reid’s essential video design, which both creates intimacy for key off stage scenes, and a sense of disorientation and danger for some disturbing moments.
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OneRepublic Develops a Look
When opportunity knocked for Mark Butts and Raj Kapoor to work with OneRepublic, two things made them open that door: The prospect to work in the rock genre, and the chance to provide visual direction for a young band. “Raj and I work together often, and we’ve always wanted to do a really bad-ass rock show, so we could approach things a little differently than we normally do,” says production/lighting designer Butts. “Someone like Kenny Chesney knows what he’s looking for, but something like this is fun because it’s a blank slate.”
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Green Day ‘Revolution Radio’ Tour 2017
We caught up with production and lighting designer Ethan Weber and lighting director and programmer Tommy Horton for Green Day’s hometown show in Oakland, CA. Although the band has been playing mostly in arenas and sheds for their Revolution Radio tour, this show, staged on Aug. 5 at Oakland, CA’s Alameda County Coliseum, is one of the band’s stadium gigs. The tour, in support of Green Day’s Sept. 2016 album by the same name, is a 120-show trek that launched Sept. 26, 2016, one day after the album’s debut. Since then, the Revolution Radio tour has included multiple legs in North America and Europe along with a series of shows in Australia and New Zealand. After a performance at the Global Citizen Festival in New York’s Central Park on Sept. 23, the band heads to South America and Mexico for a series of shows this November.
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Ed Sheeran ÷ (Divide) World Tour
Singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran is out on his world tour in support of his latest album ÷ (Divide), a title which follows in the footsteps of his previous releases, 2014’s x (Multiply) and 2011’s + (Plus). The albums were released, respectively, in March 2017, June 2014 and Sept. 2011.
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