Skip to content

Articles

Pyro extended 200 feet into the air above the roofless stage. Metallica 2017 tour photo by Steve Jennings.

Metallica WorldWired Tour

Metallica’s current “WorldWired Tour” is in support of the band’s Hard Wired… To Self-Destruct album, released last fall. We spoke with the band’s longtime lighting designer and director, Rob Koenig, about working with Dan Braun (show director and set designer) and the tour’s design and logistics he’s encountered for this massive production that’s been filling stadiums around the world. The tour began last year and included a run of stadium dates in North America this past summer. The band is continuing with a series of dates in the U.K. and Europe this fall and next spring.

Read More »
Lady Gaga 2017 'Joanne' tour photo by Steve Jennings

Lady Gaga ‘Joanne’ World Tour

Note: This feature was prepared shortly before tour dates in late September and October were postponed or cancelled due to Lady Gaga’s hospitalization for body pain caused by fibromyalgia. The tour is set to resume Nov. 5. —ed.

Lady Gaga’s Joanne World Tour is a two-hour extravaganza to behold. Her performance starts on a main stage. She later walks out into the arena via bridges that lower from the ceiling, bringing her to three intimate stages within the audience… for closer fan interaction. We spoke with key members of the production that bring this all together, starting with LeRoy Bennett, production and lighting designer.

Read More »
MIG tied into the stadim ribbon boards to run content, tooStadium ribbon boards ran content. Photo by Jeff Monuszko

Filling AT&T Stadium with Imagery for AdvoCare’s National Success School

Multi Image Group’s Visuals Ride the Big Screens in the Home of the Cowboys

The annual AdvoCare National Success School is more than just an event; it is a destination. Held at the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, TX for the last five years — the home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys — the annual training and sales conference focuses on celebrating the achievements of the company’s independent distributors, while also providing education, inspiration and motivation for continued successes.

Read More »
The musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda was staged at Geva Theatre Center. The morning after a power outage in Washington Heights, dawn lighting brings life to the cast of In the Heights. Photo by Goat Factory Media.

‘In the Heights,’ in Rochester, NY

Upper Manhattan is Reborn Upstate

Take a Tony Award-winning musical featuring a large cast of dancers and flamboyant choreography infused with salsa, merengue and hip-hop. Surround this cast with scenery that depicts the working storefronts of a bodega, a hair salon and a car service. Light it up with dozens of colors, patterns in motion and — in a purely 21st-century moment — the glow of smartphone screens.

Read More »
The band performed July 21-23, 2017

The String Cheese Incident

[caption id="attachment_279800" align="alignnone" width="800"]The band performed July 21-23, 2017 photo by Dylan Langille[/caption]

Lighting Cos
Brown Note Productions, Morpheus Lights

Venue
Red Rocks Amphitheatre
Morrison, CO

Read More »
The dazzling drop and staircase combo from the Follies section. Images courtesy Beowulf Boritt.

The Tetris of Broadway

Beowulf Boritt is known for his bold, ambitious scenery in shows like Act One (a musical with a three-story revolving turntable) and Thérèse Raquin (a play with a river upstage). But for Prince of Broadway, the musical revue of the work of Broadway legendary Harold Prince, the Tony Award-winning scenic designer got a chance to create numerous old-school set pieces. The challenge was not to make everything fit onstage; it was storing it all in the wings of the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, which has not had a musical production mounted there since the Prince-directed Lovemusik, which Boritt also designed sets for, back in 2007.

Read More »
Kid Rock on the thrust provided by Gallagher Staging

Kid Rock Opens Little Caesars Arena in Detroit

LD Makes Use of State-of-the-Art House System for Six Sold-Out Shows

In retrospect, there was no question: Who else could have opened a new stadium in Detroit but Kid Rock? The hometown favorite sold out the new 20,000-seat sports complex’s six dates in mere hours. And, while all the shows went well, a few of the early ones didn’t go perfectly, as longtime Kid Rock LD Nook Schoenfeld was the guinea pig taking a brand new technologically-advanced stadium out for its first ride.

Read More »
An even wash is tough with the chimneys and overhanging structures.

Gourmet Lighting

The F Word, on Fox, Lit by Darran Webb

Although it appears to take place in a trendy, real-world restaurant, Fox’s hit food competition show, The F Word, starring celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, is actually shot live and in real-time on a Hollywood soundstage. Its massive, four-wall set rises 28 feet above the floor and includes multiple dining alcoves, a large balcony, a semicircular bar and an open, fully functioning kitchen.

Read More »
The choreography was conceived simultaneously with the projections.

Particle Dance

Daniil Simkin’s Falls the Shadow at the Guggenheim Museum Fuses Projection and Dance

For Falls The Shadow, a dance piece created for the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series and staged in the famed art repository itself, choreographer Alejandro Cerrudo and principal dancer/director Daniil Simkin teamed up with projection designer Dmitrij Simkin and costume designer Dior for an unusual convergence of fashion, technology and art. Four dancers had their movements captured by motion sensors, which generated 3D mapped visuals that were then projected back onto the floors and the ramp of the famed building.

Read More »