Lighting Designer Mason Felps with 46 Entertainment has created an eye-catching lighting design including 68 Robe iFORTE and 16 iSpiider moving lights supplied by Backstage Productions for the 2025 leg of country music superstar Alan Jackson’s Last Call: One More for the Road tour. Billed as a celebration to mark a truly legendary career for his massive fanbase, the first section of the tour started in 2022 and continued well into 2025, the road just kept expanding for a couple of more years such is the popularity and stature of the best-selling multi-award winning and Country Music Hall of Fame legend.
Felps likes to keep busy on the road and is also the tour’s production manager / lighting director. He started work for the Alan Jackson camp at the end of 2017, initially as a backline tech, so all his stage and performance delivery technical skills have been able to shine through this period. The 270° visual production design fitted expediently into six semi-trucks with Felps taking care of lighting, video, and set, working closely with Wesley Owens from PXLBOX who programmed the Disguise media server on the video side to produce a coherent and consistent stage aesthetic.
The video content was a starting point for Felps and Owens to build looks and scenes for all songs in the set, and this will typically comprise re-edited footage from Jackson’s vast archive and back catalog of hit music videos. These images from the videos are displayed on the 64’ wide upstage screen juxtaposing dramatically with him live onstage. The lighting style was also developed around the playback content combined with the I-Mag mix cut by Steve Thomason, with Felps creating epic looks that matched and complemented the stage and onscreen action.
This look worked brilliantly in 2022 when the tour started, and Felps used Robe ESPRITES as the main workhorse fixtures which he loved. After a break in 2023, the essence of this design was reimagined for the 2024 and 2025 legs of the tour, with Felps wanting to retain the look and feel but max it out more and make it bigger to suit even larger venues. “With ESPRITES having been my key feature before, we then swapped them out for iFORTES which gave us that extra brightness and punch with their excellent optics, color mixing capabilities and camera compatibility.”
The roof is filled with a tiered wide-truss design with iFORTES scattered across the trusses and positioned perfectly to deliver all the basic beam work and specials, while the iSpiiders are the main stage washes, picked for their “smoothness and reliability.” Felps had used FORTES and iFORTES prior to this tour, and in fact Backstage Productions’ Brad Brooks consulted him in 2022 when the product was being launched, seeking his opinion on what he thought were the best fixtures coming to the market with a view to investment. Felps recommended them as a solid rental product, “Bright, tough, and rider-friendly.” Brooks didn’t need so much persuading as it happens, as he was extremely happy with the performance of the ESPRITES which he had purchased for the first leg of the Last Call tour. Felps has also utilized Spiiders and iSpiiders many times.
RoboSpot is another Robe product he really rates. While there are none on this tour as they use in house spots at each venue, they did use iFORTE LTXs for one show and he thinks this is an “incredible” system. On that show he really noticed how the color mixing matched so beautifully with the Robe fixtures onstage. “The iFORTE color correction is amazing and they are ideal for both back and front key light!” he declared, together with the zoom, the optics are optimized to allow the colors to punch through at all points.
Felps thinks Robe products offer fantastic quality and value. He notes that over two years of touring they have only had to swap out one faulty fixture “they have held up phenomenally to the rigors of touring,” he affirms. He has really enjoyed the opportunity of being part of Alan Jackson’s prolific and acclaimed journey to music stardom, recalling the story that Jackson was one of the first ever gigs he attended as a kid with his music-loving father at The Wharf in Orange Beach, Alabama. That show was also one of the triggers that sparked his passion for the production industry and the decision to make it his career.
Joining Felps on the lighting crew for the latest leg are Lighting Crew Chief Matt Stigile and Lighting Techs Claude Thomas and Miles Shelton from Backstage Productions. “I love how light it is for the output,” admitted Stigile, Production Lighting Department Head at Backstage Productions when speaking about the iFORTE. “I also love the zoom range, colors, and gobo set. As an IP65 fixture, it’s super easy to work on since it has an internal pressure test, and that makes a big difference.” The video vendor is 46 Entertainment, looked after on the road by Video Crew Chief Jesse LaVallee and LED Techs Tim Wilbanks and RJ Cavanaugh.
Photos by Matt Le, Luxium Creative
Further information from Robe: www.robe.cz
