Robert Wertheimer puts his theatre background on ice
At an age when most of us are still playing with bugs, a different sort of bug bit Robert Wertheimer — the lighting bug. Ever since, the owner of Spectacle Lighting Design (www.spectaclelighting. com) has been fascinated by the world the lighting. In this month’s PLSN Interview, Wertheimer explains how he ended up designing for Hockeytown, the art and danger of designing on ice, and why it’s important that your client has an excellent experience.
Q PLSN: How did you become interested in lighting?
A Robert Wertheimer: I started off as a child actor in a community theatre. We were doing Our Town and I was in first grade. I was fascinated with the lighting. Even though acting was fun, and I did a lot of it, I was captivated by lighting. Back then, it was big handles and rheostat dimmers. Our theatre got renovated when I was in second or third grade and we got 16 brand new Strand 7.2k dimmers. As the community theatre program moved into the new space, they let me bring up the handles to help focus fixtures and that’s when I learned how to use a board.
Q How old were you then?
A Fourth grade. By the time I was in sixth and seventh grade, they were letting me run the lights for all the different events that were happening in school. I was, more or less, designing the lighting for the junior high school shows and I was really enjoying it.
When I got into high school, I was the auditorium manager. I had my own set of keys and I actually got paid for it. I also went to Interlochen Arts Camp for two summers as a student and one summer as their youngest intern for the technical theatre program. There, I learned all the other trades of theatre. I spent lots of my time building sets and learning about scenery.
Then I went to Hope College and studied in the theatre program. They’ve got one of the nicest theatre programs in the state of Michigan, and it’s a nationally accredited program. It was wonderful. The school only had 2,700 students, so you got one-on-one attention. If you had the self-motivation, you could do whatever you wanted, and get as far as you wanted, while you there.
Q How did you get started as a professional in the industry?
A After Hope, I went to Purdue for a year and very quickly discovered that grad school was not for me. It takes a certain kind of person to go through a graduate program in theatre and subject yourself to graduate studies. [Laughs]. So, I went back to South Haven and was working at a little barn theatre when I decided to help a friend of mine who was trying to put together a community production of The Wizard of Oz. This was our first go at a really large production in a small town using all volunteers. We really wanted to let the town know it had created students who are interested in theatre and could pull it off, so we decided to rent some moving lights. This was back in 1994, and moving lights that you could rent, and were affordable, hadn’t been out that long.
I called different rental houses to try to figure out how to make this work because we really thought it would blow the town away. It was something they had never seen before. I ended up calling Fantasee Lighting (in Ypsilanti) and they were curious to know where I had seen moving lights before. I explained that I saw them on a show at Purdue. After our conversation, they asked me if I would be interested in working on them all the time. I agreed to do it on a part-time basis, so I was living in western Michigan half of the week and working in Ypsilanti the other half. I was traveling back and forth — I had a show in west Michigan, work in Ypsilanti, and TD’ing the little barn theatre. By the end of the summer, I decided that I might as well keep working at Fantasee. That was back in 1993 and I worked there until 1998.
Q What was your role at Fantasee?
A I was hired in as a technician/programmer. Very quickly, I started to become the technical guru. Before there was an IT guy, I was the IT guy. But more and more, I was in charge of shows. I was given a show and I’d have to design it, spec it out, load it, run it, and pull it out.
Q That sounds very different than your experience in college.
A Yes, it was very different. In college, you were honed to work on a single project for weeks on end. When you decided to do a show, you lived and breathed it for weeks. And the facility didn’t change: you had catwalks, you knew exactly how many lights you had, you knew how many lights were focused, and you even knew your entire gel inventory. In the professional world, 90 percent of the venues aren’t designed to do what you are about to do. There are no catwalks or even dimmers. If you’re lucky, you’ve got a 400-amp service and you’re responsible for everything else. So you’ve got to deal with all of this gear — dimmers, truss, cable and fixtures — and it’s all for a one night show. It took me a while to get over that. It was a huge learning curve and I’m certainly better for it.
Q What made you decide to start your own company, Spectacle Lighting Design?
A It just made sense. There was very little I had to learn to do it on my own. Basically, I saved money, started a business plan, and looked at the things I would do differently as a design firm instead of a rental house. The freedom of being an independent designer is that I’m not thinking about what kind of gear I have in my rental inventory when I’m designing a job; I’m thinking about what is right for the design. And I can get the gear from rental house A, B or C. That’s what I based my business plan around. Let’s face it, in our business, 90 percent of our clients come from word-of-mouth. If you’ve got a client that you’re working with, you want their experience to nothing less than excellent. I also think that having your own business and designing for yourself, rather than working for someone else or being sub-contracted, gives you the control and responsibility you need to make that experience excellent.
Q What types of shows do you specialize in?
A Generally, corporate clients. But that could be a wide variety of things. It could be anything from a hospital having a benefit dinner to working for the Detroit Red Wings organization. Some people might consider them their own entity or a sports organization, but they are a corporate client. The variety of shows one can do in the corporate world is vast.
Q And more recently?
A We still have the dancing logos, amazingly. But now, we light up the entire ice, we light up the audience and we’ve got video playing on the ice. We’ve used pyrotechnics and shooting flames. We’ve done still projections on the ice that have gone from endto- end. We’ve even used lasers. If there has been a gag, we’ve tried it.
The hard part of having a client for that long of a time is trying to make it look new. Luckily, they have a great producer and we work together to come up with fresh ideas. But, I do have to think outside of just lighting because I don’t want it to get boring. We have to approach it in different ways every year so it doesn’t become routine.
Q What are some of the nuances of lighting on the ice?
A First of all, it’s a huge surface — 200 feet by 85 feet — and it’s white. It takes light wonderfully but if you try to pull something off — like lighting the surface evenly — it’s hard. That surface of ice is magnified so much that if you don’t have a quality light, you’re going to get hot spots or shadows. Because the lights are so high up in the air, any sort of flaw is amplified.
Q In January, you were part of hockey legend Steve Yzerman’s retirement ceremony. What can you tell us about the production?
A JPI, the company that produces most of the Red Wing’s events, brought me in to design the lighting and for some creative services. The producer really wanted it to be a show for the people in the arena, and, even though television could pick up the feed and get a nice picture, the whole feel was supposed to be for everyone that was in the arena. Television would be looking in on our event. It was a more intimate feel and it wasn’t about flash and cool effects. It was about creating an environment where we could have heartfelt speeches and create emotions other than excitement.
The owners of the Red Wings, Mike and Marion Illitch, said they wanted the area where participants were, which was essentially between the blue lines, bathed in red. But they didn’t want the red light to be overwhelming. So we created a red light backwash, which lit the ice nicely and added depth. We came in with Martin MAC 2000 Performances with shapers for the front light. That really helped us balance the visibility lighting against the red wash that the owners always wanted to be there. Then, we lit the speakers with High End Systems x.Spots. For the red wash we used Robe Color Wash 1200 units. They were extremely punchy — there was a lot of light coming out of those units. It was a nice flat field and very red. The owners loved that a lot.
Q How has new technology helped you on a show like that?
A Well, I’ve invested in a Pathport system. It allows me to be much more efficient. For instance, before, if I wanted to have my lighting console in the house, halfway up for programming, I would have to run at least four DMX cables and a power cable. Now, I just drop a single Ethernet line and that’s it. It’s a huge time saver. Now that I’ve implemented it, I can program a show from center ice and get an entirely different perspective if I want to. It’s all about saving time.
Q How did that production of The Wizard of Oz turn out?
A For community theatre, I don’t think it’s been beat, yet. [Laughs].
