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Almost every show I light involves scripting cues. This is the process of breaking down a show’s events. If it’s a corporate production, most likely I will be handed many pages showing the schedule of rehearsals and performance times for the next week. If it’s a musical or theatrical play, the lighting department may get a full script with hundreds of hand-written notes detailing potential lighting cues. If it’s a rock show, we may get a set list with some discs of music you can expect the band to perform.
The best way to explain this process is to describe how I did things on R&B singer R. Kelly’s recent theatre tour. First I met with Chris Weathers, the artistic director for Mr. Kelly. He handed me four CDs with the complete sets of music we would play, as well as a DVD of “Trapped in the Closet”, a popular long form music video that Kelly had recently released. The show consisted of four separate 20-minute vignettes, as well as an ad-lib version of the first three chapters of this music video as a play. Chris and I listened to the songs together and I made notes of the lighting transitions and set moves that Chris had in mind. At the same time, he asked for my input on how to treat everything. After several hours we had several pages of notes for each set of music, and I was on to the next phase, figuring out when and how to use all my toys.
The opening of the show was the R. Kelly’s concept. He would appear in a suit made of LED lights in a completely black house. Then he played with different areas of the audience as they were lit with a series of cues. The crowd ate it up. On cue, he would throw his hands at the audience as I blinded them with moving white arc lights. He’d quick-change out of the suit and reappear upstage, silhouetted by a single beam of light. As soon as he took a step I had the spotlights pick him up and we were off and running.
|The artist wanted to slay the audience in the first 20 minutes, to pull out all the stops and blow them away fast. He told me that’s what they’d remember. His first set consisted of about 12 songs, the first 10 of which were high-energy dance numbers. I decided to use a cityscape backdrop for the first set of music. I had a custom sign made of lights that flew in on the fly rail and was revealed at the top of the show.
The entire proscenium of the stage was lined with hundreds of frosted marquee light bulbs. I had lights flashing and moving constantly for each number, but I made sure the audience never saw the same look twice. Between each song, Kelly had inserted sound effects, such as explosions or thunderclaps. These made a great time for lighting transitions. For instance, I set off the strobes to make a lightning effect for a split second while all my moving lights moved in black to refocus themselves for their next cue.
In between sets, the artist would change clothes. In other shows I’ve done, this time would be filled with a dance number or the band playing an instrumental piece. We didn’t want to go that route. So we played footage of the boss and his homies playing basketball. It was comical and gave the crowd a five-minute breather from dancing.
The second set consisted of lots of ballads and his sexy songs. I used the projectors and High End Systems Catalyst media server playing on the white backdrop the whole set. The media was all triggered from my lighting console. I use the Maxxyz console from Martin. It’s the simplest console for what I needed to do. I had a compilation disk of 20 of his music videos. The artist wanted to see parts of them played in certain songs. The only requirement was he didn’t want to see any frames where he’s singing the lyrics along with the song. This took a little time, but it was really no problem with the console I was using. The Maxxyz console can activate the movie files on a media server and view them one frame at a time. I built lighting cues that would jump from one frame to another one, skipping content I didn’t want to show, looping together different parts of the video.
The second set ended with “The Feeling on your Booty Opera.” This ballad ends with a dramatic segment where the tempo changes from R&B to a spoof on opera. I backlit the artist while he did an on-stage costume change. His dressers appeared in a red cloud of smoke and dressed him in a top hat, cape and mask as he assumed the character of an orchestra conductor. The lighting went from dramatic sweeping waves of light to a single spot, culminating with a blast of light and a blackout. The crowd did not expect this and was blown away by the theatrical effect.
The third set involved a mixture of songs and audience play. The audience knew every word he sang so Kelly used this and bantered back and forth with the crowd. Within a few shows, these banters became integrated into the show at the same time every night so I was able to light the a cappella parts he shared with the crowd. During this set, I used a lot of solid colors and gobo looks on the backdrop. The custom gobos in the Martin MAC 2Ks were hand picked for this purpose. The set ended with Rob singing while a lone dancer wound in before a silhouetted image of a large palm tree. At the end of the song, the singer lunged for the dancer as I hit black out and the curtains closed.
Two minutes later the curtain would open to reveal a single closet sitting downstage. For the next five minutes the crowd was virtually in a movie theater watching the first act of Trapped in the Closet on the big screen behind the prop. At the end of the first chapter, the artist would come out of the closet and ad-lib the parts of the other actors for ten minutes while pacing the stage. I kept the lighting minimal to concentrate on the artist’s acting ability. At the end, the artist bowed and ran out of the spotlight, while I faded the closet and closed the curtains.
The final set opened with dancing girls and Robert providing a few campy moves to popular songs. These final 20 minutes were one big dance number of his latest hits, complete with mirror balls, flying signs, paparazzi strobes and any other old lighting gags I could muster up.
All in all I had 600 lighting cues to hit in 100 minutes. They were all written out theater style in large cue lists and executed with single “Go” commands. Last night the artist came to me with a wonderful compliment. He said “Nook, thanks for your vision. I gave you a sentence…and you gave me back a paragraph.” And he doesn’t know I’m a writer too.
E-mail Nook at nschoenfeld@plsn.com.
