Lighting designer Bob Barnhart has 30 years of experience in the entertainment industry under his belt, including 17 years as an LD working on the Academy Awards, the Grammy Awards, the Miss USA Pageant and with performances by musical artists ranging from Barbara Streisand to The Rolling Stones. He also has a theatre background, worked for Flying By Foy for seven years. But no matter how much experience one has accumulated, there is always something new to contend with, and in the case of the well-received Andrea Bocelli concert in Central Park this past September — captured on the new live DVD, Concerto: One Night In Central Park — the unknown factor was Mother Nature herself. “It’s the wind that really did us in,” Barnhart tells PLSN when discussing his design work on the event. The show still looked great, despite the rain during the first half of the show that had umbrellas popping up everywhere.
The evening was a star-studded affair, mixing up operatic favorites with pop standards and even some Italian film music. There were esteemed singers on the classical side, including bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, soprano Ana Maria Martinez and soprano Pretty Yende, along with jazz and pop performers such as trumpeter Chris Botti, diva Celine Dion and the inimitable Tony Bennett. Pianist and frequent Bocelli collaborator David Foster also provided accompaniment during part of the second act. The wet but faithful crowd was on its feet by the end.
Challenging Logistics
Putting together a large concert in a public space — in this case, for 60,000 fans — can be a spectacular event. But time is usually of the essence, and for this free event the production team only had a few days to get everything ready. “The biggest challenge of working in most of Central Park, particularly the Great Lawn in Central Park, is the Central Park Conservancy gives you a very small window to launch a show,” explains Barnhart. “So as soon as that door opens, it’s 24 hours a day with the different departments, but your delivery times are only from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. You can’t get any gear delivered unless it’s in the middle of the night, but you’ve got crews working 24 hours a day. And, of course you can’t be the only guy delivering stuff, because every department is trying to cram into that window as well. Working on the Great Lawn is a logistics challenge more than anything.”
The production team had seven days over the course of a month to put the concert together. The primary concern was what the roof would look like. Barnhart and his team sat down with the production design team of Bruce Rodgers, Mitch Owgang and David Horn to come up with a roof, because it would be the set and the centerpiece. “We wanted to get rid of that rock ‘n’ roll flat roof and square stage, so we found that dome roof,” says Barnhart, “and Bruce continued that shell all the way down to the ground with scenic elements that looked like the roof continued as a band shell or a bowl. That was the first big step in designing the lighting and scenic, because that set the tone for what that audience was going to be looking at all night. It didn’t necessarily look like a tour had come in. It looked like it fit on the lawn of Central Park, which I thought was essential to the overall feel.”
This is where the design process started, and there was some down time while Rodgers set out to find the roof and determine feasibility, affordability and the ability to load it in a small window of time. Barnhart recalls that the roof had to be up in two days, then on-site they had three days to put the rig in, get it working, focus it and finish it up. There was no hard scenery to actually light, except for the orchestra.
Two Days of Pre-Viz
“We actually went in and did a pre-viz studio for two days and basically built cue blocks with color palettes,” says the veteran LD. “We didn’t worry so much about focus as we did if there was a set, so once we got onsite, our programmer/ lighting director Harry Sangmeister had the ability to get us focused in and then have a show. The night after we got the rig working was the camera looksie and then dress rehearsal, and the next day was the show. Everything to do with a Central Park-type show is logistics — coming in prepared as you possibly can and getting ready for change.”
To finish out the overall look of the dome roof, the production crew installed a fiber optic star curtain all the way around the inside. They went with fiber-optic for color palette, and it became a very low-density site. Barnhart’s design team was able to influence an overall color palette (since there really was little scenery to light), “but in a very subtle way, which I think worked out very well.” The only scenic deviations in the show came during a Fellini video montage and the appearance of an “I Love NY” sign during Bennett’s appearance for the eternal favorite, “New York, New York.”
When it came to lighting the audience, Barnhart chose PARs and Leikos. “I used regular 1K PARs for the most part, just because the 1K and the rectangular lensing that comes out of a standard PAR for a longer throw I find easier to stack on the focus on the audience and not overlap,” he says. “I usually use Leikos for what I refer to as the ‘Hero Audience,’ or the first 40 rows, where you’re going to get your close-up work, mainly because, on the wide shot towards the stage, I don’t have as much flare out, and it contains light better. That was the conventional gear doing the bulk of the audience lighting because it’s inexpensive, and there’s no reason to waste money. I’d rather put the money on the stage.”
On the main stage, Barnhart mostly used the 3000 series from Vari-Lite, specifically 3500W spots with shutters “for certain control to get around the orchestra” and 3500W washes for backlight and to key light the choir. Then he used a series of Bad Boys for the primary backlight for Bocelli and the guests, “so I got a heavier backlight beam that stood out amongst everything else — that gave you more control. I also used [PRG] Bad Boys on the floor for some good dynamic beamage right behind the choir.”
Off the stage, the LD used 7K Xenons from Arc Light — behind the stage “for good beamage and in the back of the audience, then scattered around the perimeter as well. Just to try to help build the venue, if you will, at night, so you got a sense of the space we were in. And for lighting the trees as well, but just trying to give that sense of what the theater really was.”
Followspot Woes
Barnhart only had two spot towers available to him, and they could only go in one place based on the Conservancy rules of Central Park, “which is in the first two ball fields at about second base, which is not anywhere a television lighting designer wants to put a followspot, but we don’t get the choice.” The distance between Bocelli and the follow spots was 240 feet. They could only go up 30 feet, and the stage was 10 feet high.
“So you put a six-foot tall person on a 10-foot-high stage and go back up 30 feet with your highest followspot, and you realize your angle is just a disaster,” notes Barnhart. “It’s just too flat, you’re going to get under his chin, and it’s off to the side and not centered on him. You are coming in with two followspots, one from the left and one from the right, and causing nothing but shadows. That is the least appealing thing about working there.”
Then Mother Nature made things trickier on the day of the actual performance, generating 30 mph wind gusts, preventing the lighting team from raising the FOH spot baskets. They stayed on the ground, stacked in three, with the highest one stacked above the other two, which was technically grounded, resting at about 15 feet.
“The first followspot was behind the people, so our bottom followspots were rendered useless,” reveals Barnhart. “We didn’t put the operator in the basket because we couldn’t even see the stage. They were literally lower than the stage. Unfortunately, that’s just one of the things you have to deal with at an outside show, and you have to be prepared for that from a safety standpoint. We had a stage wash that was mounted to the top of the towers, for emergency backup in case there was anything that rendered the followspots unable to even get into their baskets. But you don’t want to use it if you don’t need to, because it will literally wash the whole stage, so we went with the low followspot.”
Beam Challenges
While Barnhart would have preferred “extremely bad humidity” because it would have shown off all the beams of light, he accepted the rain “just because it showed off all the bigger beams around the park itself. Halfway through the show the rain kind of stopped, and the wind came in and pushed any atmosphere that was there, so then we lost everything. But we had hazers on the stage, so we were able to maintain a look within the stage and give it some dynamics. Bocelli’s music wants that beautiful, soft look with a dynamic punch at times.”
Barnhart mostly works on live specials like this Bocelli show, and the biggest challenge is to balance the look so that the cameras “see everything the way the production perceives it live.” He gives props to his lighting directors Matt Firestone, Ted Wells and Harry Sangmeister, without whom he says shows of this size “absolutely wouldn’t happen.”
In the end, nothing goes exactly as planned, and Barnhart learned from the experience. “I think to do another concert in the exact same situation, I would have an additional series of backup key lights from the front of house towers to give me more options,” remarks Barnhart. “I felt a little handcuffed in what happened as far as the spot. It’s by no fault of anybody. Everybody was being safe and properly doing their jobs. I have no arguments there, but when it came down to options, at the last minute, I might’ve been willing to risk a piece of high technology exposed to the elements in the chance that it could survive, but to use it as a good spot fixture. I had a backup, but I would do an additional backup that was even more delicate and precise.”
