This month finds me programming a rather cool show. It’s an Idol-type tour in which four contestants do their best to imitate Freddie Mercury while playing live with a Queen cover band. The “Queen Extravaganza” is an actual professional touring show conceptualized by founding Queen members. The show itself is quite different from any others I have done, as designer Rob Sinclair has a unique game plan and a simple set of rules that we must follow for the entire performance.
I have never been a fan of this music, but I am a bit of a mercenary, as far as lighting goes. If you pay me, I will light any event, no matter how big, small, or palatable or offensive to my personal tastes. But by the time I finished programming this show, I found that I enjoyed listening to their stuff. Rob and I happen to agree on so many things (including lighting) that I felt I had found an English version of myself. While he dealt with the talent and his seemingly endless list of other projects, he left me to cue and come up with looks for all the songs on a first pass. He simply gave me the single color we would use for each song and a time period. But Rob had a strict bunch of rules to adhere to that made lighting this show unique from any other.
Chronological Progression
First of all, Queen always had huge light rigs. Hundreds of PAR cans was their style. But they had one rule they tried to adhere to. Only bring up one color at a time. They did not like looks with different colors. So if this were a “blue” song, the cues would all be blue. In the words of Queen drummer (and show producer) Roger Taylor, “My only regret was that, in our heyday, we couldn’t turn every light red when we wanted to.” Of course, now you can. So for each song, Rob would give me a color, and I would write cues. When I was done, he and I would play through the song and he would edit the looks to suit his taste. But there was one other stipulation to the show. It would run in chronological order. They had a ton of hits from the mid-1970s until Freddie died in 1991. But many of the lights and video elements we had were not invented then. So Rob had a vision. He would start the show using basic lighting fixtures that emulated the time period. As the show progressed, he would add different types of lighting fixtures into the mix.
Though we were playing theaters, Rob spec’d a sizable lighting package. He had two 15-foot-tall truss towers upstage. On each tower were eight PAR cans, half of them white, half with color scrollers. We had 20 Martin MAC Aura fixtures on the floor; 10 served as side light, 10 as rear floor lights, to emulate more PARs. These fixtures made the light beam resemble a PAR can quite closely. Rob also had an upstage ground row of 8-lite Moles and some set practicals. For a downstage truss, he chose eight MAC 700 wash fixtures that we kept in a band wash all night to serve as key lights. The first song was done all in white, with no front light. In the old days, when you played clubs, they would have a handful of PARs. Rarely was there adequate front light back then, so we were true to form. By the third song, we added in a couple of strobes from the tower to mimic the old black and white antique footage look so popular with Diversitronics strobes way back when.
Halfway through the first set, we started using the moving lights in the air, but we didn’t move them. Instead, we just set up looks where they lit band members or placed generic breakup patterns in them so they imitated the hard-edged lights of the 1970s — the Leko. All of our songs were one color. But by using different fixtures, the shades of each color would vary. So a “green” song may include three shades of green. This was actually quite necessary — if you light an entire stage and a backdrop the same color, it all goes rather flat-looking. So we needed to constantly turn different lights on and off to make up cool looks. We also determined that it was okay to start mixing white in with the solid colors, as they used to do with ACL PARs and truss spots in the late 1970s. The method to Sinclair’s scheme was definitely original and taxed my programming mind. As we went through the lighting programming on a second round, he would often reel in the reins and remind me that a particular light had not been invented just yet, and I would revert to the basics.
Ron Schilling was set to be the lighting director/crew chief for the tour. Upstaging supplied the gear and it performed in a flawless manner. Poor Ron thought he was just going to run a show pressing a simple go button. By the time Rob and I were done, he had another 19 faders full of bump buttons per song, making it a very manual show. Rob kept on offering him more money to operate the show as it got harder. Of course, that money came directly from the crew chief’s salary, as the lighting budget was maxed out.
Strobes and Sharpys
Rob came up with some cool ideas. One song was lit entirely by strobes. Another song was simply “dancing Sharpys.” With their pan and tilt speed, I was able to make effects on the grandMA that literally made them dance in various patterns per tempo change. After tiring of primary colors, Rob had me mix a new color on the lights. It was a greenish-brown hue that I had never used before. We did an entire ballad — “Bohemian Rhapsody” — in this new color palette, which we decided to call “Dog Vomit.” Rob explained that the song was basically three cues. We would have a soft piano look, an opera section and the heavy-metal bit. I tried that at first, but it just didn’t work with the live band. In the end, I handed him a cue list with 63 cues and a bunch of manual bumps and pushes. After listening to the song live, he agreed that it was the proper way to light it. But he did remark that he had designed entire shows with fewer cues than that one song.
After the first set, the lighting guys moved the truss towers to the side of the stage. On cue, the back scrim dropped to reveal three video walls separated by some upright trusses with more modern lights as well as more PARs for that big Queen PAR can look. The screens were fed old live Queen footage as well as custom clips Rob had made. Being a Catalyst guru, he utilized the media servers and all their gimmicks in ways I had never thought of. He employed a handful of cheap security cameras that mounted to drums as well as sticks that the singers could point at audience members’ faces for real-time playback.
We programmed for two weeks straight while Rob sat on his blue ball. He carries a two-foot diameter inflatable ball that he perched on the entire time. He was able to bounce to the music comfortably while working, though he often called on Ron to stick a plug in the rim for blowing it up. Unfortunately, the ball constantly picked up sticky substances from the floor that the director was required to clean off. What I thought would be a painful gig turned out to be one of the more pleasant programming experiences I have ever had.
