Established Vendor Hires Mark Fetto to Help Spearhead New Lighting Division
Last year at LDI, I ran into a couple of old friends walking the aisles, Mario Educate and Mark Fetto. It was nice to see an audio guy and a lighting dude walking the aisles together, but since they were both from Las Vegas I figured they were just hanging out and doing the grip and grin, as opposed to researching gear.
After a few minutes of small talk about the past, Mario, who is the president of OSA, looks me in the eye and says, “So what would you think if we hired this guy to run a new lighting division for us?” I replied in earnest that anyone who employed Mark Fetto would be adding a valuable asset to their team. Before I could ask why, Mario said, “Well that’s good, because we just hired him yesterday.”
Both of these fellows have been popular names to me since the 80’s. I’ve honestly never heard a negative word about either and always enjoyed working with both of them. I met Mario when he was mixing FOH for Loggins and Messina on a comeback tour, utilizing his own company’s audio gear on tour. Fetto has been around since the late 1970s and has worked as a lighting tech, then lighting designer for Obie’s and Vari-Lite. Along the way, he worked his way up, running the VL Las Vegas operations, looking after that company’s branch. He eventually found himself working as a sales manager for Stage Rigging. When I first met him in the 90’s, he was employed as a site coordinator on a gig.
Fetto is proud of the 14 years of work he did managing the day-to-day operations at Morpheus Lights and all his team accomplished. By the summer of 2019, though, Mark was contemplating his future and figured it was time to make a move. About the time he decided to head in another direction, Mario had concluded that OSA needed to expand their lighting division to be a full service department to augment their audio and video services. OSA wanted to go from dabbling in lighting to becoming a player with a state-of-the-art inventory. They wanted to be able to offer a one-stop shop, so to speak. It was perfect timing. Mark walked out of Morpheus and, two days later, Mario snagged him for a new position as VP of lighting.
On Stage Audio (OSA) started as an audio vendor back in 1985 in the Chicago area and has expanded over the years to include warehouses in Las Vegas and Nashville. They cover the gamut of show services ranging from corporate theater and special events, tradeshows and press events such as the auto shows, product launches, concerts and touring, sporting events to live TV broadcasting. OSA International, Inc. deals with live events, supplying complete technical systems for any size show. Over the years, the company branched out into all sorts of audio, lighting, and video installations — every kind imaginable. Now, as a one-stop shop, they are able to provide the On Stage Advantage.
If there is one thing OSA is known for, it’s providing quality gear. They utilize high-end equipment, including their thousands of speaker cabinets, consoles, LED displays, camera packages or staging. That is just one factor that tempted Fetto to come on board.
“Being in the business of live events for so long, I was thrilled at the prospect of starting a lighting division almost from the ground up and making the decisions to purchase the gear that would be on every designer’s wish list,” Fetto says. “Mario was very open with me and trusted me to make the right decisions and cut the best deals to help our company with a spanking new inventory.”
OSA is serious about impressing their customers by getting enough fixtures to “have critical mass with all of our fixture types,” Fetto adds. “By this, I mean we want 50 of each type of fixture that we see spec’d on most of our shows. LED fixtures were our main source of interest. I think the only arc-sourced lights we own are the Robe Mega Pointes, but those are a must have for many rock ‘n’ roll LDs. They can shoot down from high above with great brightness. We need to have the sources to illuminate big arena shows. But we do an awful lot of trade show gigs and corporate events. For those, we are more inclined to offer the designer the new Esprite fixtures, purchased from Robe as well.”
Fetto is well-versed in the differences between arena and ballroom lighting practices. While several types of fixtures can be used for both scenarios, a key to the success of the new lighting division would be to have lights that LDs wouldn’t mind accepting as a substitute for what may have been spec’d on the original light plot. He picked up GLP JDC1 strobes as well as their X4 Bar 20 moving battens. “There are plenty of options out there, but if you carry the best of each type of fixture, you are covered,” Fetto says. “Nobody is going to say ‘I can’t stand that fixture’ with any light we own. We personally tested out a lot of different fixtures. We know we will get requests for Claypaky B-Eyes, so we bought a bunch of the mini sized ones to be able to use them in ballrooms and smaller venues as well. We loved what we saw with the Ayrton Diablos as well and realized they would make a great fixture for our ballroom productions.”
OSA didn’t stop there. They purchased grandMA3 consoles for operation. They required the best strip lights they could find and chose Chroma-Q Color Force II units to fill that need. And as for all the infrastructure necessary to make the lights function, Fetto notes that “Luminex network devices were what we chose, and Lex was able to supply us with all the cable and power distribution. Mario spent what was necessary to do it the correct way, right from the get-go.”
With three different locations, we asked Fetto what the plans are for full service through all their shops. “Step 1 is what we call ‘Critical Mass’ — collecting everything we need to do any sized show and cover multiple events at the same time. So we are planning to keep the lighting gear in Vegas to start. We have been transferring large amounts of gear between shops as necessary for shows and we will just continue that with lighting gear when necessary. The second phase will be concentrating on our 65,000-square foot Nashville warehouse and stocking that.”
To run the shop, Fetto connected with Warwick Burton, a longtime lighting director, crew chief and popular lighting veteran. Warwick had relocated to Vegas several years ago and was looking for a house position that would enable him to manage a shop and build shows, as opposed to always traveling to various locations for work. Seems like a good mutual relationship could work out. He was hired as shop manager right before the lockdown.
OSA is not a stranger to lights by any means, they just never stocked a full inventory. They employ a head of lighting design/production manager. “OSA has employed Duke Carlisle for the last three years as our resident staff LD. That stands for designer as well as lighting dude, since he looks after the lighting aspects on our jobs and is one heckuva production coordinator,” adds Fetto, as he mentions some history as well. “2020 actually marks our 35th year as an audio company. Seven years ago, the company purchased Media Solutions and made a very big push into the video side of our industry. So while we have been doing lighting for years, we usually sub-rented whatever lighting gear we needed to augment our own.
“There is literally nothing we can’t do in the corporate world. We have been looking after all the graphic capabilities involved in an event as well as providing a certain amount of scenic,” Fetto continues. “We even provide small stages for corporate events. The NBA is a big client of ours — we have put together big parade dollies for their events recently.”
In conclusion, Fetto points out that Mario is 100-percent involved in every move the company makes. “He has his own clients, and by that, I mean he draws up his own Vectorworks drawings and makes the presentations personally. Because of this, he understands every piece of the pie. He’s not going to skimp on any of the ingredients.”
