Pre-Broadway productions are as high tech as their Broadway counterparts, with projections and LED walls helping to expand the scope of imagery in a cinematic way. For Dirty Dancing: the Original Story on Stage, which has played around the world and recently ended its pre-Broadway run in Chicago, such technology helped to recreate the film onstage. “It’s not really a musical and not really a play,” video and projection designer Jon Driscoll says of the show. “A lot of people find it hard to understand what it is. It’s very faithful to the film. It’s a hybrid in a way.” That hybrid utilizes an LED screen on stage, a projection wall at the back and projections on the floor. Two lighting consoles are being employed — an ETC Eos for lighting and a Flying Pig Systems Wholehog III to control video — along with a High End Systems DL.3 moving yoke projector.
The LED wall is split into four sections, and the two center sections are able to hinge back and slide off to allow actors to come onstage, which is essential to the show. There are over 100 scenes in the fast-moving production, making it like a movie on stage.
“It’s a continuous backdrop for the whole thing, and it allows very fast movement from scene to scene,” explains Driscoll of the LED wall. “You can reset a location very quickly. We used it quite a few times for special effect, a lot of moving stuff. It goes between effects sequences and background sequences, so it will morph from one to another. At certain moments, it tells a story on its own.”
Setting the Scene
When it came to finding the right LED wall for the U.S. touring production of Dirty Dancing, Driscoll went with P10 LED panels from Lighthouse Technologies. The whole display is approximately 8 feet high by 20 feet wide and made up of 50 Lighthouse 10mm panels. And the wall is not used merely for projecting background images.
“The LED wall is the backdrop of the show and one of the prime pieces of scenery,” says Driscoll. “It projects realistic images of settings, video montages and live video feedback of the actors during the show.” The wall shows video material related to the narrative, including the trip from Manhattan to the mountain resort where the story mainly occurs. The screens provide scenic backdrops like the lake, and there are live video feeds of the actors during key moments in the show, including a tight shot of Baby when Johnny lifts her up during the song “The Time of My Life.”
“The LED walls are on a motorized track,” says Driscoll. “The far stage left and far stage right walls are permanent while the stage right and stage left center panels pivot at the upstage-onstage corner and then move straight off to clear the permanent wall. The LED does run while the walls are moving.”
Video Triple Play
A key sequence created using the LED wall was called “log, lake and field,” which Driscoll says “is the bit in the film when she [Baby] learns to dance properly with Johnny Castle. They go out in the country and he teaches her balance on the log, which then develops into something called ‘the lake,’ where they practice the lift but do it in water so they don’t hurt themselves. Then between the log and the lake is ‘the field,’ which is a combination of technologies because we also use a lot of projection as well. You’ve got three things going on at the same time — LED screen at the back, projection on the floor and projection on the gauze at the front — so you’ve got a lot of layers of video.”
One prime example of the show’s technology synergy are the lake and field sequences, where it looks like the actors are immersed in water or surrounded by tall grass.
Sometimes the LED wall mirrors what is on the back projection wall. “The projection is used less often,” says Driscoll. “That wall is on the entire evening and there’s barely a moment when that’s in blackout, but there are certain sequences, like the one with the water, where we use a scrim. So the scrim comes in and we start telling a story at the very front of the stage. There are other sequences where it’s just the LED. There is a sequence with a car journey and the LED shows a scene with a road on it.”
Melding Technologies
An outdoor party sequence in the show features tall trees being shown on both the LED and the back wall. Driscoll says that it is a real complication and adds that in order for it all to go seamlessly together, he put in an additional element. “Because there’s a very big cyclorama, I designed a lot of custom gobos for Vari-Lites. I worked with the lighting designer so they all looked part of one thing. I designed this series of cloud gobos and tree gobos, a whole catalog of stuff for bright arc source Vari-Lites. The whole idea of this stage set was that we wanted it to come together with the light, video and projections.”
LED technology has already become popular because of its resolution and brightness and the fact that ambient light levels do not have to be lowered in a theatre so much as for projection. Joe Lapchick, senior sales manager — eastern U.S. region for Lighthouse Technologies, credits the quick set-up, fast start-up time and processing depth as the keys to landing the LED walls in the Dirty Dancing gig. The company’s P10 panels are an indoor product with a brightness level of 2000 nits and a single panel is 25.2” wide by 18.9” high, weighing less than 20 pounds each. That makes them easier to rig in older theatres, especially should Dirty Dancing tour.
“One of the characteristics and advantages to our product is that you can get the brightness down so low it doesn’t compromise the color, which makes the product very good for theatrical use,” explains Lapchick. “We've done numerous indoor shows with the same product.”
Quiet Light
The P10 panels’ horizontal and vertical viewing angles are both at 140 degrees at 50 percent brightness. The contrast ratio is 1,000:1 and pixel density is 10,000 per square meter with a 4 mm pixel pitch. “For this show they're using a 10 mm SMB 3-in-1 chip Cree LED,” says Lapchick. “Because we’re using 14-bit processing depth we’re able to get 4.4 trillion colors onto the panels. A lot of companies use different processing depths. Some people use 16, most companies use 10 or 12, but we found that 14 is the right one.”
Another advantage to the P10 panels is the fact that they are quiet. Lapchick says that they have a small power supply inside for fans to cool, hence the noise reduction that would be a problem for the sound designer and live mixing engineer. “They run really quietly, and all the noise will come out the back, not the front,” he says. “The noise level is so low you can't hear the fans running on the panels. The more panels you have, obviously the more fans you have and the more power supplies you have to cool, so each one will create more and more noise, whereas ours is super quiet.”
“The Lighthouse screens are reliable and quiet,” concurs Driscoll. “In my experience, they are a good choice for touring because they are rugged, which is important because my reputation is built on my ability to put on a technically flawless show every night.”
