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Subtlety doesn’t exist in Las Vegas. Ask a local and they’ll probably tell you it’s a new Starbucks drink. But don’t tell this to the designers and crew of Phantom—The Las Vegas Spectacular at the Venetian Hotel-Resort-Casino. Despite a title that includes the word “Spectacular,” despite a budget that ballooned from $25 million to $40 million, despite recreating the interior of the Paris Opera House from 1894, LD Andy Bridge still insists the strongest design element of the show is subtlety.
“It’s meant to be the Paris opera house in 1894—gaslight. So we can’t over-light it and make it look modern. That’s the trick,” Bridge says. He backs this up when he says “It shouldn’t be too overtly spectacular and bright and brassy. Darkness is our friend. We don’t want to over-light things just because it’s Vegas. So we’re keeping that chiaroscuro feel still. But we can expand it out into the auditorium.” And there it is; the reason for ”Spectacular.”. Because the theatre really is meant to be the Paris Opera House, circa 1894, and the show really has expanded into the auditorium. The façade of the Paris Opera house is from the center of the stage deck, and proscenium that extends around the sides of the theatre and merges with three levels of box seats filled with mannequin audience members in period dress; these box levels wrap around the auditorium which will be dwarfed under a 90-foot diameter dome housing the famous chandelier, which also has a few new surprises. If, that is, all this can be built in time.
The day before the first technical rehearsal Bridge surveyed the controlled chaos. “I just counted and there are 72 people in the auditorium building at the moment construction people. There are two worlds going on. Upstage is sort of familiar theatrical country, but from the orchestra out is construction land. From here upwards you can almost say you’ve got a show.” He turns, gestures at the construction crew and laughs. “But they’re very late at it.”
Rick Baxter, the production electrician for Phantom is similarly sanguine. “They’re still building the theatre. Day by day they’re still ringing out circuits in the dimmer room. As they ring stuff out, I get to go plug it in.” Baxter has been working on the Phantom install for over a year, overlapping with his work on the Hairspray install at the Luxor. Currently he’s in the side boxes of the theatre, where the mannequins will eventually go, pointing at the steel conduit that needs to get anchored and explaining how the show’s circuitry just keeps getting bigger.
“January 2005, when they were laying out circuitry for this theatre, I was working on Chitty- Chitty Bang-Bang back in New York. Fisher Dachs, who is doing the layout for all the electrical, came to us and wanted to know how many circuits to put everywhere. We had no drawing, no plot for this show. So we told them what would be best for a Broadway show. We knew nothing about 226 units that would have to go here to light the mannequins—so we scrambled to find circuits to light the mannequins. We actually robbed circuits that had been designated for house lighting. We just didn’t have enough circuits here to deal with all the stuff they added.”
And this was after the animatronics idea had been tossed. The mannequins were originally designed to react to singular events in the show, like the famous chandelier crash. Perhaps in a move towards subtlety, this plan was scrapped.
“Nobody down there is going to be looking up here when the chandelier crashes,” Rick says, then points up into the dome at the four levels of steel rings that are the chandelier mock-up. “They’ll be looking at that.”
And for good reason. The 90-foot dome in the center of the ceiling is supported by 16 ribs. Each of these ribs is a runway for a wheel guiding a wire that is attached at one end to a winch in the catwalk above the dome and at the other end to a point on a chandelier section. With four points on every section, this means that each of the four sections of the chandelier is movable, and can be guided to any location in the auditorium. “Rather than one lump going up, it sort of has balletic choreographic life of its own.” Bridge elaborates. And this balletic life is guided by Fisher Technical Services, Inc., who’s been coming in at midnight to practice the flying—the only time they can get the space because of the intense construction schedule. And they’re not the only ones working on it. Howard Eaton Lighting from London has designed all of the electronics and fixtures for the chandeliers, a mixture of LED’s and globe fixtures, run wirelessly using a City Theatrical wireless dimming system. The four sections of chandeliers use 104 DMX512 control channels.
It’s a good thing they’re using wireless controls. Beyond mobility’s sake, there’s almost too much weight on each of the chandelier sections. Each section was limited to 500 pounds, and the structures themselves came in at 250 pounds each, leaving only 250 pounds for everything else that had to be loaded onto each section. Then they discovered they would need an additional 90 pounds of batteries to power everything, which didn’t leave a lot of extra weight for the instruments. Howard Eaton went back to the drawing board and designed more LEDs and cut the number of globes. A further assist came from Rick Lamp at PRG (provider of the rental lighting package), who gave Baxter the name of a company called Valence that makes and distributes large lithium-ion batteries.
“Because they want the chandelier to stay lit for about a half an hour every show and there’s two shows back to back in Vegas, that means one hour of burn time on the battery,” Baxter says. “We found these 40 amp-hour batteries that Valence distributes that weigh 15 pounds. They’re just little light-weight things. There’s a three month lead time on those, too, because they had to get shipped from China. Valence actually got them to us in about two months. They were great. They were very helpful. They understood our deadline time.”
A day before tech everyone understands deadline pressure. The dome, one of the major set pieces of the show, even though it’s in the audience, has been through multiple design iterations, and is still not quite ready. In September of 2005 the original lighting design called for “moving lights all over the place, back lighting everywhere,” says Baxter. But all that would have required 600 amps three-phase just to turn it on. Understandably, the hotel pulled the plug on that idea. The next reincarnation included a lot of LEDs, but the price tag on that was about $400,000 and the producers balked at that. So in the end the dome ended up being lit with LEDs and fiber-optic rope light using Fiber-Star illuminators. The Color Kinetic fixtures are powered using DMXcontrollable City Theatrical PDS 750TR power supplies.
As Bridge says, “We’ve got a ton of stuff up there in the dome. We just won’t have it for or 3 weeks!” He laughs before going into detail about why the dome is so important to get right.
“We could light it quite boldly and brassily, but it would look wrong, so I’ve got a ton of kit that’s doing candle flicker effects and just very subtle stuff like that. So when we’re doing an opera on the stage the light hopefully enervates from the stage, so it’s not just flatlit, it’s got sort of dimensions.”
On the other hand, he knows how to make it pop when necessary. More equipment going into the dome includes three Studio Due Space Flowers from their distributor in Canada, (also used in the short-lived We Will Rock You) and a Lightning Strikes strobe unit they’re going to hang off a beam on the center line, along with its 450-pound battery. And there’s still more light to come.
“We have a huge lightning bolt thing made out of neon, an entire drop. Neon from top to bottom,” says Baxter. “Adirondack Scenic made it for us and we’re going to do a big lightning flash.” He laughs a little. “We haven’t even turned it on yet. We didn’t have power to turn it on yet. Now we have power, but we haven’t had a chance to test it yet.”
So has all this flash completely obliterated any ideas of subtlety yet? Not quite.
“It’s striations,” Bridge says, referring to alternating bands of darkness and light. “Maria Bjornson, the set designer who unfortunately passed away, always wanted striation and darkness as part of our friends. Striations in the lake, candles being held to faces. All that. So we’ve emphasized that a bit more.
“A lot of the proscenium—which we had in the original production, and the expansion of it we’ve done here—as an overall overview picture, it’s all glorious and ornate and gold. But if you look at it closely there’s lust, there’s rape, there’s sex on that proscenium. What I can do with the new moving light system is, during the lair scenes, where Phantom’s underneath the lake, we can emphasize some of the grotesqueness of that. So I can just bring in the guy’s horns. So we can emphasize, will Phantom kill Christine, or will he rape her? Or what? There’s a sexual predator around; it’s not really Disney. And the great thing is because it’s slightly wider and higher, we can play with darkness a lot more. Beams of light and just cross-light in one direction. So you can make it look a lot more mystical.”
And will mystical powers be necessary to get it all finished in time? Not according to Bridge.
“I’m not worried,” he says. “The good thing is that we’ve done Phantom for over 20 years. So the general picture and the emotions you can get from the general pictures is done. We don’t have to make up lots of new cues. We just have to get the original ones working better, bigger.”
Better, bigger—that doesn’t sound so subtle, but it does sound an awful lot like Vegas.
