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Last winter, I got a call from a Chicago friend asking if I would be interested in designing the lighting and a set for a theatre tour. The artist is R. Kelly, a popular R&B singer, and he wanted to do something different. Robert (the artist’s real name) was used to playing arenas, but this time he wanted an intimate show in a theatre environment, complete with set changes and different themes for five sets of music.
I was intrigued by the creative process that would accompany the project, so I agreed to take it on. Chris Weathers is Robert’s artistic director, and he is in constant communication with the artist. He relayed ideas from Robert to me in early January, and I took those ideas and drew up artistic renderings. These renderings are extremely important for two reasons; one, to show the artist whether or not we could make his vision a reality in a theatre-sized venue, and two, to see if all his set/video/lighting ideas fit into a budget and still make money.
Robert had some straightforward concepts about what he wanted to see. They were cool, but financial considerations as well as the size of the stage made some of them impossible to implement. But rather than tell an artist you can’t do what they want, the best approach is to have a substitute plan ready. I took his ideas, added mine and Chris’ and started drawing.
I made some pictures of a stage set with multiple backdrops. I inserted various riser setups for the band, and then drew a simple lighting rig. Thinking in a theatre mode as opposed to rock ‘n’ roll mode, I inserted three straight lighting trusses and a rag truss with five traveler tracks built into it. I designed borders and legs that would mask the entire stage in medium blue velour soft goods. These 22-feet-tall by 6-feet-wide legs were hung in layers to give a forced perspective of the stage. The downstage legs were 50 feet apart, the mid truss legs were hung 46 feet apart, etc. I placed a single PAR under each leg to up light them for a simple theatrical effect. I turned the stage lights on in the drawings and made some tasty renderings.
I then met with Robert and Chris to go over all the other ideas we all had.
Robert wanted some large custombuilt set pieces. These were all good, except for two things. First, we could not fit these things on stage along with a 10-piece band on many of the theatre stages in America. Second, rehearsals were going to start in six weeks, and we still needed a production manager to figure out logistics on all these ideas we had. I figured we’d save some of these ideas for the summer arena tour where space is no problem and we could come up with another idea for the current tour later in the week. So we concentrated on the lights for a while.
The name of the show is called the Light It Up Tour. Robert had an idea for an opening gag: The show would start with just him up on stage in a dark theatre with no lights except the LEDs that were sewn into his suit. The idea was to work the audience into a frenzy prior to the start of the music. My only suggestion was that if we were going to have him appear in a lit suit, I wanted him to appear 10 feet off the ground, as if he were floating above the crowd. So I designed a “stairway to nowhere” set piece. It was a simple set of 10 stairs that lived in the middle of the stage. We would figure out more uses for the stairs during rehearsals.
After the opening gag idea, Robert looked for Chris and me to come up with something unique. I decided I would need some light gimmick to match the name of the show, so I drew in 300 white golf ball marquee lights and framed the entire proscenium of the theatre, as well as the stage and thrust. When I showed Robert, he grinned. He felt it was like forcing people to watch a giant TV, and he was in the middle. Needless to say, I’ve come up with about 50 different chases for these lights, but they fill another great void as well. They bathe the audience with soft white light. I also designed a custom “marquee-style” sign for the tour that would fly in and out at opportune times.
At this point, Chris Gratton was hired as production manager. He grabbed the bull by the horns and started everything rolling fast. Hiring a seasoned pro like Gratton allowed us to concentrate on the show flow, while he tackled logistics and crew hiring. He hired L.A.-based All Access to fabricate the set pieces and rags I drew up. They built the sign with the same bulbs with which I lined the stage. They did a fantastic job in a short amount of time.
Robert also wanted a photorealistic backdrop made up of an actual Chicago cityscape. Gratton found a photo that the artist approved, but we needed to replicate it on a 40-foot-wide by 20-foot-tall drop cloth. Any time I had seen this before, it was printed onto vinyl material and was tough to light due to the glare of the material. We needed something different, that we could light to look sexy. He hired Sew What?, a soft goods manufacturer from L.A., to sort this out. They managed to replicate the picture by digitally printing it onto the fabric. The end result was flawless.
Now we had three people to make decisions. Gratton and Weathers would come to me for drawings and dimension specs for stuff like band risers and Rob’s latest set ideas. So then, we were back to the same set problem. Weathers did not want to go to the artist and tell him we couldn’t do what he wanted unless we had a backup plan. So I suggested we take the money we had allotted to build one set piece and give it to Nocturne Video for two 10K Sanyo projectors and a media server. This way, I could project images of a chandelier on a white cyclorama curtain and not have to rig a big chandelier set piece for one two-minute song. I could also project images of set pieces Rob wanted to use. Of course, we knew that if we added projection, they would want to use it. On the first day of rehearsals, Robert handed us a list of songs on which he wanted to see video content.
Editing footage and finding appropriate stuff that the artist would like is not that hard, but it is time-consuming. And we had no budget to hire a video director. I had planned on programming all the light cues myself, but the video work threw a wrench into the works. I could do the extra video work, but only if my lighting crew chief, Jonny Tosarello, helped with the programming.
I spent hours editing and adding video content to a High End Systems Catalyst media server while instructing Jonny what I wanted to see in the next lighting look. He bailed me out with some late hours at the console. The only way he could do this was because all of the Upstaging Lighting gear we were using was in perfect operating condition, and the lighting crew was made up of team players. With nothing to fix, it gave him time to bail me out.
E-mail Nook at nschoenfeld@plsn.com.
