Celtic Woman sings their way into the Big Time.
You say you’ve never heard of Celtic Woman? You may not have, but millions of PBS viewers and concertgoers certainly are in on the secret, although it may not be one for much longer. Having notched three successful albums on the Billboard charts (including a recent Top 10 entry) with no MTV presence, the Irish folk/ pop project offering both covers and originals has beguiled audiences with a quartet of pretty voices, a vigorous violinist, pulse-racing percussion and a smooth mixture of energetic and ethereal moments. Currently finishing up a 100-plus show tour, Celtic Woman is becoming one of the biggest (yet quietest) pop sensations around. “It’s wild,” declares lighting designer Tom Kenny. “It’s one of those phenomenon like Riverdance that goes under the radar, then all of a sudden, becomes huge.”
Kenny knows of what he speaks. The man works MTV Awards shows around the world and has also designed for The Who and David Bowie. He was referred to the Celtic Woman tour when they wanted a redesign because he knew the music — he’s worked for Enya, Clannad and U2, who are all covered in the show. It also helped that he’s from Ireland and got the stamp of approval from many top-notch people in his homeland. He gladly accepted the gig and began collaborating with the tour’s lighting director and programmer Travis Shirley in Tampa, Fla., at the beginning of the year.
“When I’m programming, I get very involved, and it’s just very intense really,” notes Kenny, who likes to research the performers and the music he is designing for. “I just get into the grain of something, and for Celtic Woman, because it’s such a show show from the minute the house lights go down to the last number, I just felt that it was something that I could really spend some time at. I had an absolutely fabulous programmer, Travis Shirley, who helped me out immensely. The great thing for me is that he’d worked on the show previously, so he knew the mechanics of the thing. At the same time, they had never worked with me, and they were very open to what I could bring to the show.”
“We were programming for about five days of rehearsal, just programming in the evening,” recalls Shirley. “I was rushed to program this whole thing. That’s why I’m still programming it, because I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to really program the show. We’ve got some information in the desk and cues built into the desk, but I didn’t have enough time to really clean it up the way I wanted to.” Thus, on tour he has been fine-tuning the show and evolving its look.
“Travis has done a fantastic job,” remarks Kenny. “I inherited him, and sometimes when you inherit somebody they try to hold on to the old show, but he was very open to working with me and did a very, very good job. I’ve worked with some of the best programmers in the world, and he easily fits into that genre with his speed and style. He really wanted to keep the whole standard of it going. He’s one of those up-and-coming stars.”
Singing Green
Cool colors, specifically greens and blues, dominate the Celtic Woman show, which features four main female singers, a lively violinist, musical director/pianist David Downes, three multi-instrumentalists on stage left, two percussionists and eight choir members, who move around the most on stage. “It just seems that a lot of the songs are mystical and myth-based about Irish history, and a lot of them are very ancient songs, so I just felt the blues and greens,” says Kenny. “There is also some very uplifting stuff that David Downes wrote, so that’s why I brought in the warmer colors there. The colors were not hard for me to choose because they came to me automatically. They had decided to come up with a new set, which was very different from the last set. On the last tour they had a projection screen, and they were finding it hard to get away from that. We just decided to get rid of it, so having a very easily lit, light-friendly set was great for me. It was very easy to light the show.”
Like Kenny, Shirley is experienced in working mostly with rock bands, having recently toured with Disturbed, worked with pop/opera group Amici Forever, and also having programmed for the likes of Cold, Van Halen and R.E.M. For him, it has been quite a change going from gigs with highly energetic and semichaotic lighting patterns to a show where each song has one look that defines that particular moment in the show; from concerts with changing set lists and a little improvisation to ones with an unwavering set list and audio run on time code from start to finish.
“When you’re in a situation like this there are not too many dynamics,” notes Shirley. “There are moving lights, but in this show you’re limited in the amount of movement you can have. The set is huge. It’s a plain white, gray scale set. Each song is really fresh because you’re transforming the set via color for each particular song. That’s why I love the set being the color and texture that it is because it takes color so, so well.”
Because so many of the Celtic Woman performers are stationary, Kenny created a mood for every song. “On some songs I have just one look up and just a little twinkle in some of lights, and that works,” the designer notes. “You sit there and fall into a trance with the show. Shows that work on the stage are ones that when you get into the theatre, you forget about everything else. By the end of the show you’ve gone through a story or a journey. That’s what I felt with Celtic Woman. There’s a huge cross-section of people that go and see it. I think the show has come at a time in everyone’s lives, and a time in the world, when people need to escape a bit, so it works that way. I think the bonus of having those beautiful girls’ voices just helps. I’ve seen it five or six times now, and people just walk away happy. People go see it again. Everybody involved is so passionate about it, and that comes out in the show.”
Celtic Woman uses only 50 moving lights. “We got a great package from Creative in upstate New York,” reports Kenny. “My dominant light is the Mac 2K Profile, and that’s basically it. There are not that many lights up there. If you compare it to another type of show that’s out there, it’s half of what they would normally have, but they had budget concerns and wanted to keep a very tight ship. A majority of the people that work for Celtic Woman come from Riverdance, so they’re used to that theatre-based type of tour. I was given that brief, and I’m a very minimal lighting designer anyway. With any band or show I work with, I try to use lights as much as I can.”
The lighting rig includes 14 Mac 2K Washes, 12 Mac 2K Profiles, eight Mac 2K Performances, 16 Studio Beam PCs, four Mac 250 Entours, four Color Pros for spots, and one truss spot. “The Mac 2K is the workhorse in this show,” says Kenny. “Martin gave me great gobos. I have a good relationship with them, so any time I do a new show they give me new types of gobos to use, and that adds to it.” Shirley operates two Wholehog II consoles that are MIDI-ed together; one is the main board and the other is the backup. He also controls two DF-50 hazers for atmosphere and a low smoke generator that creates a low-lying fog for several eerie numbers.
Star Light, Star Bright, Star Curtain
The back wall of the show features a fiber optic drape with hundreds of LEDs, which is used during the second half of the show. The lights are white, but are also hooked up to a color-changing light, a moving light that doesn’t move, that feeds it different colors. “I have some white sometimes, I have them red sometimes, and several times I have them blue,” explains Shirley. “It can be any color I want. Typically, I like white because I like the intensity of the white. It reads a little bit better than everything else and gives this whole idea of stars. I also have them twinkle like stars.”
For the Radio City show, 12 VL-3000s were brought in to effectively light the venue because of its impressively large, curved ceiling. “I textured the whole roof of Radio City in gobos,” explains Shirley. “There were certain songs where I opened the iris on the lights and washed out the theatre, but there were several songs where I put these weird gobos and trickling effects on the ceiling.” Unfortunately, Shirley only had the afternoon of the show to get everything programmed, so he was cramming everything in, but he got all the information into the console and got the look he wanted.
A major, regular component of the show is a collection of five follow spots, four at front of house and one atop the lighting truss. Shirley sees this element as a challenge as he deals with different spot operators every night. He notes that how well they perform their job depends on how much they are invested in making the show itself successful.
“People on a rock show can mess up because that show is structured that way,” notes Shirley. “Nobody’s going to notice it. But in this show, things are so subtle that when you do mess up, when a spot operator doesn’t do something correctly, it’s very, very noticeable. I’m giving spot cues 10- or 12-second fades sometimes, and I’m trusting that person to do a true 10-count or 12- count fade. It depends upon how much the person really cares about the gig in general. If they’re really into making the show look good they’ll do it, but I find that if they’re just here to do the gig and get it done with, then they’re kind of half-assed about it. That’s a major complication that I run into every day as far as calling the show.”
The most dynamic spot is the one operated over the stage. Shirley uses it for special effects. “I don’t really use it as a proper follow spot,” he reveals. “He’s actually sitting on top of my lighting truss. We do these nice silhouettes with him. He’s not used at all like a traditional follow spot. I’m using him in a very theatrical, very mystical way. It’s a pretty creative, backlit silhouette on the girls.”
Places, Please
A major logistical problem on the tour has to do with the size of the Celtic Woman set. It is nearly 68 feet wide, and not every venue the tour hits is as expansive as Radio City. According to Shirley, some smaller theatres require the crew to cram in the set, which in turn means the lights have to be crammed in as well, making the setup more centralized than it normally is, and making it look a little smaller than it was designed to look.
Still, he says the set works well and that it has made it into every single theatre. “In an ideal world, I would like to have an 80-foot wide proscenium every day,” Shirley says. “When we get into these smaller B-market and C-market theaters that have a 40-foot proscenium, my downstage truss is 40 feet wide and will barely fit, but we always manage to get it.”
Shirley says the set was designed with an A version, a B version and a C version, whereby some of the large panels onstage are trimmed in number to make room for everyone. “So if we run into a situation where I can’t fit everything, we cut two far downstage panels,” he explains. “We still have the set there, but we subtract it going upstage as the venues get smaller and smaller. As it goes upstage it also works more toward the center stage. So if we’re playing a place that’s very narrow, I’ll cut the upstage piece, and if we’re playing a place that’s even more narrow, we’ll cut the next upstage piece. We’ve only had to do that twice, thank God, but that’s another problem that we do or will run into. We’ve been pretty lucky because we’ve been playing pretty nice places. There are also a lot of floor lights lighting these set pieces, so in smaller venues there’s less room for me to put them in.”
Despite all of these obstacles, Shirley and the crew have been pulling off the Celtic Woman show at all of their tour stops. The combination of beautiful voices, faces, lights and songs certainly captivated the Radio City audience. So much so, in fact, Kenny reports that the girls have been invited back for a week of gigs at the venue. It’s easy to see why. “This show is nice, it’s pretty and it sounds great,” he declares. “It’s exactly what people want to see.”
Gear List
14 Mac 2k washes
8 Mac 2k performance
12 Mac 2k profile
16 Studio beam pc
4 Mac 250 entours
4 Color pro’s (fiber source)
1 Truss spot
