The “Heart and Soul” Tour that played in sheds across the USA this summer featured a unique performance unlike any co-headline tour before it. Well, almost any tour. 2015 marked Earth, Wind and Fire’s fourth time out playing with Chicago in this format.
Country star Luke Bryan’s meteoric rise to the top has solidified his tour as one of the must-see shows of the summer. The singer has been selling out every show this year from arenas to sheds, special club gigs to humongous stadiums as evidenced by this weekend’s sold out gig at Nashville’s Vanderbilt stadium. Production designers Justin Kitchenman (touring LD) and Pete Healey (touring production manager) co-designed a large-scale system that can fit into any type venue. Through reconfigurations of where to rig the truss and video elements, these transitions between different sized venues are seamless, due to the design team doing their homework ahead of the tour.
“Since I started working with The Rolling Stones back in 1982,” says longtime lighting designer and show director, Patrick Woodroffe, “the background to the planning for a tour would always be the same. The band would get together and ask a question. ‘Should we go on tour?’ If the answer was ‘Yes,’ they would then commit to a year and a half on the road, and we’d be off. Mark Fisher and I would design a production, spending millions and millions of dollars on the grounds that this would be amortized over 160 performances or whatever. But they don’t work like that now.”
Rush hit the road last month for what they are calling the continuation of R40 — celebrating 40 years as a band. Parnelli award winning production designer Howard Ungerleider actually explains that he is entering his 41st year with the band, having been brought into the fray back in 1974 as he says, “to teach a new band how to tour.” But what is separating this tour from any other Rush show is they are touring behind a theme this time. They are “Deconstructing” their career live — as each song they play takes you back one more step in their long, storied career.
Kenny Chesney has embarked on his 2015 trek across America. It’s his 14th headlining concert tour in support of his 16th studio album, The Big Revival, and some of the different stadium gigs will also feature a long roster of co-headliners/supporting acts including Eric Church, Jason Aldean, Miranda Lambert, Cole Swindell, Jake Owen, Brantley Gilbert, Chase Rice and Old Dominion.
“The whole idea of the show is essentially building from zero,” says lighting programmer Jason Baeri. “It begins without giving anything away — just a simple stage. Then as the show unfolds, there’s a little bit of Magic Blades, and then video, and then we lower the ‘V’ trussing, and then we push out to the B stage. It’s a linear progression upwards and forward, expanding in the space as the songs go by.”
This is not Broadway, this is a concert. I take my daughters to shows and I look up and can’t find the talent located on stage. We didn’t want that. We wanted a polished act with classy props. Think of a Bette Midler-type show where the singing is never second fiddle to the spectacle. Don’t get me wrong, we have dancers and a great stage set, but our artist is the center of everything.”
“It’s the hardest show I do, but I love it because you’re working with the best of everybody,” Mark Grega of Strictly FX says of the Super Bowl.
What started out as a single event 15 years ago has blossomed into the Ice Cross Downhill World Championship Series. For the fourth year in a row, one of these sporting spectacles took place in downtown St. Paul, MN on Jan. 24, 2015, where an estimated 140,000 spectators got right into the up close action of this sport. A plethora of the worlds’ fastest skaters go head to head down a narrow track skating at speeds of 40 mph. While the races themselves were exciting, I couldn’t help wondering who and how a company can erect this gigantic structure along with all the lighting, video and audio it takes to put on a world televised event like this.
A dynamic genre-bending artist. Hydraulics, custom trussing, split 7mm video screen, and a whole lot of spankin’ brand new gear. Usher is in the house.
Good things come in threes. At least that’s what solo artist and White Stripes co-founder Jack White would have us believe, judging by the lighting and production designs for his current tour in support of his 2014 solo record, Lazaretto.
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The Ricky Martin creative team came prepared for whatever happens, for wherever they play. They delivered a consistent show night after night — no excuses, no “loco.”Martin, who has amassed six Grammy Awards among numerous other honors and 85 million albums in his career, has demanding fans around the world that expect and receive a show better than the last. So the creative team has to always top themselves, no matter where they go. Martin’s manager/creative producer Veikko Fuhrmann agrees with the conventional wisdom that touring south of the border can be more challenging, but he overcomes it, starting with the design. He’s learned from others who build tours for the U.S. for the relatively cookie-cutter arenas with success only to see it buckle under the weight of its gear when playing the varied landscape of Latin American countries. “I saw one that was not able to travel into Mexico, and as was suddenly too expensive and too heavy, and the tour lost out on a major market.” |