The Biz

One of the remarkable growth areas in the entertainment business in the last decade has been management of record producers and mixers. New shops popping up and consolidations of existing ones have increasingly crowded the big companies in that space, such as Nettwerk and World’s End. So I wondered, where are the managers who want to manage the careers of lighting designers, stage designers, video designers and the rest of the staged-arts disciplines? I’m still wondering.

It may be worth noting that Coachella, the wildly successful music and arts festival, has been staged at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA since its inception in 1999. One of the next iterations of the event might also include water polo.

There are two things to note about the recent fatal stage collapse in Toronto in mid June this year: 1) Radiohead sold out Downsview Park’s capacity of 40,000, meaning that those who were heading to the event constituted roughly 0.1 percent of all tickets sold annually in North America, none of those ticketholders were even scratched and most of the other 99.9 percent of concert attendees each year need little more than an aspirin as result of a show they go to; and 2) all of that is completely meaningless. A string of fatal staging incidents, including the Indianapolis State Fair stage collapse last August that killed seven, the Pukkelpop Festival storm in which five died in Belgium that same month, and the Big Valley Jamboree in August 2009, where one person died when wind knocked down the main stage, is about to put the live staging industry under scrutiny like never before.

When the megachurch trend broke wide a couple of decades ago, the news was filled with stories of ever-larger spaces converted into houses of worship. Churches like Lakewood in Houston, where over 43,000 crowd into the former NBA Rockets arena to hear Joel Osteen preach, or Willow Creek Community in South Barrington, IL (23,000-plus), North Point Community in Alpharetta, GA (also 23,000-plus) and Saddleback in Lake Forest, CA (22,000-plus) took center stage not only for their huge congregations but also for their extensive staging and systems. Saddleback’s Flying Pig Systems Wholehog 3, Vari-Lite VL2000 wash and spot fixtures, Sony DXC-537A digital cameras, Grass Valley 100 switcher and Digital Projection HIGHlite 5100gv projectors, for instance, could induce the sin of envy in many secular performance venues.

In show business, being dead has become a viable career option, thanks to technology. The most recent iteration of dead men telling tales was the projection resurrection of Tupac Shakur during a performance by rappers Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April in California. The projection was otherworldly and, depending upon your perspective, it was also either way-cool or downright creepy, but it also suggests that there is a budding business to be had here.

The little town in the Bible Belt turns 100 this year and is drawing a lot of wattage in the process

Last year at this time we looked back at the recovery of Nashville’s staging industry from a devastating flood that swept through the city in May, 2010. This month, we’re looking at another entertainment event success story that had its own brush with meteorological disaster earlier this year and has come out of it just as robustly.

The 2012 summer touring season kicks off this month, a year after one of the most violent weather years on record: tornadoes in 2011 started the earliest ever — New Year’s Day — and went on to kill 550 people, injure 5,400 and cause $10 billion in damage, the most in U.S. history. Some of the biggest weather disasters in the touring business also took place last year, most notoriously the collapse of the stage, due to high winds from an approaching storm, at the Indiana State Fair last August that killed seven and injured dozens. And as I write this, people in Illinois, Kansas and Missouri are picking up the pieces from twisters that passed through on Leap Day, killing 14.

By the time you’re reading this, you’re already deep in to prepping your information to ship off to the accountant in anticipation of April 15. But there’s a big change that took place last year regarding one of the trickiest aspects of tax law, and it’s one that affects those in the staging business directly.

It might have something to do with the presidential election cycle. Back in 2008, when Barack Obama trumped John McCain, the Warped Tour featured a 40,000-watt solar-powered stage provided by Stage-Tech Productions. It was one of a cluster of high-profile applications of alternative energy to provide the power to run sound and lights for outdoor music performances that year. Examples of stages being powered by the sun (and vegetable oil, and wind) continue to appear, but at nowhere near the pace one might have expected after the heady days of 2008.

What OWS Might Show Us about Staging

Just about two months to the day it began, the original Occupy Wall Street’s run was over. It didn’t exactly get the kind of perceived permanence that shows like Miss Saigon or The Lion King achieved a few miles north around Times Square, but it’s not simply coincidence that the terms “staging” and “staged” appear frequently in conjunction with news stories about OWS locations around the U.S. That’s because, like any interactive phenomenon, organic or premeditated, these protests have shown some level of production values.

Anyone who has gotten onto an airplane in the last 10 years knows that it’s not as simple a process as it once was. The Transportation Security Administration has added multiple layers of procedures in that time, from banning liquids to backscatter X-ray scanners, most of little use in the way of actual security. But even as the TSA has made getting people onto airplanes a massive headache, the federal government has made getting materials of all sorts onto airplanes and other forms of transportation a relative breeze. And that’s not necessarily a good thing.