Studio & Theatre |
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Howell Binkley lights The Full Monty
Broadway's Eugene O'Neill Theatre currently houses a rocking musical version
of the 1997 Academy Award-nominated film sensation about male strippers
in working class Britain who bare it all. Just like the movie, this show
features six uptight, over-age, ungraceful, unemployed mill workers. Only
they are now Americans in Buffalo, NY, who go to great lengths to raise
cash. The Full Monty is currently playing to sold-out houses in an open-ended
run on Broadway.
Yes,
they take it off. They take it ALL off. Can you see everything? Well, no,
thanks to the Full Monty sign spelled out in lights that blinds the audience
from behind the actors. However, just before the moment of truth, the audience
is treated - if that's the correct word - to the sight of the inexperienced
strippers taking off their G-strings as they are side lit by Studio Color
automated luminaires positioned on trees in the wings.
Lighting designer Howell Binkley first handled the task of dictating
this delicate lighting cue and, indeed, the entire show, in just five days
before the production opened at the Old Globe theatre in San Diego. "The
whole design process of the Full Monty was a major collaboration," Binkley
says. "Even before I went into tech, I had gone through the whole show
with the director, Jack O'Brien, many times in the rehearsal hall. So I
really felt equipped for the show going into it."
Automated
lighting programmer Tim Rogers credits the production's lighting supplier
for its pre-show assistance in helping everything run smoothly."Four Star
Lighting did an excellent job getting us the gear because it was a regional
theatre situation at the Old Globe it was all house gear," Rogers says.
"It was the first time, to our knowledge, that they had ever used any kind
of automated lighting in that space. That was kind of a challenge to begin
with."
"We had very limited time to program there," he continues. "We basically
programmed the show in five days before an audience. It was a fast cueing
time, so we just slammed it in there. Then, whenever we could, we touched
it up, but it actually looked very good from the beginning. The Wholehog
II console really helped us pull off some of the things we wanted
to do as fast as we needed to. We also left it to a crew new to the Wholehog
II giving them a little lesson on how to run the console. I'd get the calls
from them about how this or that cue was acting weird, so Hog Edit really
came in handy, because I could then just pull up the show, find out
where the problem was and tell them how to fix the problem over the phone.
That was great. They'd call a cue and it wouldn't clear in time because
the show had sped up a bit, or marks were being stepped on. I was able
to see all of that from my computer at home and then talk them through
it."
When
the production moved from San Diego to New York City, Binkley added six
Studio Colors to the front-of-house box booms for a total of 39 for the
show. "They really helped us handle the chases for when they were in the
club, so we could incorporate the audience into being in Giordano's," Binkley
explains. "We had no FOH positions in San Diego at all, and Monty is about
the text and the music. It's not a dark, shadowy type of show. It's bright
and fun so the transitions had to be like film wipes. The sliding set panes
wipe across and then, boom, you're in the next scene. So we really wanted
to keep the complete transition process alive - keep it moving and not
let it be fragmented. I feel we really met that challenge and made it work."
"Having FOH positions in New York helped immensely because it's a comedy
and you really need to see the actors' faces," Rogers adds. The set also
changed when the show came to New York. "The floor stayed the same but
the portals changed completely," Binkley says. "The rig had to deal with
all the corrugation in the scenery, because to make the scene transitions
work, I really had to back light a lot of it. Then, when we would land
into our scene for the show, we would come in with the front light and
sculpt the corrugation from the front and the high and low sides. I used
spotlights primarily to cover a lot of the tight area scenes, such as the
dressing room or their separate houses, to really keep tight isolation
on those scenes.
"Then, all around that, I would use the Studio Colors to wash and sidelight
and sculpt the whole picture," he continues. "I love the softness of the
Studio Colors -- especially on the scrim on The Full Monty -- and the color
range on them is just great. They're very accurate units and we never had
any problems with them. The beam-shaping capability makes it a really good
sculpting tool for a wash light. Whether it's spotted or flooded, it has
a good use for me. Mainly, I used a lot of the colors for transitional
purposes and also to wash the scrim, cyc and stage."
Having worked on several Broadway productions and theatrical tours,
Binkley and Rogers have developed a programming rapport, which made the
time crunch easier for them to deal with. "I love working with Tim Rogers
because he knows the Wholehog board so well and he knows how I work as
a designer," Binkley says. "Although a lot changed between San Diego and
New York because of the units that we had to add and the footprint had
changed, we still used the same disk and went through the show piece by
piece. We put all the new cues in and cleaned the board. Tim and I have
developed a unique process working together."
"Since we changed a lot of the lights for New York, I had to transfer
all the old data to the new data," Rogers adds. "Having the Wholehog was
quite the advantage because the DMX channels on different lights obviously
don't line up the same. I went to the High End Systems' New York office
and Paul Sonnleitner helped me go through the show and take the data out
and then clone it into the new fixtures. Then I had to go back and clean
it up because I didn't have the rig in front of me. So that saved a lot
of time."
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