Q: What did you like the most about lighting this particular show?
Bruno: The team – Jerry Mitchell, the director, leads an enthusiastic and positive rehearsal process, and gives great clear notes. Tim Hatley is a set designer I love to work with, and I had a fantastic lighting team supporting me.
Q: Can you explain any parts of the show that you think worked really well?
Bruno: I can think of two very different moments that I’m particularly pleased with. In Act 2, there a three short scenes in the Paris Hotel where some simple drapes and a window frame are the set – the lighting really closes down on the performers and feels really simple, elegant and beautiful. Another is a big dance number, Who’s She?, where we fly in an array of Atomic Dots behind the performers and use them along with the rest of the rig to deliver a fun, punchy, upbeat number. At the end of Act 1 we have the scene outside the Met Gala, where the set is a big staircase with red carpet and some huge black pillars. Greg Barnes (costume designer) fills the stage with his extraordinary costumes and the lighting is very bold monochrome – red and warm white, then red and cold white. I don’t think I’ve ever used so much red lighting in a show, but it works perfectly for this production.
Q: What were your inspirations when lighting the show?
Bruno: Mainly the show itself – the staging, the music, and the rest of the creative team – but we looked at references of a lot of catwalk fashion shows. There is a nod to the famous Yves Saint Laurent fashion show at the Eiffel Tower in Act 2 where we use a lot of floor lights, and an Eiffel Tower for one of the catwalk scenes.
Q: What made you choose an MA console for this project?
Bruno: I have used MA for all my music touring and large scale event projects, because I believe its ability to handle very large rigs and to work with movement and intensity effects is second to none. However, I had disappointing experiences with MA2 for theatre and opera as it was not able to give me the information I like to see on my displays, and I always found it slow for programming in a theatre context. It wasn’t the initial choice, but after realising that we were going to need over 80,000 raw DMX addresses, it made sense to look into if the MA3 could be used for this musical. We did a desk test back in March 2024 with some beta v2 software, and then decided to take a leap of faith that the MA3 was going to work for the show.
Q: What particular console/software was used?
Bruno: We had an MA3 Full Size for programming, along with two other MA3 Lights (one on the stage rig for checks etc, and one in the control room, along with one Replay Unit and 6 Large Processing Units. We used v2.0, then v2.1.
Q: How did recipes help you on this project?
Bruno: Recipes were used mainly for musical pulses or quick ways of manipulating the 5500 channels of pixel tape on the show. It meant when the show moved from Plymouth to London, where we added over 1500 new fixtures of pixel tape, a lot of the programming was merely updating a group rather than having to reprogram all the cues.
Q: What was something that helped your workflow?
Bruno: Probably the new Sheet/Filter+ View, which means I can now see dimmer, position and colour in one nicely laid out screen.
Q: What are your top 3 grandMA3 features and why?
Max: Move-in-Black (MIB) – never used it on MA2 for various reasons, but in Mode3 it just works, and saves hours of work manually presetting the lights. This along with the MArker (HOLD) dimmer makes MIB very powerful. Second would probably be recipes. Once you work out how they can fit into a theatre workflow, they make some quite complicated looking effects very easy to manipulate or tweak to fit to music or to change what the designer wants. Lastly would probably be align features in the selection grid while making phasers, they give the ability to make some rather complicated looking effects but in a matter of seconds.
Bruno: For me it’s the new Sheet/Filter+ View displays, meaning that I can get the information I need in front of me.
Q: Was there a pre-viz before going on site? If so, which visualiser was used?
Bruno: We used Depence3, along with an MA3 VizKey to be able to pre-programme the show along with all the pixel tape.
Q: Which software features saved you the most time?
Bruno: MIB, Recipes, and the MA3 Phasers.
Q: What advice would you give to someone who is thinking about using MA for lighting a theatre production?
Bruno: Think really carefully about the set up, and try to set the desk up in a way that can be understood and managed by theatre lighting operators who have come from an EOS background. The MA can be scary to those not used to it – there is no point having an amazing programmer make the show if the resident team can’t look after it once the show is up and running.
Q: What benefits did using an MA console bring to this particular show over other consoles currently on the market?
Bruno: For this production it is the ease with which Max could manipulate and program large quantities of pixel tape without needing any video control, and the way we could layer up effects, as well as the way it works with multiple cue lists. On other productions, the way it can be set up for multiple operators is very powerful.
Q: Who else was involved?
Bruno: Associate Designer – Tamykha Patternson
Programmer – Max Narula
Production Electrician – Ian Moulds with Sam House
Dominion Head of Lighting – Stuart Plume
Package supplied by PRG
BTS Photos: Bruno Poet & Max Narula
Production Photos: © Matt Crockett
