A dance show then a youth theatre show followed. After these came Anything Goes at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury. We had moving clouds on the cyc and a nice, almost white set which took colour beautifully especially when lit by the Mac 300 and Mac 600 'mix-any-colour' washlights we hired in to compliment the theatre's existing rig.
April saw The Pirates of Penzance hit the stage with a good, artistic set that consisted principally of a painted floor cloth and some boxes. Again a lovely set to light and a production which received praise all round.
April also brought Dance Designs - an expertly put together show of all styles of dance seemlessly linked together on an open stage. There was no masking, the only 'set' being my side light trusses which gave shape to the stage, as well as carrying the bulk of lighting instruments. We had Pars with scrollers, gobos, shins, birdies, ropelight and fuzz lights all crammed in there. A good rig and some lovely choreography made the show a joy to light.
Next came West Side Story for a college who had an interesting scaffold-based set that cried out for beak-up gobos everywhere. I ended up using these in nearly every state to give the piece a 'raw' look as opposed to something 'clean' which I'd have had without them. Again it looked great and was received extremely well by director and audience.
I worked next on a re-light of a show called Happy With Half Your Life. This had come from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a basic lighting plot, but needed looking at from scratch, lighting wise, for a tour. I had to keep the number of channels down to 24 to suit even the smallest of venues yet still have more cues and more interesting states than before. I enjoyed the challenge and came up with something which the performer (it was a one woman show) and producer loved. More satisfied customers!
May saw the start of another tour, this time a show called Reflections: The story of Dianna Ross. For this I used a V-shaped truss loaded with Par 64s from behind, some Mac 250s both flown and on the stage and an in-house rig for washes. It worked well and is still doing odd dates here and there.
June brought a hair show for Goldwell, lighting people having their hair cut. As you can imagine, this is not particularly dramatic to watch so subtly changing patterns on the cyc were the order of the day. Reach for the Macs again!
Later in June I lit another dance show. The time the budget was smaller but I still managed to come up with something snazzy!
July was mainly taken up lighting outdoor events whilst August brought Dracula and some more youth theatre stuff.
The next big show was Cabaret, for which I decided to put up a small lighting rig on view especially for the club stage on set. Above this came the rest of the lighting which consisted of scroller backlight, gobo sidelights and nothing too sunny from the front: the scrollers gave me colourful dancing and the dialogue scenes were set in dingy rooms.
After a few one-nighters in October and November I came to pantomime in the shape of Dick Whittington for Hammond Productions. Those 100-hour working weeks can be tough, but it was all worth it with a lovely-looking show at the end of the day - bright and cheerful.
I'll let you know about 2004 next time.
Eric.
