THEATRE Copyright Lighting&Sound America March 2014 http://www.lightingandsoundamerica.com/lsa.html Encore for The Phantom of the Opera The ultra-long-running musical tours America with an all-new design By: David Barbour 84 March 2014 Lighting&Sound America
Left photo: Matthew Murphy; Right photo: Alastair Muir In The number Masquerade is set at a fancy-dress party at the opera house, for which Brown has created a forced-perspective hall of mirrors framed in gold, featuring an array of gold floor-length candelabra. A mirrored ceiling piece tops it off. case you were wondering, the chandelier still falls. Musical theatre fans have been wondering about the new US tour of The Phantom of the Opera; for the first time in this country, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is being seen without its iconic original design scenery by the late Maria Björnson, lighting by Andrew Bridge, and sound by Martin Levan. The new production, directed by Laurence Connor, retains Björnson s costumes, but everything else is new, including Paul Brown s scenery, Paule Constable s lighting, and Mick Potter s sound. And for the first time, a production of Phantom features projections, with Nina Dunn, of the firm Knifedge, doing the honors. One reason for the new design, which was seen previously on a UK tour, is to create a production of Phantom that tours more easily. Also, Phantom has been in existence for nearly 28 years, and this was a golden opportunity to freshen up a venerable property. If the new Phantom isn t quite as spectacular as the London/Broadway original, it still packs plenty of visual surprises, and it well serves the musical s highly mysterious atmosphere and melodramatic narrative, as derived from Gaston Leroux s famous novel. The bulk of the story, about a horribly disfigured, but musically gifted, psychopath who promotes the career of the young, wouldbe diva he loves from afar, takes place inside the Opera Populaire, a fictionalized version of the Opera Garnier, one of Paris most famous buildings. For the musical to effectively cast its gothic-romantic spell, one must feel that the Opera Populaire is vast, dark, and a place of unfathomable depths. This design delivers on that premise; it also unfolds fluidly and cinematically, helping to ensure that there is not a wasted second of stage time. The show s prologue offers clues to the approach taken by the design team. Many years after the main events of the story, the properties of the opera house are being auctioned off. The set is an eerie, desolate tableau consisting of various unrelated set pieces. The overall look of the scene is dark, although certain key elements most notably a music box that opens up to reveal a performing monkey are highlighted with pinpoint precision. The scene unfolds behind a scrim on which images of cobwebs are projected. The voice of the auctioneer is processed with heavy reverb, providing an extra touch of the sinister. Throughout the scene, the opera house s chandelier hangs over the audience, wrapped in a muslin cloth that is marked Lot #666; the cloth is ripped away, and as it begins its ascent, it is bathed in carefully targeted low sidelight. Projections aimed at the chandelier create the illusion of crystal glittering in the light. Of course, all this happens to the booming, bass-heavy sound of the title tune. It s a clear sign that all departments are working in synch to deliver a fresh take on an old favorite. www.lightingandsoundamerica.com March 2014 85
THEATRE The staircase needed to look precarious, even though it is safe, Brown says. Inside the opera house Paul Brown, the production s set designer, is a man of the opera, having designed productions at Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; Glyndebourne Opera; La Scala; Metropolitan Opera; Zurich Opera House; and Bregenzer Festspiele, to name a few. (He has also worked extensively in the West End and at the National Theatre and Almeida Theatre, among other venues.) His scenic design for Phantom is a smoothly tooled machine that moves rapidly from one location to the next, rendering both the on- and off-stage aspects of the Opera Populaire with considerable flair. The show, he says, is a nose dive from beginning to end. It has a momentum, and you can t mess with that. It s a melodrama, a vital and directional thing; you can t do a piece like this and stop, ever. He adds, It was important to play with the idea of fantasy and reality. The backstage world of the opera is made up of the real and the unreal, the fake and the solid. I wanted to play with the ideas of entrapment, of game playing, of disguise. Brown s design makes a clear distinction between the on-stage scenes and those that take place backstage and in the opera house s depths. The on-stage scenes are framed in a gilded proscenium consisting of periaktoi at stage right and stage left, each containing two opera boxes and a matching portal. The piece is punctuated by three different operas, Brown says. We wanted the gold proscenium to come and go; it changes the shape of the frame around the stage picture. The three operas, all pastiches by Lloyd Webber, are designed in true 19th-century style. Hannibal, a Meyerbeer-style exotic romance, features palm trees framing a painted drop depicting an enormous temple-like building in some corner of the Roman Empire, perhaps Carthage. An elephant, complete with a head that moves The pastiche opera Hannibal features palm trees framing a painted drop of an enormous temple-like building in the Roman Empire. Left photos: Matthew Murphy; Right top photo: Matthew Murphy; Right bottom photo: Alastair Muir 86 March 2014 Lighting&Sound America
The backstage scenes are dominated by an enormous curved wall with a gallery walk at the top that acts as a kind of camera wipe, revolving to reveal dressing rooms belonging to Christine (above) and the opera s corps de ballet as well as other backstage locations. up and down, slides in far upstage during the number Think of Me. Il Muto is a Mozartian sex romp, dominated by an interior drop full of painted Louis IV furniture; there is also a practical closet in which characters may hide as they spy on one another. Don Juan Triumphant is the Phantom s composition, a decades-ahead-of-its-time exercise in atonality that features a drop depicting a room with vaulted ceilings; the main practical piece is a long table, where Don Juan ravishes his latest conquest. I like taking the tradition of a 19th-century scene painting and putting it against a much more automated world, Brown says. There is also an elaborate opera house curtain, in reality a painted drop showing elaborate red and gold swagged drapery. The backstage scenes are dominated by an enormous curved wall with a gallery walk at the top; during the title number, the Phantom and Christine, his protégé, descend from the gallery via a set of stairs that project out from the wall a vista. The staircase is quite frightening. It needed to look precarious, even though it is safe, says Brown. Verticality is important in a touring show, and the idea of descent also seemed important. We wanted it to feel like the Phantom had invented this extraordinary thing. The wall acts as a kind of camera wipe, revolving to reveal dressing rooms belonging to Christine and the opera s corps de ballet as well as other backstage locations. The curved wall is the main engine of the design, says Brown. I The vividly red office of Monsieur Firman and Monsieur Andre, the opera s managers. www.lightingandsoundamerica.com March 2014 87
THEATRE like having a single machine that opens and closes to reveal scenes and which can also split and twist and turn. Again, it s about the maze idea. It s a touring show, and you have to use the fly bars, but they re very linear, and it s good to mix it up with a circular shape. It adds variety to the piece, and it facilitates all the changes. The bottom of the wall opens up to reveal the vividly red office belonging to Monsieur Firman and Monsieur Andre, the opera s managers. Cameron Mackintosh and I didn t see eye-to-eye about it, Brown says. I saw the characters as being rather small-minded and tawdry, so I gave them a claustrophobic space with a kind of shabby gentility. It s one of those awful offices where you can t move around. I was obligated to make it grander than I intended originally, but it s still every manager s office where the desk is too big. The wall also breaks apart to reveal the building s roof, where Christine and her lover, Raoul, sing the ballad All I Ask of You, and the cemetery where Christine s father is interred. The hardest are the scenes where the show leaves the opera house the roof and the graveyard. In these cases, the wall tears open, like a rupture of the world, Brown says. Speaking of the roof, he says, I wasn t wedded to the Opera Garnier it is called the Opera Populaire but the roof does evoke the Garnier. We used many references from it in the design and also from the Opera de Monte Carlo, which is another design by [the architect Charles] Garnier. Both the roof and the cemetery, with their statuary, have a certain grandeur about them. The Phantom s lair, hidden deep in the bowels of the opera house, is rather sad, made up as it is of bits and pieces of old opera productions, things he found while wandering the opera house at night. It s a magpie world in the darkness, filled with things that glitter and gleam, Brown says. It s an illusion, a dank world at the bottom of the opera house in which he has tried to make a world of luxury but it s all cardboard and plaster, nothing substantial or real. One of Brown s most original contributions is the set for the second-act opener, Masquerade. The scene is a fancy-dress party at the opera house. Björnson s concept featured an enormous curved staircase. Without access to that kind of space, Brown has created a forced-perspective hall of mirrors framed in gold and also featuring an array of 88 March 2014 Lighting&Sound America
Photos: Matthew Murphy gold floor-length candelabra. A mirrored ceiling piece tops it off. Brown says the concept for the scene comes from the novel, in which a hall of mirrors figures into the story s climax. Also, he says, It s not a big ensemble, so it was another way of exaggerating the number of people on stage, as Maria did with dummies on stage. And of course, there s the chandelier, which Brown says helps bring the production out of the proscenium and into the auditorium. We wanted to hang it in a Damocles way over the audience until we drop it down on them. This happens at the end of the first act, when the Phantom, enraged, nearly destroys a performance of Il Muto. The set collapses at the same time, the designer says. The proscenium collapses, and the front curtain drops. Footlights and darkness Adding to the effect of many scenes are Nina Dunn s projections, which act as a kind of bridge between scenery and lighting. As mentioned earlier, they include cobwebs on the front scrim and glitter effects on the chandelier. There are some carefully wrought shadow effects, which, for example, appear on the curved wall, illustrating the Phantom s tragic backstory, as revealed by Madame Giry, the opera s ballet mistress. Dunn also makes use of what she calls zoetrope effects, effectively flashing lights to help divert the audience s attention at times, most notably at the end of Masquerade. Interestingly, Dunn says, when she was hired, They wanted one thing, and in the end got something quite different. My original remit was to create movement for the mausoleum scene, but the set was built in such a way and the venues on the tour are so large that getting projections to the upstage wall was virtually impossible to do. What we came up with wasn t satisfactory. I ve worked with Paul Brown on many shows, she adds. The Phantom set is very dark it helps that the lighting is so atmospheric, but it was hard to get a set level of color images because the set would absorb them. We tried a number of ideas, and they didn t work. But the set needs to do what it needs to do. As a result, she says, I worked to create other languages, creating effects that could be lighting and working with lighting to heighten the effect. The images are front-projected, delivered via a Catalyst media server to Panasonic 21K projectors. Catalyst is my media server of choice, Dunn says. I ve picked up QLab [the sound effects software, which is now driving media servers in some cases] for workshops where you want to be light on your feet, but to make a real show, I turn to Catalyst. She adds that during the earlier UK tour, There wasn t a budget set aside for the lumens that we needed, but that was rectified for the States. The Panasonics are good units and quite respectable in terms of noise. Dunn says that she spent six weeks with the show during its UK tour, which started in Plymouth. I was in the theatre, making content. Anything that couldn t be done on-site, I had delivered to me from various 3-D renders using Dropbox. She notes that for the US tour, we ve done some extra work on the overture and put back in some narrative shadows that were cut from the UK tour. It makes for a stronger narrative when Madame Giry tells the Phantom s story. Overall, Dunn says, Cameron Mackintosh s shows generally have a lot of effects thrown at them, and I think, for me, the challenge was to work out within all the pyro and automation and flying where my groove should fit. Projections can stand up and shout, but on this show, the job was to date it a bit, which I quite liked. Most people would probably comment that there aren t projections in the show. Shadows on the wall Dunn s comment about the atmospheric lighting is right on point. Paule Constable only half-jokingly refers to herself as the queen of murky lighting, and indeed she does imbue the backstage and Phantom s lair scenes with gorgeously chiaroscuro looks; she also gives the on-stage sequences a series of evocative footlight looks defined by plenty of shadows and a warm gaslight feel. All of this contributes much to the feeling of the opera house as a place of intrigue and terror. However, Constable notes, none of this was easily achieved. Paul came up with an extraordinary new design, but when we looked at it, there wasn t a single lighting position overhead, she says. But Cameron fell in love with it, so we had to make it work. There was a suggestion that we would do it all from the floor, but that wasn t possible. Space was negotiated, but, as she notes, The pack up there is very tight. This comes as something of a surprise since Constable s lighting choices are so specific, with specific details of the set highlighted in each scene. This would seem to indicate an extraordinary number of specials, but instead, the designer went almost totally with automated units. That s why I have so many [ETC] Revolutions, she says. The units were chosen, she adds, because we can control the lighting from them. Coming to the US, I must be driving Christie Lites [the production s lighting supplier] mad because most American designers prefer [Philips Vari*Lite] VL1100s. But you can t get sludgy colors from them, and you can t get a consistency of colors. Also included in her rig are Martin Professional TW1s because their narrow lenses give you good key light, 5kWs and VL3500s on booms and providing cross light, and ETC Source Four 10 units functioning as followspots; all conventional units have scrollers. Speaking of the on-stage scenes, Constable says, The whole palette is based on late-19th-century French paintings of theatre interiors Degas and others. There s a www.lightingandsoundamerica.com March 2014 89
THEATRE Constable uses carefully chosen colors to create on-stage looks derived from paintings by Degas and others. lot of Lee 213 [White Flame Green] and 241 [Fluorescent 5700 Kelvin] where you might normally use Lee 202 and 203, pushing it a little greener than I normally would, to give it an edge. There s also 764 [Sun Colored Straw], which is quite a good acid yellow. Everything is slightly more acidic. Speaking of the backstage scenes and the Phantom s lair, Constable says, Paul Brown is a great collaborator. He was very happy for me to run with his images and embellish them with lighting. The use of lighting on the fly floor and the use of real flame in the Phantom s lair those are my contributions to the language of the show. You want the audience to go on a journey with the Phantom, and the backstage and lair want to be really different from the on-stage scenes. Using real flame in the lair means you can get away with the darkness and you can also do the trick with the cape [when the Phantom disappears, leaving his cape behind]. The Phantom can conjure things; you want that magic about him. The use of real flame in the lair is facilitated by a gas organ linked to the candles in the set. We can control them, black them out, and rise them up a bit during Music of the Night. When he is carrying the candelabrum, those are real candles. One place where candles don t appear is during the title number. In Björnson s design, the gondola carrying the Phantom and Christine is surrounded by candelabra. In the new production, as the gondola crosses the stage, it is lit from underneath by dozens of tiny units built into the deck. It s a little bit of a nod to Maria s original, says Constable. I tried to make it look as if the candles are under the low smoke that covers the stage. They re tiny LEDs, creating tiny circles of light in a candle shape, that add a little bit of texture to the gondola. One especially challenging scene for Constable is Masquerade, loaded as it is with mirrors. We did a version of it that I loved; it looked like it was lit entirely with candles. But Cameron s big thing is that Masquerade can t be dark, so we re pushing a lot of lighting into that mirrored box. A couple of times, we do consciously light the mirrors. I think it s the part of the show where I do the least good, and I don t know what else I could have done with it. If the production was sitting down somewhere, we could do a more particular focus, but we don t have that option. Constable says that lighting the opera house roof and cemetery scenes is challenging because of the lack of space on stage. To cope with this, she uses a series of EvenLED panels, a discontinued product by Martin Professional. They re an amazing piece of kit, she says, quite expensive and tricky. But when you go to the roof and the mausoleum, you want a source of natural light. We ve got them under the sky drop. Speaking of the show s fluid cueing, Constable says, It s so lovely working with Paul, a designer who picks up on the fact that a good musical hangs on movement. It s got to be seamless, and it s got to be surprising, and he has done some very clever things to make the opera house seem like a labyrinth. I was just following his lead. The show is controlled by an ETC Eos console. Again, the design stresses the complete lack of room, which meant I was pulling rabbits out of hats. It was a very happy show, however. Paul really delivered something I could work with. I love scenery that has a dirty, lived-in quality, and I love all those old-fashioned cloths, even if finding the space to light them was hard. But we ve made a new version that works. Music of the night The one member of the design team who is well-versed in all things Phantom is Mick Potter. In addition to designing The Phantom of the Opera The Las Vegas Spectacular, he has also updated Martin Levan s original designs for the London and Broadway companies. Of course, as he notes, It s always much more difficult when you re touring. At the moment, we re trying to tour a surround system, so there s advance crew that travels to each venue; we re trying to keep the quality of the sound as close as possible to what we have on a Broadway show. For the tour, Potter says, he has quite a big system, consisting almost entirely of gear from Meyer Sound. On the proscenium, he says, There are curvilinear arrays of Meyer M elodies, 16 a side, at left and right. There s quite a small cluster of UPJuniors, UPM-1Ps for front fill and side fill, and 600-HPs and 700-HPs for the lower end. Also, there are UPJuniors on-stage for foldback. The surround consists of d&b audiotechnik E0s, which are very compact and light, making them great for surrounds. Some additional E0s are built into the stage and the towers for 90 March 2014 Lighting&Sound America
The cast members all wear DPA 4061 mics, which, Potter says, offer high gain before distortion and really good feedback rejection. foldback and sound effects. Genelec speakers on the front rail of the orchestra pit deliver sound to the orchestra. Having done other Phantom productions, Potter is wellversed in Björnson s costumes, so he has a good sense about mic placement. We use a lot of transmitters built into hats, he says. The Phantom has four mic packs a main mic and a backup that he wears and a transmitter built into his hat. When he takes off his hat and throws it to the floor, we switch to another mic. In the cemetery, he has another hat, which is also miked. In general, mics are placed just below the performers wigs. With the Phantom, the additional mics are placed in the same general area, although, the designer says he staggers them. The cast members all wear DPA 4061 mics, Potter s mic of choice. You can t beat it, he says. It offers high gain before distortion and really good feedback rejection. Also used are Sennheiser 5212 transmitters and 3732 receivers. He adds that the musicians in the orchestra are miked with DPA 4022s, in part because they re studio quality but very small, and you can get them close to the instruments. Onstage foldback is controlled using a DiGiCo SD8 console, which is linked as part of the Optocore fiber system, to the main front-of-house console, a Digico SD7T, chosen in part, Potter says, because of its programming flexibility, using aliases etc., and sonic clarity. In aliases, he s referring to the function that allows one to assign different channel aliases to different cues; a new feature of the SD7T is its ease of copying aliases. To get the reverb that is a distinctive part of the show s sound design, Potter uses a T. C. Electronic TC6000, which, he says, gives you four stereo channels of reverb. As mentioned before, the reverb is a prominent part of the opening scene. However, he adds, Connor and Lloyd Webber were keen that in the scenes in the lair, the relationship between Christine and the Phantom be more intimate. So those scenes now tend to be quite dry; in the original Phantom, they are quite reverberant. The rest of the show s sound processing is done through the SD7T. Sound effects are delivered using QLab 3 show control software, linked to the SD8. Sound Associates of New York supplied the sound gear. Potter could be speaking for his colleagues when he says, We weren t trying to recreate the old Phantom because Laurence had different ideas and Andrew and David Cullen did new orchestrations. This version is a bit more cinematic, with a more contemporary feel. The characters feel a bit more fleshed out. Brown adds, You do need to find ways of breaking the mold of such an iconic piece. We needed to reinvent. Audiences will be able to see the results for themselves as the production makes its way across the country, concluding in San Francisco in October 2015. www.lightingandsoundamerica.com March 2014 91