Two Musicals In Ten Days
Rob Halliday

Every year, in mid June, a group of people gather together for two weeks of divine madness: getting on two full scale musicals, plus a smaller cabaret show, in just nine days, then performing the two in rep for five more days, changing shows between each performance matinee to evening and evening to following matinee.

The reason? To show off the cream of new British musical theatre talent. London's Royal Academy of Music runs a hugely popular one year post-graduate musical theatre singing course. Led by Mary Hammond, vocal coach to the stars, it attracts about 25 people each year, and therein lies the problem. Very few musicals can truly showcase that many people. RAM's solution? Do two....

As you might imagine, that presents quite a challenge - particularly in the Academy's 230-seat pros arch Sir Jack Lyons Theatre, which doesn't have much storage space and can't really fly scenery, the low grid there more to hold a set of motorised lighting bars, manual winch bars and good old-fashioned hemp sets. But there is a real will - and an enormous amount of support - from the Academy to present two shows to the highest possible standard.

That support has manifested itself in the theatre's infrastructure, which has seen many improvements over the decade I have been involved with these shows, most dramatically in the last seven years since the arrival of Jake Wiltshire as theatre technician. FOH focus is now by a crawl truss rather than a long wobbly ladder. The new dimmer installation (144 ways of ETC Sensor including 5Ks) doesn't flicker at random. Most importantly, this year Jake finally got to update the lighting stock: Strand's finest (the Patt 743s) remain now complemented by new Juliat 1.2k Fresnels, but their worst (the T-Spot) has been replaced by 55 Source Fours in a wide range of beam angles; White Light have been Jake's collaborators in all of this.

Jake also knew he needed colour changers, but was aware of the time and expense of making scrolls - so he opted for six SeaChanger dichroic colour changers for Source Fours, the 'xG' version with green as well as CMY. These are also silent - an important consideration in a small theatre regularly housing opera - and it was only when Jake was offered an unbeatable deal on six silent-running, tunsten VL500 Washes that he also added moving lights to the stock.

So, new toys to play with! Or, at least, the chance to form the core rig from stock, with any rental budget then used for particular specials...

This year's shows were Sweet Charity, directed by the Academy's Karen Rabinowitz, and Oh What A Lovely War, directed by Matthew Lloyd. Nigel Hook was the set designer for both - he is a master of designing structures that can be made to look dramatically different between shows with just a little re-arrangement and re-dressing (-he and production manager John Pitt are also masters at then selling those structures on to other theatres!) Here Nigel designed twin truss arches as a base structure dressed with red legs and drapes and a slash curtain for Charity, dressed with old flags for War, plus a moving 'room' piece and a moving tower.

Of course, the difficulty - one shared with big musicals - is that the rig has to be designed early enough let us work out how to afford it and make it work, which means it's designed before many specifics have come out of the rehearsal room. So design is a matter of seeing specifics required by the set (UV light for the poor-man's neon created with UV paint), picking up any moments from the script or rehearsals, then designing a rig flexible enough to accommodate those and cope with anything else that might thrown at us during tech while making best use of the gear and budget available.

Nigel's arches left me able to continue with the dance-style rig that has evolved for these show, partly because the weight loading on the old winches limited the overhead rig, and partly just because it works so well, controlling stray light by keeping it off the floor and losing it into the wings. Ultimately, it's a showcase: the performers must be allowed to dominate the space and 'win' over all else.

So the rig is based around four booms per side, each with a shin Source Four in open white, a head high Par can (a 'wide' crosslight that spills onto the opposite masking, with a scroller to give colour variety - White Light's stock scroll is pretty good for this), a head high Source Four in 202 (an 'invisible' crosslight, cut off the opposite masking), and a high cross light - this year 36degree Source Fours with gobos to give texture across the set and actors, fitted with Jake's SeaChangers which were great - if you haven't seen these in action, you really should. Overhead, there is a two colour toplight (I love the richness of mixing colours), plus some diagonal PAR backlights.

The rented specials, from White Light, included three DHA Light Curtains, which I wanted as 'in view' lights from the back truss and to solidify the haze to make the exposed theatre back wall recede, and three shuttering Revolutions, to let us cut off scenery or frame rooms on the floor, one as a backlight (a second would have been great, but budget, budget, budget), two from the advance bar as steep moveable front specials. Both shows needed footlights, so three L&E battens. Then two R&V Beamlights with scrollers, tucked behind the pros as followspots - a great position for making sure people can always magically be seen, the operators making them 'true' intelligent lights! With both shows needing projection, Creative Technology supplied a High End DL2 - Nigel Hook spent the tech generating then merrily uploading images from his laptop.

With the gear in place, it's really then a matter of making it up as you go along, based on earlier conversations with the directors (albeit brief ones!) and an inner mental 'idea' of what you're trying to achieve. This will vary from show to show but, for example, on Charity it was as simple as it being Charity's show, meaning she should always - in my mind - 'float above' everyone else - definitely, if almost subliminally, brighter. With War the challenge was to differentiate between the 'show within a show' and the 'real' scenes, particularly since we weren't using the traditional Pierot costumes; here we lit the trusses and, gently in broken gobo light, the audience for the 'show' scenes.

The real trick, though, is having the tools - particularly moving lights, desk and operator - to be able to try ideas quickly as the cast rehearse, grabbing the ones that work and discarding those that don't. I'll start with a vague plan for each scene (and a lot of cues in the book - it's easier to have them there then delete some than be trying to write them in during tech), but sometimes it's the solutions reached for in desperation that look wonderful - using the DLCs to frontlight the people who suddenly appeared right upstage on towers in War! After that, it's really a matter of grabbing every spare moment to do notes and fix things...

The Academy has no technical courses and so no technical labour, so we draft in help from drama schools - a collaboration that, as with all areas of this project, has been improved immeasurably by the efforts of Jake and Nic Watson, newly appointed Technical Director of the National Student Drama Festival but for the last few year's RAM's Student Co-Ordinator, plus the show's other professional staff (stage managers Matthew Hales and Debbie Waters, production electrician Martin Goodman, plus technicians Richard Booth and Sam Fluskey).

The result, we all think, is a fantastic opportunity for the students - stage managers from Rose Bruford, electricians from Mountview - to learn by doing, working on relatively big shows away from the familiar 'comfort zone' of their college. They get to face challenges they wouldn't on simpler shows - teching and calling 400+ cue shows for the DSMs (Abbie Farnsworth and Charlotte Eden), everything from using a tallescope and locking off lights tightly enough to survive whacks from scenery to seeing - and being part of - that process of bringing a 2D plan and some vague ideas to 3D life for the electricians (Simeon Miller, Lewis Wilding, Pie Ramsay, Adam 'Twiggy' King, Charlie Strangeways and Maria Gozadinou).

The education extends to the performers: it's amazing how if you explain cross-light to them, they'll pay you back endlessly by cheating their positions to let light in to the eyes of their colleagues, and while this is a showcase they're also learning about radio mics from sound designer Mike Walker and his team, quick changes, and the thrilling tedium of tech.

Best and worst moments? Well, the worst always comes when having created 400 cues in just under three days you have to delete them all and start again at cue 1 on show two... and close second is the realisation that it's the longest day of the year and you've somehow missed the summer (again)!

Best: being part of two fantastic shows (plus the half, the cabaret show lit by Jake), performed by fantastic singers and backed by the kind of orchestra (28 in the pit!) you rarely hear anywhere anymore, let alone up close in a 230 seat theatre. Quite something.

Oh, and this year seeing the Academy realise the debt they owe to Jake Wiltshire for his work upgrading their theatre, and thank him by making him an Honorary Associate of the Academy. A touching and well deserved gesture.

Sweet Charity Pictures >
Oh What A Lovely War Pictures >

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