A week before opening night, lighting designer Brian Gale is on stage setting trim heights and focusing lights. He works with the confidence and calm that comes with a CV that would leave anyone slack-jawed. While officially 'retired' after 24 years as a fulltime designer with the Walt Disney Company, he is currently engaged as a consultant on six Disney projects, including in Tokyo and Shanghai.
"With Disney, I left through one door and came back through another," laughs Gale. With his work on the Stagecraft Institute in Las Vegas, lighting major productions at the Pasadena Playhouse, La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts and the Mark Taper Forum, Gale has a breathless schedule. At least he has the luxury of choosing his theatrical projects, allowing him to work with favourite directors and designers. He explains: "The best directors are also good editors. I always give directors a lot of choices and let them make the decision."
His links with ETC reach back into corporate prehistory. "I first worked with Fred Foster while he was contracted to build products for Berkey Colortran, designing a control system for Epcot on Parade," says Gale, "and I was one of the first to use the ETC Concept desks designed for Disneyland in 1982." After ETC acquired LMI and got into the dimmer business, Gale was one of the company's early corporate clients. "I ordered 10 or 12 dimmer racks for the Pleasure Island attraction in Florida, and Fred was my install technician," says Gale. In a great slice of ETC history, he is proud that he convinced Fred to write a Macintosh interface, so that a club DJ could run his cues on HyperCard. "I am not sure Fred has forgiven me for that," he jokes.
His current project, Carrie - The Killer Musical Experience, looks like an ETC fixture catalogue. "I have equal numbers of Source Four LED Series 1 and 2 Lustrs, Selador Desires and Classics - my keylight is 60 tungsten Source Fours with a lot of 26-degree lenses. The LED Series 2 Lustr makes a perfect downlight, and of course the whole rig runs on Eos Ti," says Gale.
Like many theatrical designers, he was disappointed with first-generation LED fixtures. For a man who can recite gel swatch-books by number, colour rendition is everything: "Theatre designers really deserve the new colour technology - it has great resonance and is nuanced and subtle."
(Jim Evans)
