Richard Knight, the associate lighting designer who came out to recreate Natasha Katz's original design in Johannesburg, was also the original moving light programmer for the Beauty and the Beast tour which successfully ran in the United States from 2000 to 2004. The show is based on the original Broadway production produced in 1994.
The South African contingent of Programmers included Glenn Duncan, DWR Distribution's Nick Britz, and of course the South African associate designer Denis Hutchinson who also did his share of programming.
Hutchinson commented that the rig was fairly conventional, with five over stage bars and corresponding ladders, with 42 Robe moving lights, plus copious lights for the upstage Bounce system to light the cloths.
The original Beauty and the Beast was programmed on another desk: "We got hold of an old data disc which had the conventional lighting on it," said Knight. "Richard Lambert from MA Lighting helped us with the translation for the grandMA. I then transferred the moving light program across to the grandMA on top of the cue structure.
"The intention of importing the original files using the ASCII conversion was to get as close as possible to the original lighting structure. With the tight timescale of the SA production we needed to have a solid basis prepared to stand half a chance. Once we had that we could then add ideas for the South African production. If I know one thing it is that change is here to stay and that includes changes to lighting technology, so where possible we added to the excellent original."
Full technical was supplied by Prosound. DWR Distribution cc is the exclusive distributor of MA Lighting in South Africa.
(Claire Beeson)
