Associate lighting designer is Daniel Walker with Kristina Kloss as assistant lighting designer and Rob Halliday handling the lighting programming. "Generally, we were very pleased with the decision to use the MAC 700s," says Walker, "Especially once we put them in 'studio mode', which made them much quieter."
Rob Halliday, who has worked on both the London and Broadway productions, says: "The previous version of the show, in London, used a different automated spot luminaire. We liked the units, but ideally we wanted a unit that offered colour mixing rather than a fixed colour wheel because the luminaire didn't fade from colour to colour very elegantly and the nature of the show is that a lot of moments benefit from a colour dissolve. We never knew in advance which colours we'd be going between and the MAC 700 solved that problem. The other bonuses it gave us were the animation wheel, which turned out to be quite useful in a couple of scenes, and the low noise 'studio mode', which allowed us to satisfy the requirements from the director that the rig be as quiet as possible."
The MAC 700s are located at various locations: FOH truss positions, Proscenium booms, on-stage overhead electrics, SL & SR shins and side-stage ladders. "The lights have held up pretty well with very few reliability problems," says Halliday. "They are accurate, responsive and well behaved."
Moving light technician, Andy Catron, continues: "I think the MAC 700s have been a very solid light for this show. We got all of our units brand new from the factory, so I would expect that they would be pretty solid. I find that the MAC 700 is very user friendly in the respect that the gobo module and colour module are easy to replace, should the need arise."
(Chris Henry)
