USA - Mason Felps with 46 Entertainment has created an eye-catching lighting design including 68 x Robe iForte and 16 x iSpiider moving lights, supplied by Backstage Productions for the 2025 leg of country music superstar Alan Jackson’s Last Call: One More for the Road tour.
Billed as a celebration to mark the artist’s career, the first section of the tour started in 2022 and continued well into 2025.
Felps likes to keep busy on the road and is also the tour’s production manager / lighting director. He started work for the Alan Jackson camp at the end of 2017, initially as a backline tech, so all his stage and performance delivery technical skills have been able to shine through this period.
The 270-degree visual production design fitted expediently into six semi-trucks with Felps taking care of lighting, video and set, working closely with Wesley Owens from PXLBOX who programmed the Disguise server on the video side to produce a coherent and consistent stage aesthetic.
The video content was a starting point for Felps and Owens to build looks and scenes for all songs in the set, and this will typically comprise re-edited footage from Jackson’s vast archive and back catalogue of hit music videos. These images from the videos are displayed on the 64ft wide upstage screen juxtaposing dramatically with him live onstage.
The lighting style was also developed around the playback content combined with the IMAG mix cut by Steve Thomason, with Felps creating epic looks that matched and complemented the stage and onscreen action.
This look worked well in 2022 when the tour started, and Felps used Robe Esprites as the main workhorse fixtures which he loved. After a break in 2023, the essence of this design was reimagined for the 2024 and 2025 legs of the tour, with Felps wanting to retain the look and feel but max it out more and make it bigger to suit even larger venues.
“With Esprites having been my key feature before, we then swapped them out for iFortes which gave us that extra brightness and punch with their excellent optics, colour mixing capabilities and camera compatibility.”
The roof is filled with a tiered wide-truss design with iFortes scattered across the trusses and positioned perfectly to deliver all the basic beam work and specials, while the iSpiiders are the main stage washes, picked for their “smoothness and reliability.”
Felps has also utilised Spiiders and iSpiiders many times. RoboSpot is another Robe product he really rates. While there are none on this tour as they use in-house spots at each venue, they did use iForte LTXs for one show and he thinks this is an “incredible” system.
Joining Felps on the lighting crew for the latest leg of the tour are Matt Stigile (crew chief) and lighting techs Claude Thomas and Miles Shelton from Backstage Productions.
The video vendor is 46 Entertainment, looked after on the road by crew chief Jesse LaVallee and LED techs Tim Wilbanks and RJ Cavanaugh. Audio is supplied by Clair Global, the FOH engineer is Glen Collett with Carson Brannock on monitors.
