The production was presented at the Magna Carta School theatre in Surrey, which presented a number of challenges including power, space and access restrictions during school hours.
Lighting designer Andy Vere explains: "We had a very short time in the theatre before the first performance so we arranged to do a pre-rig on the Thursday night, leaving the Friday night for focusing and plotting. Then the cast was onstage at 11am on the Saturday for re-blocking before the first performance at 8pm.
"Having pre-plotted the show back in our offices meant the only touch ups to the cues were with position palettes and intensities."
London Light supplied all the lighting equipment including MAC300s, VL2000 spots, 50m2 of Chroma Q Color Web, 12 Rainbow scrollers and its full ETC Eos system including the iRFR control and RPU backup console. It also supplied two Unique Hazers, an F100 Smoke machine and two HMI follow spots.
Pantographs were also bought in especially for the production. Vere continues, "We hung the pantographs with old TV lamps on them upstage of the Color Web so we could either have the Color Web on or, in the TV station scenes, use it as a gauze. This allowed us to change location between scenes very quickly and, without any flying available, was also very useful."
Matthew Chandler, director of Hairspray and also principal of Songtime Theatre Arts added: "Andy Vere and the London Light Team did an amazing job with our production of Hairspray. We were really over the moon with the end result."
(Jim Evans)
