Featuring a variety of music that spans from rock n' roll to gospel, as well as dancing, aerialists, comedy, magic and more, Smoky Mountain Opry includes something for everybody and the lighting system needs to be able to keep up and transition accordingly.
Smoky Mountain Opry is produced by the Fee/Hedrick Family Entertainment Group, one of the largest show production companies in the southeast. Technical director for Fee/Hedrick Family Entertainment is Marshall Whaley who was looking for something to replace the large variety of fixtures they had, some 1200W discharge fixtures, and met up with Chuck Dillingham, director of lighting operations at Elation dealer TMG Production Services of Nashville, to discuss options.
"Over the years this theatre just had such a mixture of fixtures and we wanted to get down to only a couple of fixture types," Marshall explains. "I also had a budget to work with and Chuck's recommendation was the Platinum Spot 15R Pro. When we did a shoot-out against our MAC 2K's we were surprised by the brightness of the Elation 15R units and decided to go with them." Marshall was looking for an affordable light with CMY colour mixing, lots of gobo options and an output as bright as or brighter than the MAC 2000 Performance II units they would replace and found it in the 300W Platinum Spot 15R Pro.
TMG was the lighting vendor for the new gear, which debuted on the Smoky Mountain Opry show in February. A special holiday show dedicated completely to the magic of Christmas is coming this holiday season.
(Jim Evans)
