Unusual Rigging chosen for Tina Turner musical
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Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, the production charts Turner's journey from humble beginnings in Nutbush, Tennessee, to her transformation into the global queen of rock'n'roll. Production manager Sacha Milroy knew that rigging the show successfully required a sound knowledge of the theatre and so turned to Unusual Rigging to handle the project.
"This is actually the first time I've worked with Unusual," said Sacha. "Of course, I've known of them for many years and Simon Stone, who is senior project manager at Unusual, has a great reputation which precedes him. I was also aware of all the amazing work they'd done to transform the grid of the Aldwych Theatre for Beautiful - The Carole King Musical.
“The challenge we had with Tina was that this show had a huge amount of flying. We needed to estimate the weights of all the flying elements, work out how to fit it all in the grid and decide which pieces to manually fly with the in-house counterweight system and which to automate. It entailed putting in five large intermediate trusses that fixed directly into the walls of the theatre to rig the 4 automated LX trusses and a 10m x 6m LED wall from and derigging and diverting every single one of the 40 in-house cradles.
"We drew up a groundplan of all the flown pieces and explained to Simon and his colleague Jeremy Featherstone (an engineering genius!) what we wanted to achieve. They found a way of solving everything we threw at them and nothing was ever a problem."
Set wise, Sacha admits the production has relatively traditional scenic elements, but the complexity was in fitting it all in the theatre - it’s a very busy show and every inch of the theatre is used including the basement and sub-basement.
"We have a series of lifts that come up through the floor with doors and walls that get changed below stage, a ring revolve, a very large LX and sound rig, an automated band truck and lots of flown scenic elements - it’s a very busy automation show. Simon and Jeremy were fantastic at helping us decide which flown pieces we should automate and which should be manually flown.”
She concluded: "I've never known a team like Unusual. They appear on the first day - and after that they're like little invisible elves - they disappear into the roof, you rarely see them again until they reappear a couple of weeks later saying they’re done in the grid and then you see the results of their amazing work! It's been a huge collaborative effort and great fun working with them. We have achieved everything we hoped we could for this production.”
(Jim Evans)
