I'm going to start a series of posts on the challenges of lighting the Empress Theatre stage. And there are a lot of challenges.... Let's start with the main stage lighting, since it is obviously the most important performance area to light.
The Empress Main Stage is the easiest performance area in the Empress to light, but the Empress' architecture still makes lighting it quite a challenge. Since the stage is essentially theatre in the round, it requires twice as many lighting instruments as it would take to light a similar space in a conventional proscenium theatre.
The Empress Stage is on the small side, about 25 x 25 feet. Until recently, there were seats litterally on the stage on three sides, and there are still seats on the stage on the east side of the hall. Directors and actors need the whole space. At the same time, it would really be bad form to light the audience. So there is a challenge to keep the performers visible on the edges of the stage. As a performer moves toward the far side of the stage, he walks out of the light cone visible from the other side. Removing the two rows of seats on the north and south will be helpful with this because the audience is now above the stage about a foot, but it won't solve the whole problem.
Because of the down stage bridge and proscenium upstage, the range of instrument placement is also a challenge. Typically, it is good to have lighting coming from 45 degrees on either side, so that a key and fill can be set up, but these angles just aren't possible in the Empress. The first pipe is directly over the downstage edge of the stage, the last pipe is directly over the edge of the proscenium. One color must come almost straight on (left or right) on the upstage or downstage edges. For the audience on the north or south sides of the hall, we lose modeling and detail because there are hardly any shadows. For the people sitting on the east side (downstage) the downstage lighting is directly from left or right, instead of 45 degrees to the front. This creates too much modeling and some unnatural shadow effects when the actors are downstage.
Using the pipes over the center of the stage, the angles don't work very well either. Douglas and I often argue about whether the instuments that light the downstage acting areas should be on pipe 2 or 3 (the two middle lighting pipes next to the catwalk), and vice versa for the upstage areas. The best angles actually come from pipe 4 for the downstage areas and 1 for the upstage areas, but we can't balance the center that way and putting all of the instruments on just 2 pipes would overload the pipes. Pipe 3 for downstage and 2 for upstage is better for angles, and 2 for downstage/3 for upstage provides the best balance. We've settled, for now, on the latter arrangement.
We've considered putting some additional instruments under the bridge to help on the downstage side, but we don't have the instruments, dimmers or electrical capacity to do it yet. Anything we put down there has to be small enough that it won't block the audience's view or be a head bumping hazzard. In time, as resources become available, we'll probably put some PAR-16 "Peanuts" under the bridge, but there are other needs competing with that one.
Because of the theatre in the round set up, each acting area on the stage needs to have 4 lighting instruments focused on it; two warm (amber) and two cool (blue). If we divide the stage into nine areas, that works out to 36 lighting instruments. Each instrument requires a separate dimmner. (We are currently using ellipsoidal spotlights with 750 W lamps. Our distributed dimmer packs are rated for a total load of 2400 W across 4 dimmer channels, and each is plugged into a 20 A circuit. We have a total of 20 dimmer packs. Our capacity limits are a topic for another day.)
Because the beams are conical and focused, we need to overlap each area enough that the actors don't walk out of the light when moving from one area to another. More instruments with tighter cones would give us the ability to isolate each acting area much better, but we'd have to make compromises in other parts of the plot to do this, so we use nine acting areas and have each area overlap significantly into the adjoining areas. This was a significant problem with the Fruma-Sarah scene in Fiddler on the Roof and the barn scenes in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. In both cases, we had to use follow spots to get light on the actors when they were higher than normal people are tall.
That's probably enough for now. In future posts, I'll talk about the "landings" at the down right and down left corners of the stage that lead off stage, lighting the stairs (each of the 4 sets poses different problems), lighting under the proscenium and on top of it, using follow spots, and the physical and electrical limits on our theatre plant.
The Empress Main Stage is the easiest performance area in the Empress to light, but the Empress' architecture still makes lighting it quite a challenge. Since the stage is essentially theatre in the round, it requires twice as many lighting instruments as it would take to light a similar space in a conventional proscenium theatre.
The Empress Stage is on the small side, about 25 x 25 feet. Until recently, there were seats litterally on the stage on three sides, and there are still seats on the stage on the east side of the hall. Directors and actors need the whole space. At the same time, it would really be bad form to light the audience. So there is a challenge to keep the performers visible on the edges of the stage. As a performer moves toward the far side of the stage, he walks out of the light cone visible from the other side. Removing the two rows of seats on the north and south will be helpful with this because the audience is now above the stage about a foot, but it won't solve the whole problem.
Because of the down stage bridge and proscenium upstage, the range of instrument placement is also a challenge. Typically, it is good to have lighting coming from 45 degrees on either side, so that a key and fill can be set up, but these angles just aren't possible in the Empress. The first pipe is directly over the downstage edge of the stage, the last pipe is directly over the edge of the proscenium. One color must come almost straight on (left or right) on the upstage or downstage edges. For the audience on the north or south sides of the hall, we lose modeling and detail because there are hardly any shadows. For the people sitting on the east side (downstage) the downstage lighting is directly from left or right, instead of 45 degrees to the front. This creates too much modeling and some unnatural shadow effects when the actors are downstage.
Using the pipes over the center of the stage, the angles don't work very well either. Douglas and I often argue about whether the instuments that light the downstage acting areas should be on pipe 2 or 3 (the two middle lighting pipes next to the catwalk), and vice versa for the upstage areas. The best angles actually come from pipe 4 for the downstage areas and 1 for the upstage areas, but we can't balance the center that way and putting all of the instruments on just 2 pipes would overload the pipes. Pipe 3 for downstage and 2 for upstage is better for angles, and 2 for downstage/3 for upstage provides the best balance. We've settled, for now, on the latter arrangement.
We've considered putting some additional instruments under the bridge to help on the downstage side, but we don't have the instruments, dimmers or electrical capacity to do it yet. Anything we put down there has to be small enough that it won't block the audience's view or be a head bumping hazzard. In time, as resources become available, we'll probably put some PAR-16 "Peanuts" under the bridge, but there are other needs competing with that one.
Because of the theatre in the round set up, each acting area on the stage needs to have 4 lighting instruments focused on it; two warm (amber) and two cool (blue). If we divide the stage into nine areas, that works out to 36 lighting instruments. Each instrument requires a separate dimmner. (We are currently using ellipsoidal spotlights with 750 W lamps. Our distributed dimmer packs are rated for a total load of 2400 W across 4 dimmer channels, and each is plugged into a 20 A circuit. We have a total of 20 dimmer packs. Our capacity limits are a topic for another day.)
Because the beams are conical and focused, we need to overlap each area enough that the actors don't walk out of the light when moving from one area to another. More instruments with tighter cones would give us the ability to isolate each acting area much better, but we'd have to make compromises in other parts of the plot to do this, so we use nine acting areas and have each area overlap significantly into the adjoining areas. This was a significant problem with the Fruma-Sarah scene in Fiddler on the Roof and the barn scenes in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. In both cases, we had to use follow spots to get light on the actors when they were higher than normal people are tall.
That's probably enough for now. In future posts, I'll talk about the "landings" at the down right and down left corners of the stage that lead off stage, lighting the stairs (each of the 4 sets poses different problems), lighting under the proscenium and on top of it, using follow spots, and the physical and electrical limits on our theatre plant.
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