The Mystery of Edwin Drood

Last spring I did my first large scale Lighting Design in the 600-seat proscenium Hanaway Theater. The Hanway Theater shares a space with the Elizabeth Cheney Studio Theater in the Silver Center for the Arts at Plymouth State University, and during the time of this design the Cheney Theater was holding multiple different shows using the Silver Center's LED Fixtures, so I worked with primarily conventional Chauvet Source 4s. The intelligent fixtures I had access to be the Cyclorama's Colorsource Cyc Lights and the two Lonestar Movers. Fortunately, Edwin Drood is an older musical, so I had the ability to keep it simple in my design.

I had originally planned to use the R13 (Straw Tint) and R66 (Cool Blue) gels for my cool and warm lighting and have each of my eleven focus points have those two colors alongside R37 (Pale Rose Pink) on some of the upstage focus points. However, once I was in the space testing out the gels I had realized R13 was a great way to make the actors look sick. So, I instead went with the classic warm gel being R02 (Bastard Amber). I had also noticed there were not enough of the R66, so I asked my TD to get more, and he said to just use the ones close to it. So, I had used R67 (LT Sky Blue), R68 (Parry Sky Blue), and R69 (Brilliant Blue) alongside the little R66 I had. I actually had ended up changing out for majority of them using R67 because it gave the lighter blue which I was looking for. I also knew this was in an older theater, so I used the Backstage Gobo to put on the back platform to give the illusion of the lights shining through the backstage sandbags and old fly rails. Then I used the classic Bark Breakup 1 for texture alongside Construction A.

Unfortunately, right before our focus day our Genie lift had broken so when focus came, we had to bounce focus the entire thing. On the bright side though, the front of House fixtures was on a catwalk, so we didn't have to worry about those as much, but the three electrics we had took use multiple days of attempts. The first electric had a light even fall off when it came in, due to the C-Clamp being unsecure and no safety cable was used, nobody was injured thankfully. The set was also almost complete during focus so we couldn't fly any of them to the ground, so my focusers had to use 6 -foot ladders to reach two of them. However, we eventually finished after the week was over even with changing the plans multiple times and bounce focusing my wonderful and patient peers did great and we were able to make more precise adjustments after when the lift was fixed.

Once we had arrived at designer week, I had created plans for the show where most of the fun lights would be with spotlights which also helped give the "old theater" feel. Since the show had a lot of solo numbers and movement, I had two spotlight operators to focus on large groups or single actors when needed, each with a selection of five gels. When we got closer to the show I had realized two things, one, my boom lights weren't doing their desired effect, which was creating a ghost effect for Rosa) and two, the upstage platform was way too dark. So, to fix the first problems we used the movers with a gentle rotation and one of the pre-installed gobos and removed the booms. Then to fix the second problem I hung two of the boom lights on each side of the pin rail with R66 to amplify the lights and that lit up the platform significantly more.

Once the show went up, I had realized how much effort I put into the show and decided I was proud of my work. This show taught me a lot, it gave me more problem-solving skills, how to work with primarily conventional fixtures, how to make a show fun with minimal tools, and how to direct and work with my peers to achieve a vision despite setbacks. Thank you to the Silver Center shop for your excellent help and patience, and for helping me achieve my first large scale lighting design.