When I was 13 years old, my mother took me to my first concert to see Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden. A few songs in, I very quickly became fascinated and enamored with the show’s lighting, having never seen anything so colorful and visually stimulating before. I was mesmerized by the ever-searching beams from the moving lights and the blinding strobes and flashes during the song “Pressure.” I knew then and there, at that moment, that I wanted to become involved in production and live entertainment. I never thought that, almost 20 years later, I would get to meet Steve Cohen, the lighting designer for that tour, and get to see his new production design for Billy Joel’s residency performances at Madison Square Garden.
Scheduled to perform once a month for the foreseeable future, Joel’s new production has been consistently selling out to record crowds.
As you look around the arena and see every seat filled with fans singing every single lyric, you start to wonder why they didn’t think of this sooner. Well, it so happens that the idea of The Piano Man doing a residency somewhere in the world came about almost 15 years ago during a leg of a Billy Joel/Elton John stadium tour. “Fast forward to last year, when we really didn’t know how much Billy wanted to do,” says Cohen, “but it sort of took on its own momentum when he decided to commit to one performance, and everyone at the Garden said, ‘You could probably play here until you don’t want to play anymore.’” At that point, a plan was created, which was later set in motion, for the residency to be an ongoing series. Cohen says the team was conservative in their approach “because you can be humbled at any time.”
Designing for, and touring with, Joel for 40 years, Cohen started out as lighting designer and early on got involved in how the shows were put together, including the pacing and set list creation. Scenic and overall show design soon fell to Cohen, along with Brian Ruggles, Joel’s long time FOH engineer and live sound producer, and with the advent of video design, he became the overall creative director for Joel’s touring shows.
The scenic design for this specific show is simple yet effective. “The stage itself is a simple, clean platform. Billy’s piano is on a turntable so he can face different parts of the audience throughout the night, which is kind of a challenge for lighting because you focus a song with him facing one way, and all of a sudden, you’re lighting the tip of the piano instead of him,” says Cohen.
The residency at Madison Square Garden is designed as a 360° experience, with seats sold on all sides of the arena. Cohen explains the organic nature of the production design: “We sell every seat in the house and cannot obstruct views, so the trim has to be super high. We’re in New York, and video comes in rectangular panels,” he says, adding that the inherent architecture evokes a cityscape.
Add in the PA, and you have an impression of the New York City skyline. “Those big pieces of blocks were the initial overlay. Then what I wound up doing, which is how I paint, is I filled the negative space with other elements, in this case trussing and lighting. So there is vertical and horizontal pre-rigged truss outlining the ‘buildings,’” says Cohen.
To provide video content to the seats behind the stage, instead of having standard T-truss with 16:9 ratio projection surfaces on both sides, Screenworks, who also provided the video package, had drops created by Sew What? that attach to the back of custom Daktronics 10mm modules with Tait frames. Content is routed to Christie 20K Roadster projectors that are rigged upstage to provide the same visuals for the projection surfaces as the LED.
The designer built the entire environment in Autodesk 3ds Studio Max, manipulating elements within the virtual environment. “All kinds of messaging had to happen with the various pieces,” says Cohen. “It starts out as a conceptual design, which turns into the practical execution of that by filling the space, and then it all has to be torn apart a little bit to ensure it works and plays, and then we have to make sure it’s financially viable with only one show a month. Then the content comes into play, and there’s nothing better than images of New York, whether they’re architectural, helicopter footage, aged and distressed photographs; it’s so rich.”
Fixtures Of Choice
Cohen’s fixtures of choice are the Martin Mac Viper Profile and GLP impression X4. Cohen is effusive about both fixtures, describing the Viper Profile, of which there are 113 in the plot, as the best hard-edged fixture out there “that does all of the things I need it to do,” and the X4—101 of those—as “an LED wash that I think is one of the best on the market.” Never overplaying his hand, Cohen uses both to drastically change the visual environment from song to song, mixing yellows and greens, blues and reds, and hard- and soft-edge focus to achieve dynamically opposite, yet complementary, lighting looks. Lighting is supplied by Atomic Lighting.
The show is programmed and run by Cohen’s longtime collaborator, Mark Foffano. Their setup is unique and specific to their style, having worked together for more than 17 years. “Mark is my programmer, and he’s more than a programmer,” says Cohen. “I believe that a designer is only as good as the guy who’s pushing the buttons, and he has to be a designer in his own right. The interesting thing is that Mark, like me, likes to collaborate and likes to give and take. We’re like brothers, and we love each other. He started with me as the fourth man on the lighting crew—as a tech—and he would sit around after everyone else had gone to the bar and watch us program. He wanted to work. He’s evolved and become part of the Billy Joel family. What winds up happening when the two of us meet is that the sum is greater than the parts, so he’s a very integral part of the process.” Foffano is equally enthusiastic about their successful working relationship. “It’s really a partnership,” he says. “Steve’s fun to work for because he he lets you go off on your own, and then he edits.”
Foffano also credits working for Joel with keeping him in the entertainment business. “I had gotten to that point of my career where I asked myself if I really wanted to keep doing this,” he says. “It was during ‘Piano Man,’ believe it or not. Billy started singing the song, and he stopped to hear the audience, and I looked around and saw everyone in the audience singing the lyrics, and I remembered why I like doing this.”
Foffano runs the show’s main control console, a Martin M6 that he calls “extremely intuitive.” Cohen runs an expansion wing that is setup for a few functions for certain songs. Individual faders control intensities of certain groups, such as hard-edge floor fixtures, hard-edge air fixtures, wash lights, towers, etc. Cohen explains, “There are also momentary buttons that are all set up as swaps only, so if I have a bunch of faders up, and I want a button that blacks everything out, I just turn that button on.” Every song is programmed and has its own cue structure, but there are roughly five songs in the set list that Cohen will not program and runs on the fly on the expansion wing.
The video design for the show is unique, with the control setup allowing Cohen to edit and manipulate video on the fly, including adding effects to previously rendered video as well as the live camera feeds being fed to him. Using a Martin Maxedia media server, which is set up next to the M6 expansion wing, Cohen says the process is like having a moving paint box at front of house. “I’m constantly manipulating the video; there’s a lot of organic stuff going on.” The video is cued by the Maxedia with the M6 triggering it, but Cohen has manual override at any time. “I can turn it off. I can change the input. I also capture all the live cams, run them through the Maxedia, and then filter the cameras—black and white, multiple exposures. I have an overhead camera that I multiply seven times so I have vertical keyboards going all the way across the screens, so we play and have fun with it.”
Video content is rich, with images of New York driving and adding to the pace of the performance. “All of the characters in Billy’s songs are residents of this part of the world, so you end up worrying you’re kind of hammering the same nail over and over again, but I think New York is the greatest city in the world and has layer upon layer of interest that all gets wrapped around this wonderful, unique architecture,” says Cohen. “It never gets boring to me. When we shot the documentary of The Last Play At Shea shows, I had this helicopter footage that was shot for the opening of the movie, but we only used like 12 seconds for the movie, so I had 10 or 15 minutes of these incredible shots of flying over the Hudson River and revealing the Statue of Liberty. So in ‘New York State Of Mind,’ you see footage that never made it into the film.”
Cohen says he has two favorite moments in the show: “the beginning of the show at the Garden when the audience is singing the lyrics to the opening song, and it blows my mind every time. My other favorite is when we discover a moment that is chillingly good. The other night, we did ‘Goodnight Saigon,’ and we brought these veterans, NYPD, and firefighters up on stage. The audience saw them on the screen and started going crazy before the chorus even began. You can’t pay for those moments. The best part of the gig is getting to do what I love, and I get to hang with my friends whom I’ve known for over 30 years. It’s great; it’s an awesome thing.”
Twenty years after my last experience at a Billy Joel concert, I was once again blown away by both Joel’s performance and Cohen’s dynamic design. As a native New Yorker and an entertainment technology geek, I can’t help but agree with Cohen: it truly is an awesome thing.
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Steven Battaglia is a New York-based production manager and lighting designer. He is currently the operations manager at Baryshnikov Arts Center.