Multi-award-winning lighting designer Kevin Adams talked to Live Design about transitioning Funny Girl from its Broadway run to the North American tour.
Funny Girl first opened on Broadway in April 2022, underwent some updates in September of 2022, and began its North American tour a year later.
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Read below for Adams' suggestions for avoiding major pitfalls when designing for an array of venues, limiting spare parts, designing for a quick load-in, and the advice he was given by Natasha Katz and Don Holder for the Spring Awakening national tour.
The Tour
Tours are defined by how many trucks the tour has and by how much load-in time you have. The Funny Girl tour has five trucks: two for scenery, one for costumes, one for sound and props to share, and one for electrics. The show loads in on Tuesday mornings and performs that night and in our first year we are playing full weeks or multiple weeks. So, what can you fit in a single truck, and what can you get up and focus in that short day? That’s what you get to make a show with.
The first musical tour I sent out was in 2009 for Spring Awakening, and I asked Natasha Katz and Don Holder for advice. They both said the same thing, “Keep the front of house hang as simple as possible. And do yourself a favor, don’t use any movers front of house.”
The Venues
Front of house positions differ wildly in touring houses. Some houses have multiple box booms, and some have only two, and they may be two blocks away from the stage. Some have a long generous mezzanine rail, and some have ten feet of a rail at the center. A few have front truss or catwalk positions but most do not, so it helps to hang as little as possible front of house because if you hang too much and the real estate doesn’t exist, then the tour crew will not hang it. Keep it as simple as possible.
Front Of House
Funny Girl has very little front of house and it takes the stage management team (because that’s who focus the show) very little time to focus it. There is a two-color Leko wash that goes across five areas of downstage space. Sometimes those positions are nice and steep, sometimes flat and really far away.
There are six Lustrs on the rail for lighting the show scrim and whatever else might look good with that same focus. It makes a nice deep blue or purple wash on the full open set.
There are two movers on the rail. This is around my tenth tour and it’s the first time I’ve placed movers in the house. This show has a lot of drops and soft goods so I needed them to light in flat on all that stuff. In addition, they often focus in with soft, deeply saturated, floating square templates on drops and walls. At every venue the tour crew has to fly the goods in and refocus these slightly because the movers hang in a different place in each venue. The crew makes them work the best they can and readjusts the focus.
We only have 22 circuits front of house. I think the other musical tours I have done have had between 46 and 52 FOH circuits. When I’m making a show on Broadway that I think might do well and eventually tour, I try to keep in the back of my head what a major reduction of front light units might be like so that it’s not a shock later on down the road.
The Fixtures
The other musicals I have toured pretty much had the same onstage touring plots as their Broadway plots. However, the Funny Girl set has been mostly redesigned for the tour, so the onstage rig looks very little like the Broadway rig. There was a request from Networks, our touring producer, to eliminate all conventionals from overhead positions as it just takes too long to ladder around with a crew and focus them all so we have no conventionals at all onstage. We have three electrics that are well stocked with profile movers and LED wash units. These specific unit types are what the shop had in stock. Then we have a smaller, fourth electric upstage to do a little work on various this, that, and the others.
It’s best to have fewer varieties of movers so that you aren’t traveling with spares for too many kinds of units. We only have two kinds of movers on this tour.
We have four ladders with two profile movers and a sound monitor each. And we have very little low on the deck. We started tech with a six-foot LED vertical strip in each wing but the spread wasn’t working so well so we changed over to GLP impression Xbar 20s. There are also low and high rows of LED strips upstage for a cyc.
On the apron, we have bright Rosco cube footlights that light a tremendous amount of the show. We didn’t have these on Broadway but they are great. Bright and light for some scenes and songs. Deeply saturated and still bright for other moments.
Finally we have eight LED movers on the sides of the touring sound towers. These do a lot of work downstage, which is where most of the show is staged. You never know where these towers will land in a touring house so we try and make as few focus presets as possible. I think we have two or three focus presets for each unit. If I’m touring a rock/pop musical I usually put blinders or some kind of rock spectacle device in the towers.
- CHROMA-Q Color Force II 72
- GLP impression Xbar 20
- ROSCO Braq Cube 4CA (RGBA)
- Martin Mac Viper Performance
- S4-14 LED S3 Lustr