Attendees at Live Design’s BLMC will attend 9 to 5 on Broadway. To add visual excitement to the set this new musical, the entire back wall is comprised of a stationary Element Labs Stealth LED video surface measuring 41’ wide x 28’ high. The LED images jazz up this new Broadway production, which features book and lyrics by Dolly Parton, sets by Scott Pask, costumes by William Ivey Long, images by Peter Nigrini, lighting/images by Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, and lighting by Kenneth Posner.
“I was brought in during the process in LA,” says Nigrini, who joined the production team at the Ahmanson Theatre. “In LA we layered a scrim, a translucent Rosco RP diffusion sheet, the Stealth, a cyc, and VersaTubes the farthest upstage,” points out Nigrini. We were very pleased with the diffusion sheet, the LEDs, and cyc. The VersaTubes were cut for NY.” With video on the LED screen for the entire show, Nigrini was able to segue from an office environment to three fantasy sequences. PRG supplied the lighting gear and the MBox Extreme used for video playback and processing, while XL Video provided the Stealth wall. A single MA Lighting grandMA console runs the show, unifying the video and lighting cues (additional video credits: programmer: Laura Frank; associate designer/lead editor: Andrew Bauer; assistant designer: Dan Scully).
“A lot of the color comes from the MBox, as a lighting device,” notes Nigrini, who worked with Posner on the Broadway version to coordinate palettes, from cool whites to deep purples, pink, yellow, and orange as the action shifts from the fluorescent world of office lighting to the fantasy numbers. Radiant Imaging from Seattle came in to calibrate the LED screen and eliminate any color differences in the pixels.
“None of the video was shot with a camera,” Nigrini explains, noting that he created a graphic language, somewhat based on film title sequences à la James Bond or Hitchcock, to help tell the story. “This is not video as scenery,” he insists.
Join Peter Nigrini, Jules Fisher, Peggy Eisenhauer, and Kenneth Posner for an in-depth look at the lighting and imaging for 9 to 5 on Wednesday, May 20, as part of the Live Design Master Classes: all attendees will have seen the show the evening before. Register before April 30 and save $100 on all prices to the Live Design Master Classes in sound, lighting, and projection—and hear what the top designers working on Broadway have to say.