grandMA2 in control as Evita tours
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“This production of Evita has been publicised as the original production,” said Glenn. “We had a few of the original creatives out for the set-up, some wonderful people. It was interesting to see them interact with each other, people who have known each other for over 20 years and who are not scared of speaking their minds.” These included lighting designer Richard Winkler from New York, along with his associate Gary Echelmeyer and programmer Joe Allegro.
The current lighting show was originally built on MA in a visualisation studio and arrived in Johannesburg complete, based on the 1998 production. While untested on a full physical rig, the programmers had examples of each light fixture to ensure correct colour matching.
“I didn’t get to really do much with the desk until the first performance,” says Glenn. “Joe even operated the final dress so that they could do live notes. It was great to see him work, and he did interesting things on the console - which I had fun reverse engineering to know what was actually inside.”
The show runs on a grandMA 2 full size FOH console, and there is an MA light on stage – both networked and sessioned. Three NPUs run 10 universes of DMX. “The onstage console is the backup so if anything goes wrong, the on-stage lighting tech will run cues until I can run backstage, but the system has been pretty solid and there have been no issues.”
Apart from controlling lighting, video is also run off the MA. “We’ve got two Catalyst servers backstage and two 20K projectors running video, all of which run on Artnet. It’s different to other shows I’ve worked on where Catalyst has its own cue list. Here the video cue list is on the MA and all the commands to Catalyst are sent from the MA which actually makes it quite a bit easier, because there's only one console to talk to.”
Glenn works closely with Alistair Kilbee from Gearhouse Splitbeam, technical director for the SA and Asian Tours. “We are in touch quite a lot, he handles all the logistics for the moves which is great and he is our go-to person for a whole lot of things.”
(Jim Evans)
