Billy Elliot, the musical which has become a runaway success in London, Sydney and New York, is set to go worldwide this year, with shows in Korea and Chicago already agreed. By the end of 2010 there will also be a touring production moving to a different US city every three or four weeks.
Until now, productions have always included set pieces which revolve and emerge through trap doors, requiring extensive digging through the floor of theatres, which will not be possible on tour, so the set has been suitably modified. Lighting designer Rick Fisher also took the opportunity to consolidate some of the lighting on the show. He explains: “We needed to be able to keep the get in and get out times as short as possible, so that the first performance in a new venue could be within the week of moving.
“We’ve packaged the lighting to stay on the trusses as far as possible, while preserving the useful mix of equipment in the show, keeping the look as theatrical as it is at the moment. Even after some consolidation, we still have some 50 ETC Source Four Revolutions among the total of 120 moving lights – there are now as many movers as conventionals.
“Each time we do a new show, I look at where the lights are and see if we can remove some or replace them with different types of lighting – so, for example, last time I looked at the rig and realised that some fixtures had just two or three focus positions while others rarely moved. This meant I could reduce the number of movers by 10-15% for the Chicago show.”
For the new shows, Fisher has also decided to move the show onto a new control desk: an ETC Eos. “It was a hard decision to make,” he explains, “but we were thinking of the future. The show might be running for another five or 10 years and we wanted to have a future proof control system. Eos seemed to be a good choice, especially since we’ll be spending a lot of time in the US where ETC is a key player in the lighting control market.”
Eos continues to make strong inroads into the theatrical market across the world, alongside its smaller siblings Ion and Element. The latter is ETC’s newest control desk, aimed at smaller theatrical venues and schools that depend on single desk operators or volunteer staff. It is designed to handle rigs kitted out predominantly with conventional luminaires, while also accommodating some LED fixtures and/or a small number of simple moving lights.
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