Legally Blonde at the 850-seat Skirball Centre for the Performing Arts
USA - Lighting designer Mason Delman lit an NYU Tisch School of the Arts production of Legally Blonde with Elation Artiste Picasso moving heads and praised the multi-functionality and responsiveness of the high-performance LED profile luminaire. 4Wall Entertainment in New York, with Al Ridella as key account manager, provided 10 Artiste Picasso fixtures for the Tisch New Theatre student organisation production at the Skirball Centre in November.
Delman comments, “This is a theatrical show and the Picasso fit in well. It was a bit smaller and we didn’t need the extra bells and whistles that the Monet has. Being compact was convenient and better fit our needs.”
At roughly two an a half hours, Legally Blonde is not a short, easy-to-light pop musical yet a fairly complicated show as Delman explains. “Most musicals that are adapted from movies are a bit more intricate than a show written for the stage because they tend to have many locations and quick scene jumps, even in a single number. That necessitated a fixture that could fulfil a number of roles.”
On top of that, the designer says the schedule was extremely tight with only 12 hours of tech time and six hours for a dress rehearsal. “Because of that, we needed a fixture that could do what we needed it to do quickly and the Picasso fit the bill.” With speed of the essence, a feature of the Picasso that the designer says was a big time saver was the auto focus on the gobo wheels, as well as the fast zoom and ability to quickly call up saturated reds or blues using the CMY colour mixing system and colour wheel. “All of this led to speed, which was absolutely the name of the game in this case.”
Legally Blonde ran from 1-3 November at the 850-seat Skirball Centre for the Performing Arts, the largest theatre on the NYU campus.
(Jim Evans)

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