Marshall Bissett grew up in Central Scotland and studied theater direction at the Old Vic Theatre School. He worked on the original productions of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and toured with such acts as Chicago, Neil Diamond, and The Rolling Stones. In 1983 he founded TMB, a worldwide supplier of lighting equipment. He’s kept his hand in directing, which in retirement now vies for his time along with freelance writing and fly-fishing.
Sometimes chance encounters turn into lifelong friendships and so it was for a young Jeff Ravitz. In the late ‘70s he was working with the Chicago band Styx and they had a show in Madison’s Civic Center. While he was setting up his front of house consoles—a standard two-scene preset linked to a...
I first met Bob Johnston in North America’s largest indoor rehearsal room—an Air Canada aircraft hangar where the Rolling Stones were rehearsing the 1989 Steel Wheels tour. I was working at TMB then and somehow we had sold the band on a set of enormous, nine-cell, color-changing fixtures, each...
The residents of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul offset their harsh winters with a vibrant year-round arts scene. The great twentieth-century industrialists who made their fortunes in flour, cattle and steel were also noted philanthropists whose legacy survives today in the many...
