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Lighting Designer David Sexton employed High End Systems Ministar fixtures for Broadway Workshop productions of Head Over Heels and Beauty and The Beast, held in New York City’s Baruch Performing Arts Center. Funded through Project Broadway, Broadway Workshop produces full scale Main Stage youth theater productions featuring cast members ranging from 10 to 20 years of age. Project Broadway offers scholarships for children to participate in intensive theater training programs and workshops focusing on self-confidence and exploration of the theater arts. Sexton has enjoyed a long association with Broadway Workshop’s annual projects.
The Baruch PAC space houses a flexible black box theatre with a 20’ trim height; it includes a tension wire grid, which Sexton says is 'both really great and really challenging at the same time.' He continues, “It makes loading in really quick and easy, but lighting has to deal with shadows and such, which I encountered quite a bit in these performances.”
Sexton used 15 Ministar fixtures in identical plots for the two productions. He placed three fixtures at FOH for front light specials. Eight were hung in two banks of four directly over stage. Finally, three were hung upstage in a lane to help pick performers out upstage against the cyc for downlight specials, template washes, and color washes. He says, “For the trim height, and what else they were competing with in the room, I thought they were really punching through color in there. With some of the more saturated combinations, I did lose a little bit of output, but I was impressed with how even the color was and how many options it offered, and the zoom worked perfectly fine for our purposes. I was initially sad there was no traditional color mixing or iris, but Ministar looked really great for my color washes and templates, and also in highlighting performers. I was impressed with how punchy that fixture is.”
Over two concurrent whirlwind weeks, Project Broadway produced Head Over Heels with a group of performers, with the second week of the shows using the youngest actors. Sexton adds, “We always do a junior version of a show, and this year it was Beauty and the Beast. Seeing those little kids in those costumes was just really glorious!
The Ministar fixtures were supplied by Hayden Productions, a dedicated lighting vendor located an hour away from Philadelphia in central New Jersey. Hayden’s co-owner Jason Marsh says, “The majority of our work is off Broadway theater, as well as local community theatre and the educational market."
Marsh describes the balance of their inventory as ‘straight ETC’, adding “one main factor in why people use us is that they can call the owner of the company – there’s two of us - plus we will purchase what the designers want. The theatre customer is just so different than the rock and roll tour, and the world we live in is in smaller venues.”
For control, the venue has an existing ETC Element console, but when Sexton mentioned that to Marsh, Hayden Productions supplied a Gio @5 desk. The LD used ColorSource Linear fixtures as side lighting. Various lekos and Source Four PARs rounded out the lighting rig. Sexton has nothing but high praise for his lighting vendor. “Hayden Productions are always wonderful, and I love them to death; they are always happy to accommodate me, and their gear's great too."
In closing Marsh adds, “We invested in Ministar because it is a high-quality fixture that comes from a reputable company who stands behind their products. We had been needing a fixture that landed at a particular price point for our customers, and Ministar fit the bill.”
Photos courtesy of Project Broadway.
