A new production of Oliver!, one of Britain’s best loved musicals, opened in London’s West End in January. Cameron Mackintosh’s triumphant new staging of Lionel Bart’s masterpiece plays at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane before a backdrop of color changing EvenLED panels by Martin Professional.

Stage Electrics, who supply all production lighting and media server equipment for the production, have made a significant investment in Martin Professional’s EvenLED, purchasing 140 panels of the latest 16 bit version. Each color mixing LED panel measures 1 meter square and is fully DMX controlled. Also used on the set are Martin MAC TW1™ tungsten washlights.

The way forward
The entire production is backed by a huge 14 by 10 meter sky cloth. Upstage of the cloth is a BP screen and behind that are 140 EvenLED panels.

Lighting Designer for the show is Paule Constable assisted by associate Beky Stoddart. Constable, who recently won the 2009 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Lighting Design for The Chalk Garden (her third Olivier award), comments on the EvenLED system.

“As soon as I heard about EvenLED I knew it was the way forward to light this cloth,” she says. “I wanted to use the panels because I wanted to paint the cloth - to play with highlights and darkness and not have to use generalized flood lighting from below and above. I could bring out the edge of the cloth or light the sky in deep blue and keep the clouds white or use moving cloud footage. It was fantastic. The sky
never looks the same twice. I was also really happy to be able
to light the sky completely from behind so it is the source of the
light as the sky is - we aren't lighting onto a flat surface but
animating it from behind.”

EvenLED
Martin’s EvenLED is a panel of 6-watt RGB LEDs that can back-project an even field of light over a projection surface. The modular system is easy to assemble and offers several other advantages over traditional cyclorama lighting including less power consumption, less heat generated and silent operation.

According to Constable, there were few problems with the system. “We learnt a huge amount and loved using them. As with so many things - simple ideas worked best. We tried complex video footage but felt the pixels turning on and off were distracting - gentle movement was best.

“Nick Simmons - a brilliant lighting programmer - created simple drawings of elements within the cloud painting - we would then use these shapes to pick out areas and play with color. We got very Turner at times!”

Constable praises Simmons “for persevering and embracing the challenge of programming with such a new element.” Simmons commented, “The auto DMX addressing of the EvenLED panels was a great help to production electrician Gerry Amies and myself and saved us a great deal of time when dealing with 28 Universes.

“We also found the rigging of the panels very quick. We had set aside a whole day to rig and commission the wall but had the whole wall rigged, cabled, tested and out of the way in the grid by 2 o’clock in the afternoon. It also helped having the experience of Ian Moulds with us as he installed the EvenLED wall on the Mary Poppins tour.”

Each EvenLED module, which consists of 16 evenly spaced, high-power LEDs, is surprisingly bright. Simmons comments, “The brightness of the wall was very impressive and exceeded our expectations. For the majority of the time the pixels were only used at around the 20% mark. We also discovered that we could use the EvenLED to light our mid-stage cloth which was also being lit conventionally with top floods. This mid-stage cloth was seven and a half meters down stage of the EvenLED wall but we still had plenty of level to play with even though we were still lighting through our BP screen and the upstage cloth.”

Simmons also appreciated the system’s DMX controllability and 16 bit resolution of each color. “The need to be able to program the wall quickly and the fact that Paule wanted the ability to play moving images through the wall meant we had to go down the media server route. The problem with all media servers is that they can only fade at 8 bit. This was fine for our moving images but then trying to fade just static colors we really needed the EvenLED’s 16 bit fade.”

It all works
Constable acknowledges “the wonderful Beky Stoddart (my associate) who made it all possible and Gerry Amies and his team for making it all work and to Steve McAndrew (chief at Drury Lane) and his department for looking after it all so well.”

This new production of Oliver! is more spectacular than ever before; starring Rowan Atkinson as Fagin, a cast and orchestra of over one hundred and an exciting new Nancy and Oliver (winners of BBC One’s “I’d Do Anything”). Rupert Goold (Best Director, 2008 Olivier Awards) along with Tony Award winning director and choreographer Matthew Bourne, use every inch of London’s greatest musical stage with sensational sets by Anthony Ward.