Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White is a chilling return to spectacular form. Encore, says John Peter, The Sunday Times. September 19th 2004
First things first. This is a big, big triumph, a very palpable hit, no question. Andrew Lloyd Webber makes a majestic return to the musical theatre. In fact, The Woman in White is more than a musical: it is a big, powerful popular opera, both romantic and spectacular; a thriller; a swaggering, flamboyant Victorian melodrama; a visual feast; a tempestuous story of love and intrigue; a great, arching narrative, brilliantly told.
......Another star of the show is its designer, William Dudley. The set is of the simplest. There are few props. A vast cyclorama surrounds the bare stage. Its central section is detachable and can be moved around on the revolve. Video images are projected onto them, and they give you a feeling of moving inside great houses, through doors, up and down staircases, in churchyards, a remote railway station, and on the murky streets of Victorian Vauxhall. I have never seen video or film so brilliantly used in the theatre, and with such a precise sense of drama. My guess is that the producers, Sonia Friedman and Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Theatres, will not have to look for a new show for the Palace for a decade or so.
Extract from John Peters review in the culture section of The Sunday Times
Unusual Rig The Show
The Woman in White is a significant project for Unusual Rigging, involving close collaboration with all production departments, in particular XL Video, and production manager Richard Bullimore.
The Palace Theatre is a challenging space for large productions to work and operate within, and a large element of the rigging detail concentrated on maximising every spare cubic centimetre of airspace for storage. Plenty of creative solutions and customisations were also needed to deal with a high profile, technically complex, large scale production like “Woman In White”.
Unusual’s on-site project manager was Simon Stone, who worked alongside riggers Kevin Carro and Mark Davis. The design, development and fabrication sides of the project were taken care of by Jeremy Featherstone, Chris Johnston and Andrew Bailey working out of Unusual’s Northants HQ.
Crawling into action
Possibly the most challenging aspect of a thoroughly demanding project was installing the front of house truss needed to position four of XL Video’s projectors (two Barco ELM G10s and two SLM G8s) mid auditorium in exactly the right position.
There were no existing hanging points and it was not possible to make new holes in the panelled ceiling, but the truss had to have a mid-span pick-up. The only option was to utilise the existing central ventilation grille and create a suspension point above.
Two 10m lengths of TeleStage truss were installed on the auditorium roof directly above the ventilation housing. This provided the necessary mid-point from which the 18m long auditorium crawl truss was hung. The ends of the truss were secured directly to the walls of the theatre via chemical fixings.
The 1 metre high crawl truss incorporates an aluminium plate running along the full length of the bottom face – allowing it to be safely crawled through for focussing and equipment adjustment and maintenance.
In addition to the projectors the truss supports approximately 40 lighting fixtures (supplied by lighting contractors White Light) and delay speakers (supplied by audio contractors Orbital Sound).
Dick Straker of projection and video specialists Mesmer consulted with Unusual about his specific maintenance requirements for the FOH projectors, sub-hung from the Crawl truss. He needed them to be accessible from all angles and able to drop in to the floor.
Unusual devised special sub frames for the projectors, which connect to the crawl truss. The projectors were mounted upon four pieces of adjustable studding, enabling them to be tilted and finely adjusted for precise lining up.
A half tonne Lodestar hoist was installed on the crawl truss, mounted on a rail so it can be easily moved along the truss to whichever projector requires lowering to the floor for maintenance.
Over-stage
The Palace Theatre had no over-stage flying points suitable for a set of this size and shape, so one of the early jobs was removal of the house flying bars to make space for the production rigging.
Bill Dudley’s set, is a spherical concept, mirrored in most of the over stage rigging. In the centre is a circular ladder beam LX truss, 6 metres in diameter, custom designed and fabricated by Unusual, and suspended by two sets of counterweights in the centre. It is fully loaded with moving lights.
Surrounding this is the over-stage projector truss, 8.3 metres in diameter, also hung on two counterweight sets, holding four projectors complete with acoustic surrounds. For this, Unusual commissioned the making of a special aluminium truss by Total Fabrications.
Outside of the projector truss is another three-quarter circle ring of LX ladder beam trusses, also fabricated by Unusual, and flown as three 6.5 metre curved sections that move in and out for maintenance via three independent counterweight sets.
Up and downstage on stage right, Unusual rigged three LX ‘trapeze’ bars/mini lighting ladders, with four on stage left, all of which fly in and out during the show.
Further offstage is a complete curved masking bar, hung with black drape and dead hung at 14 metres.
Upstage, Unusual flew a mezzanine floor set piece, fabricated by Dellstar Engineering, with access stairs, dead hung from the roof. Ground support was not an option as the legs would have protruded onto the stage.
Far upstage, Unusual hung a massive props storage tray, suspended on two LIFTKET motors. In the stage right wing the circular bar prop is flown, a one-tonne chunky piece of scenery, plus the piano and the pool table, each using two LIFTKET motors. Both wings are sardined with movable prop storage trays, also suspended using LIFTKETs, chosen for their double-brake feature which removes the need for safeties.
The LIFTKETS are operated by a pendant controller on stage.
The pool table lights are flown in separately by counterweight, in the only traditional cross stage flying element of the show.
Another two XL Video projectors are flown on the stage right and left fly floors, dead hung from the loading bays above.
Downstage left and right are two 2 × 2 metre follow spot platforms, complete with access ladders leading to the fly floors. These were custom constructed by Unusual and are dead hung approximately 2.5 metres below the fly floor. The follow spots mount to the front chord of the boxes.
Directly underneath the spot platforms are two Key Clamp lighting ladders – also made by Unusual, and dead hung to the grid. They are approximately 6 metres long and 1 metre wide, rigged with 20 lights.
Downstage of the Iron
At the start of the project, FOH flying was extremely limited. Either side of the pros were two ancient lighting ladders with scant weight loading. These were ripped out and replaced with two 11 metre heavy duty ladder beams, chemically anchored to the walls – and now a permanent feature of the Palace. This was also a tricky operation involving drilling through the marble-clad pros arch.
The new ladders each offer a half tonne weight loading and are fully populated with sound and lighting gear.
The next, and most complex, FOH operation was installation of the PA truss – a task for which Unusual came onto site 3 weeks ahead of everyone else.
The old roof timbers of the Palace (built in 1891) had no weight loading. An engineering team chiselled out the roof concrete and installed a new I-beam spreader that runs the full width of the auditorium and has a one tonne weight loading. It’s accessible via five new flying holes in the roof just downstage of the pros and is another new permanent facility. This was a particularly difficult job as “headroom” over the centre of the roof void was less than a foot …. and the team emerged looking like they’d been down a coal mine!
The whole project has been a massive challenge for Unusual – who are well experienced in rigging major West Ends shows (other currents include “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and “Tonight’s The Night”).
Jeremy Featherstone comments; “This was a particularly complex job due to the shape of the set bearing no resemblance to that which you would normally associate with a theatre show. Added to that was the fact that Les Miserables had been in the theatre for 18 years, so there were no existing drawings of the venue … and we had to survey the entire auditorium and fly tower from scratch!
“We practically had to abandon the house flying system and make up our own. Through careful planning at the pre-production stage and close collaboration between Unusual’s site, design and fabrication teams the installation was completed on time and with the absolute minimum of interference to the numerous other trades working on site.
“It’s a project that the whole of Unusual Rigging can look back on with satisfaction”
Article written by and reproduced with permission from Lou Stickland.