A production of Million Dollar Quartet at the Palace Theatre in Manchester, New Hampshire used a collection of CHAUVET Professional fixtures supplied by Events United to create a retro-style lightshow.
The lightshow was designed by Carl Rajotte, who also was artistic director and choreographer for the show.
“Million Dollar Quartet takes place in a studio, which calls for a design that’s pretty basic,” Rajotte said. “We do that, but we also go beyond that to give the audience a glance into the future of these four huge icons — and their many important live stage performances yet to come.”
Rajotte used the 12 Rogue R2 Spot moving fixtures in his rig, placing five of the Rogues on the fourth electric and two on the third electric for back light specials. Three Rogues on the second electric provided down light specials, while two Rogue units were positioned on 8’ booms for concert-style side light.
“After one of the artists on stage begins a song, we pump up the lighting to convey this sense of excitement,” said Rajotte. “We used the Rogues to create a wide range of looks, programming over 1,000 cues into the lighting board in two days. The Rogues were definitely a huge help to us when we did this. They are easy to use; and they don’t require a lot of preprograming of focus and color palettes. So I never feel limited because of time restraints in designing the show. It was also very nice that the Rogues had the intensity to blast through our down pars.”
Rajotte also used two Intimidator Spot 250 LED moving lights from CHAUVET DJ, COLORado 1 Solos, SlimPAR 38 LEDs, and COLORado fixtures in his rig.
“The Chauvet lighting instruments worked extremely well, both in the air to give us concert looks and in lighting the set in an engaging fashion,” said Rajotte. “The set that we rented from the national tour of the show is very dark in color, so I was worried about the lights being saturated enough to actually make a difference — but I’m happy to say it definitely worked out well.”
