A wide array of Ayrton fixtures, a zactrack automated follow system, Green Hippo media servers and grandMA3 consoles hit the road with Lionel Richie this summer when he co-headlined the “Sing A Song All Night Long Tour” across North America with legendary band Earth, Wind & Fire, bringing both artists’ classic catalogs to arenas and major venues. ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of all of the aforementioned brands in North America.
The 26-city tour kicked off in June in Saint Paul, Minnesota and made stops in Toronto, New York, Los Angeles and more before wrapping in Austin, Texas on August 14.
Eric Wade, one of the Partners and a Senior Designer with Crossfade Design in Garland, Texas and New Albany, Indiana, served as Production Designer for the tour with Keith Hoagland as Associate Designer and CFD design team designers/programmers Sam Brown and Brandon Wade. Wade has had a two-decade relationship with Richie and is also the Lighting Designer for the artist’s continuing Wynn Las Vegas residency.
Crossfade Design boasts a large inventory of Ayrton fixtures. “Ayrton is my workhorse – it’s what we choose first only filling in with other brands for specialty lighting that Ayrton doesn’t make,” says Wade.
Brian Burke was the tour’s Creative Director and Sagiv Karpel the Co-creative Director. “Brian wanted a linear look, so we kept the design linear and beamy with lights above the videowall and blasting through the screen, positioned up and downstage and angled at the sides of the stage,” Wade explains. “There was very little modification from venue to venue. When Keith and I started putting things together we figured what fit the smallest stage – at Madison Square Garden – would work anywhere.”
A multi-tiered set was created with the band on two risers: They were in line with Richie at the piano on the upper level for slow sets while the guitar and bass moved to the lower level with Richie for faster numbers. “The goal was not to have the piano on stage when it was not in use,” notes Wade. “So we designed it so the piano, a custom clear plexiglass Yamaha, would hide under the stage and come up and down when Lionel needed it.”
A 64-foot wide LED videowall opened in the middle with angled screens revealing Richie in a tunnel-like entrance lit by a big blast from an Ayrton EagleStrike in the center of the floor.
Four more EagleStrikes acted as followspots operating with a zactrack SMART automated follow system. All of the EagleStrike key lights were mounted on truss an average of 137 feet from the stage.
“I love zactrack. We own several systems for our use and do a lot of rentals, too,” reports Wade. “In our business, we’re always at the mercy of who’s behind the spot, and very few people are good at spot operating. So zactrack is absolutely the best option for us today. Keith just calibrated and tweaked zactrack for 20-25 minutes for each new show, and it worked. It was spot on! Extremely consistent, and that’s what you want in a tour situation.”
Hoagland notes that the new zactrack update made it even easier to use than before. “The band just dropped the trackers in their pockets. We tracked four guys with a total of eight tracks.”
Ayrton Veloces also served as followspots for Richie and the band. Six fixtures were in the downstage truss where they acted as static key lights for the band when it remained in position on stage. One Veloce was in upstage truss and was zactrack controlled to follow Richie’s movements. Twelve Ayrton Eurus Profiles also lit the band members who moved to perform with Richie.
Forty Ayrton Kyalamis were the primary effects lights delivering all the beam and prism effects during the show. They were mounted on four-fingered truss over the stage which fanned out to form two V shapes.
Two Ayrton Mambas were in upstage truss to create big backlight looks at Richie’s piano, for example in his performance of “Lady” with the late Kenny Rogers on the videoscreen. “The Mambas are huge, bright and dramatic, but we didn’t use them for big beams in the sky,” says Wade. “We zoomed out and used them as a high-power shadow light that gave a big silhouette look. It was cool, like a giant wash light.
“When you can count on your equipment, it makes your days easy and steady,” Wade notes. “When you have problems, it wears out the crew and management is not happy. When I spec Ayrton lighting I can count on it to be there every day. We carried spares but never pulled them out of the box; Ayrton is probably the most reliable brand on the market.”
Crossfade Design also had a pair of Green Hippo MX series Meuse media servers on the tour housed in custom racks built by Upstaging. “We were very excited to have them, and they ran amazingly,” Wade says. “They gave a big jump to our processing and power. They were fast, with no glitches and no lag we could see in live IMAG video.”
Crossfade Design also deployed an array of grandMA3 consoles before and during the tour. “We had a dozen or more people from the creative team in our large previz studio for a week straight working with our six grandMA3s to program all the lighting, video, pyro, lasers and TAIT Navigator machinery automation,” recalls Wade. “With Sam as Head Programmer and designer as well, we walked out with the show, so in rehearsals we were just finessing.”
Two active and one backup grandMA3s full-size controlled lighting for the show. Two more controlled the Green Hippo Meuse to run media. A grandMA3 compact XT on the side of the stage handled all the effects and pyro. Another compact grandMA3 compact XT was FOH for the lasers. The grandMA3 compact XTs were provided by ImageSFX headquartered in Las Vegas.
Hoagland notes that being on tour “is like building a small city in a different place every night. Everything has to work. The gear we chose for the tour handled going down the road in a truck with the stagehands and slamming in and out of venues, and it worked every time. You want the show to be the same every day, to keep the same high level of quality. It’s what Lionel expects from us.”
Wade says that ACT Entertainment “always comes through for us. It’s the people that support the gear that count, and they have some of the best staff on the planet.”
“We like big designs on which we push gear to the limits – we use equipment in ways people haven’t thought of. That makes a good design a great design,” says Hoagland. “If there are any hiccups, ACT is there for us from dawn to dusk, even on Sundays.”
At Crossfade Design Brandon Wade and Sam Brown were instrumental in putting the show together handling the majority of the programming, including zactrack.
The Crossfade Design team will regroup with Richie in October and November when he resumes his residency at The Wynn’s Encore Theater in Las Vegas.
