City Theatrical Blog

We organized a Professional Software Demo day at New York City's City Centre Theatre. We had John McKernon and Jorge Arroyo representing Lightwright 5, Andy Voller of Moving Light Assistant, and Kevin Linzey of Vectorworks.  It was great to see many lighting designers, users, students, and electricians from the New York lighting community.  I had time for conversations with many friends and new acquaintances.  


One of the fun moments was my conversation with designer Vivien Leone.  I wrote about Vivien in our last newsletter (Phantom, and Lucky Guy) and we were talking today about the gear that is used on Phantom.  Vivien mentioned that if the show was done over again today they would specify exactly the same gear that they did originally.  One of those items is carbon arc spotlights which are still used on the show today, and which probably are the only ones still used on Broadway.  This led us to a discussion of the very arcane world of the Broadway follow spot operator, and how talented and special those guys (well, usually guys) are, and we named some of the names of guys we knew over the years, such as Chris Fedigan, one of the all time greats.