Browse this page by:

I. Interview with Gary Fails

II. Gary's Bio

III. What Gary's Colleagues are Saying

IV. Further Reading and Videos

Section I: An Interview with Gary Fails Upon his Retirement from City Theatrical

THE INTERVIEW

City Theatrical (CT): Gary, Congratulations on your upcoming retirement! Your impact on this company and our industry as a whole is profound. You will be missed more than you know, and we wish you all the best!

Thinking back, what are some of your favorite memories from starting City Theatrical in the Bronx 37 years ago?    

Gary Fails (GF): I always wanted to have a shop. I had worked in shops and was good with my hands and I wanted to start a business and to make things for show business. In 1986, I got married, we had a baby, and I started my business. It was a year of huge optimism and dreams of the future. I found a little industrial building in the South Bronx and renovated it myself. I went to a machinery auction and bought enough machines to get started and I was underway. I specialized in lighting accessories since I was a Broadway electrician and I knew what was needed and I knew how to make it, and there was no one else doing it — there was literally no competition to what I was doing. I was making things that everyone needed, and the shop grew fast. It was a really exciting time.

CT: What are some of your favorite memories from working at the City Theatrical office in New Jersey?   

GF: We were growing so fast in the South Bronx we kept outgrowing our building, but we were fortunate to be able to break through the wall into the adjoining building to expand.  We did this three times, then got a building up the street, then another building up the street. We looked all over the Bronx for a good building without success then expanded our horizons to New Jersey and found a great building in Carlstadt. It was the perfect manufacturing building for us, bright and well-lit with windows all around, six loading docks, good office space and we were able to create an excellent manufacturing flow with a 300’ long manufacturing aisle. Raw material came in one end of the building and finished goods exited the other end. We invested in better machinery and added a good powder coat line and we had our dream shop.

CT: Who or what are some of the greatest influences on your career at City Theatrical? 

GF: I continued to work as a Broadway production electrician after I started my shop, and I was influenced by all the Broadway designers that I worked with. They all had specific accessory needs that no one else could provide so I created the products. I had a unique opportunity to get to know many of the world’s top designers. I was Ken Posner’s production electrician on his first Broadway show and did two shows with Don Holder before he went on to Lion King. I was Theron Musser’s electrician on her last Broadway show. I worked with Peggy Eisenhauer and Jeff Croiter when they were up and coming assistants. I was a production electrician on 28 Broadway shows and met and became friends with most of the Broadway design community during that time. It was a wonderful opportunity.

CT: What are one or two of the most interesting projects you have worked on through your role at City Theatrical? 

GF: We have worked on thousands of interesting projects and continue to do so every day.  Anything we do with Jules Fisher and Paul Marantz rank at the top of the list of creativity and complexity. Both Jules and Paul are extremely mechanically adept along with being great creative thinkers.  Brainstorming with them and creating the products they sketch out have been highlights for me.

The other project I look back on as a highlight is the development of our Multiverse wireless DMX technology. Paul Kleissler and I dreamed of a new and advanced system of wireless data communication that could be scaled up to multiple universes.  We started with a blank page and travelled around the country visiting chip designers and manufacturers and we created a system that had never been imagined before. Philip Nye joined our design team and Paul and Philp worked for two years to bring the products to market. As a company, it was a big bet on a new generation of technology that has gone on to provide City Theatrical’s present growth.

CT: What are you most looking forward to doing in your retirement? 

GF: First, having fun with my darling wife Terri Klausner every day. Second, letting my mind open up to new ideas and challenges. I have product ideas (not lighting) that I will explore in my newly expanded home workshop.

CT: Any shout outs to colleagues who have helped make it possible along the way? 

GF: There are so many, but here are a few:

• All of the DeVerna family and all of my Local One friends and who supported me when I left Four Star Lighting to start City Theatrical.
• Fred Foster who helped me in so many ways and always gave me opportunities to create and manufacture products for ETC. 
• All of the ETC staff over the years who became great friends of City Theatrical.  
• Steve Terry, my friend of over 50 years (we went on the road with a show together when we were both teenagers) who has supported City Theatrical since the day I started. 
• Larry Dunn, Paul Kleissler, and Philip Nye, who formed the backbone of our electronics innovation. 
• Mark Lacko who was my industrial designer for nearly 30 years and who created the look and feel of our products and graphics. 

Please read our 30-year history and 35-year history to hear all the shoutouts, there are hundreds!

CT: Is there anything else you may want to include?  

GF: My 50+ year career in professional lighting followed the arc of the industry from the primitive early days of rock & roll lighting to the introduction of moving lights, the creation of DMX, the birth of LEDs in architectural and entertainment lighting, the consolidation of local lighting shops, and the entry of Chinese manufacturers into the entertainment manufacturing world. It is a dramatically different lighting world today that requires much different skills than when I started. There were dozens of companies like mine that started in the 70s and 80s when the industry was young and many of the companies were “mom and pops”. Today, private equity money drives the industry and there is less opportunity for small startups.  I’m glad I could participate in our industry when the time was right.

Section II: Gary Fails’ Bio

This year, 2023, marks Gary Fails’ 52^nd year in professional lighting. It was a career that started when he dropped out of Columbia University and went on the road with Dance Theatre of Harlem as a teenager, first as a truck driver and later as an electrician, stage manager, and lighting designer.  With DTH, he completed numerous coast to coast US tours and 10 European tours before he was 25 years old.  He also toured extensively as production electrician on first national tours of Broadway shows and in all spent 10 years on the road. 

In 1980, Gary returned to New York City to become an IATSE Local One apprentice at Four Star Lighting in the South Bronx and spent his nights as a Local One electrician on Broadway, soon becoming the house electrician at Circle in the Square Theatre on West 50th Street.

His Local One apprenticeship allowed Gary to become a certified welder, licensed New York State laser operator, and also provided his training in sheet metal design and fabrication - all skills that he utilized to form City Theatrical. His routine for the first 10 years of City Theatrical was to work a full day at the company’s South Bronx shop, then travel to midtown Manhattan to work on a Broadway show at night. Gary was production electrician for 28 Broadway shows, and had the unique opportunity to meet and work with nearly every Broadway designer of the time, often building products during the day to meet the needs of the designer he was working with at night.  At its heart, City Theatrical’s role is to create products that serve the needs of lighting professionals.

Several opportunities presented themselves for Gary and his growing team at City Theatrical in the early 1990s. The largest Broadway hit of its time, Phantom of the Opera, needed a better dry ice fogger to support important moments of the show and Gary developed the SS6000 Dry Ice Fogger from stainless steel, which soon became the standard of Broadway and the touring world and is still used on Phantom today. 

Upon seeing Source Four fixtures for the first time and realizing there were no beam control accessories for it, City Theatrical designed and produced a full range of accessories for designers. Today, many lighting manufacturers depend on City Theatrical to design and manufacture their lighting accessories.

In 1993, Gary attended the LDI Show as a visitor for the first time and realized that what City Theatrical had been doing for the New York lighting shops was also needed around the country, and around the world.  Gary created a U.S. distribution network and expanded it to Europe and Asia. City Theatrical first exhibited at LDI in 1994, and won its first product award at the show, and since then has received over 40 business and innovation awards, including multiple product of the year awards in both the U.S. and Europe, the Crain’s New York Magazine Small Business Award, and the New Jersey Small Manufacturer of the Year award.

In the early years of moving light development, and at the request of Broadway designer Brian MacDevitt, Gary formed an engineering team to develop the AutoYoke®, a precision moving yoke designed to hold a Source Four that would give designers an incandescent sourced hard-edge refocussable fixture. This was a niche that had not been filled in the moving light world, but which was of critical importance to Broadway designers. City Theatrical brought this fixture to market and the AutoYoke has played an important part in professional lighting for over 20 years.

In the early 2000s during the earliest days of the LED revolution, Gary formed a strategic alliance with Color Kinetics to produce the products and accessories that would allow Color Kinetics’ architectural LED lighting products to transition to entertainment use. City Theatrical developed over 200 different accessories for Color Kinetics products including entertainment specific power/data supplies, beam control products, lenses, and hardware.  These products enabled Color Kinetics to lead the LED lighting revolution in entertainment lighting.

Understanding the opportunity in the technology of wireless DMX, Gary worked with co-inventors Paul Kleissler, Larry Dunn, and Philip Nye to design and commercialize five generations of wireless DMX products over a 15-year period, creating an industry leading vision of a future lighting world in which every DMX device contains a small, inexpensive Multiverse wireless DMX/RDM receiver, leading to wireless systems of hundreds of fixtures and dozens of universes. 

From working on productions such as The Amazing Spiderman 2 and network television shows such as The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live, Gary realized that entertainment designers needed linear LED products specific to our industry and created the QolorFLEX brand of LED tape and dimmers. This line has grown to be an industry leader found on hundreds of Broadway and West End shows, films, and network television shows.

Gary is a 42-year member of IATSE Local One and an instructor in their technology training program, an ETCP certified electrician, and an MBA graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. He is a member of the Advisory Board to the Entertainment Technology program at the New York City College of Technology and is a Board member of the New Jersey Manufacturing Extension Program which advises and aids New Jersey manufacturers.  

For over 20 years, City Theatrical has utilized an innovative open book management system in which the company shares business and financial information with employees in a monthly meeting, and encourages the creation of profit with the philosophy that “those who create the profits should share in those profits.” City Theatrical shares 20% of after-tax profits with the highly skilled and experienced staff and craftspeople who have designed and built thousands of products and projects over the years.

Gary is married to Broadway actress Terri Klausner. They live in New York and have three children, Greta, Joseph, and Michael. In his spare time Gary has run 12 marathons, and builds acoustic guitars.

Section III: What Gary's Colleagues Are Saying

Section IV: Further Reading and Videos