ROOMS a Rock Romance (off-bway)

Rooms: A Rock Romance was a 2009  Off-Broadway musical, which opened  to a slew  of good reviews. The show, follows the off-and-on romance of Monica and Ian,  wannabe rock stars from Glasgow It’s the late 1970s and, restyled as a punk duo, they write  a hit song.  The script follows their relationship past and present.

This, two-character story takes place in dozens of locations in Glasgow, London, and New York. The lighting sketches in various locations, including street scenes in Glasgow, London, and New York, various homes, performance spaces, and  backstage at CBGB’s.

We created over  35  distinct locations achieving  most of them using texture, color temperature and gobos.

The director (Scott Schwartz) and I decided early on that squares would be used heavily to represent rooms and isolation.  Much of the lighting was created using Martin Mac700’s which have no shutters. So I added a Glass Square as well as a Square Outline to the gobo load.  Doing this allowed me to have the appearance of Shutters in these lights and with the rotating gobo and zoom range this allowed for many unique isolation effects. In one instance we use the VL1000ASD to create a square room for Ian then we do a live move with the shutters to create a sense of his world closing in around him in a box.

Conceptually the show is about Monica who wants to see every room in the universe and escape Glasgow, While all Ian wants is to stay isolated in his own place until Monica drags him out of his shell.  This allows us to create a feeling of freedom and openness for Monica as she paces her moon strewn room, while bathed in textures that evoke swirling galaxies, Concurrently Ian is trapped by squares of light that shutter kinetically and keep him isolated throughout the show.

Our rig has 20 moving lights—four Mac 700s, one [Vari*Lite] VL3500  that lets us shutter at will, and eight[Martin] TW1s, which are wonderful, because they give you that tungsten color. Their CMY color mixing does some very subtle things especially with their zoom, and the units really punch from our 18’ high grid. We also have seven [Vari*Lite] VL1000s, four in tungsten and three more in the arc version. These allowed us to manipulate the no-color color temperature and really affect the mood

Really though  the gobos are the thing. we made several custom gobo loads for the mac700’s.These include street looks, Union Jacks for the punk performance numbers, and abstract patterns for some of the big emotional scenes.  68 ColorBlasts are on hand as well, serving as cyc lights,  scenery toners, and saturated footlights. In one number about New York, Monica says ‘the sky turns a million shades of red downtown,’ the upstage cityscape, which is lit by the LEDs, does all sorts of pinks and oranges. Overall the VL1000s provide clear front light, with the Martins adding in the deeply saturated colors for the performance numbers, such as “All I Want is Everything,” which, among other things features a number of rotating Union Jack gobos.

All told,  The design team created a very complex show  There are 285 cues in a 90-minute musical. however the lighting unfolds in seamless, fluid fashion, adding immeasurably to the story of Monica and Ian.

Design Team:

Lighting Designer: Herrick Goldman herrick@hglightingdesign.com

Associate LD: Susan Nicholson

Programmer: Nate Coons

Production Electrician: The Syndicate