Now You Can Enjoy The Lighting Conversations by Rob Halliday

The new bookTheatre Lighting Design: Conversations on the Art, Craft and Life, officially launches today - Thursday 25th July, 2024.

Rob has been helping fellow lighting designer Emma Chapman with this book over the last few years, assembling fourteen fascinating interviews with leading lighting designers (plus a fifteenth, with the wider lighting team behind the musical Billy Elliot) into one place, where they provide a powerful reminder that there aren’t really rights or wrongs in lighting, just ideas, inspiration, determination, practice - and a little bit of luck along the way.

The designers featured cover a vast range of experience: Neil Austin, Natasha Chivers, Jon Clark, Paule Constable, Rick Fisher, Richard Howell, Howard Hudson, Jessica Hung Han Yun, Mark Jonathan, Amy Mae, Ben Ormerod, Bruno Poet, Jackie Shemesh and Johanna Town. It’s fun when they agree with each other, more fun still when they disagree!

Theatre Lighting Design: Conversations on the Art, Craft and Life is available now, direct from its publisher Bloomsbury Methuen, or from wherever you prefer to buy your books in person or online.

A sneak preview: {link}

Direct from the Publisher:
Order in the UK: {link}
Order in the US: {link}
(Availability in Australia to follow during August)

Via Amazon:
Order in the UK: {link}
Order in the US: {link}
(Availability in Australia to follow during August)

Billy: Back In Japan by Rob Halliday

Rob is delighted to be back in Japan - and back for real, not just virtually! - where he is re-mounting the musical Billy Elliot for its 2024 season.

Rob has a long association with this show, back to the 2011 US Tour; he has since re-created Rick Fisher’s design in Holland, for the UK tour and in Japan and Korea, as well as moving the original London production to a new lighting control system along the way.

The Japanese production first appeared in 2017; it was re-mounted in 2020, but in the height of the Covid travel restrictions that was one of the three productions Rob worked on remotely from London, alongside Waitress (also in Japan) and Billy Elliot in Seoul.

This new production, in a new theatre - Tokyo’s Brilliant Hall in Ikebukuru - continues the gentle evolution and upgrading of the rig, this time replacing the ETC Revolutions with Martin Encore fixtures. The big Vari-Lite VL3500s and VL3000 Washes that have been part of the show since it began remain in place, however; the rig is supplied by PRG.

The Billy Tokyo lighting team includes a number of old friends from previous productions in Japan, including Mata Hari and Waitress, led by Yuta Watanabe, with Sonoko Ishii interpreting.

Billy Elliot previews in Tokyo from July 27th, and opens on August 2nd; it will also play a season in Osaka later in the year.

(Billy Elliot is also the subject of the last interview, with the lighting team that made and now re-makes the show, in the new book Theatre Lighting Design: Conversations on the Art, Craft and Life, to be published by Methuen-Bloomsbury on July 25th but available to pre-order now!)

Billy Elliot Tokyo: {link}
The Book! {link}

Theatre Lighting Design Conversations by Rob Halliday

Rob has had not one but two books on the go over the last few years. As well as helping with Richard Pilbrow’s A Sense of Theatre, he has been working with fellow lighting designer Emma Chapman on a book called Theatre Lighting Design: Conversations on the Art, Craft and Life.

It is a simple premise: conversations with fourteen lighting designers (plus a group chat with members of the team who’ve looked after the lighting of the musical Billy Elliot since its debut), talking about their working lives in lighting: where the ideas come from, how they consider light, how they talk to directors and designers, the tools they prefer, the things they struggle with, the things they love. Each conversation is fascinating in its own right. They’re more fascinating still when taken together, particularly where different designers disagree with each other!

It is quite a cast list of designers: Neil Austin, Natasha Chivers, Jon Clark, Paule Constable, Rick Fisher, Richard Howell, Howard Hudson, Jessica Hung Han Yun, Mark Jonathan, Amy Mae, Ben Ormerod, Bruno Poet, Jackie Shemesh and Johanna Town.

The book is published by Bloomsbury/Methuen, and though it won’t reach bookshops until July 25th, it is available for pre-order now

Pre-order in the UK: {link}
Pre-order in the US: {link}

A Sense of Theatre - Available Now by Rob Halliday

A Sense of Theatre, the project which has occupied much of Rob’s attention over the last year and a bit, has started landing with those who supported it’s production over the last week - and is available to everyone from May 1st.

This is the last work by the lighting designer and theatre consultant Richard Pilbrow, who sadly passed away at the end of last year. It is a book charting the history of the National Theatre, both company and building, from its inception in 1963 to the present day.

This is a story Richard was uniquely placed to tell: he was invited by the National’s first artistic director, Laurence Olivier, to light the company’s opening production. From there he became involved in the planning of the National’s new home on London’s South Bank, informally at first, then as a member of the Building Committee assembled to advise the architect on how to build a theatre, then finally as the National’s theatre consultant. In that role he and his company, Theatre Projects, not only created some remarkable technical innovations, particularly the Drum Revolve stage in the Olivier Theatre and the remarkable Lightboard lighting console, but also helped define the very shape of the building itself.

Richard documents this history with extensive access to the minutes of the meeting of the Building Committee, plus his own extensive archives. But this is not his voice alone: he also talks to many who have been part of creating remarkable shows at the National, and documents the history of those productions using a remarkable range of photographs, many of these also never before seen in public.

Rob has been working with Richard to help shape the book since its inception nine years ago. As Richard became frustrated with the lack of interest in the book from ‘big publishers’ (who perceived it as covering too broad a range of subjects to sit comfortably in any one of their ‘lists’) and, as he had done throughout his life, just decided to publish it himself, Rob became partners with Richard and his son Fred in a new publishing enterprise. After Richard’s passing he saw the book through to completion.

Publication of the book was supported through a Kickstarter fundraising campaign, which successfully achieved almost double its funding goal, as well as industry support from the ABTT, Robe, Autograph, ETC, Steeldeck, Ambersphere, Howard Eaton Lighting Limited, 3LR, Martin, Pathway Connectivity Solutions, Push The Button, TAIT, Unusual, White Light and of course Theatre Projects.

The book started arriving with those supporters from late April.

The book is now available to all through all good booksellers, including, of course, Amazon.

A Sense of Theatre website: [link]

Making A Sense of Theatre in Live Design: [link]
Designer Flora Cox on A Sense of Theatre: [link]
A quick flick through the book: [link]
A Sense of Theatre in The Stage: [link]

Purchase A Sense of Theatre direct from its co-publisher, Unicorn: [link]

Purchase A Sense of Theatre from Amazon: [UK] [US] [CA] [DE] [ES] [FR] [IT]

There will be a celebration of Richard’s life and work at the National Theatre on May 17th: [link]

The World of Abdulhussain, Kuwait by Rob Halliday

Rob is currently in Kuwait, in the National Theatre at the wonderfully elegant Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmed Cultural Centre working on a new show called The World of Abdulhussain.

The show tells the life of local entertainment legend Abdulhussain Abdulredha, though a combination of live performance and presentation of archive footage of the actual performer in his heyday - some of it footage never seen in public before.

Rob is working once again as associate and programer to lighting designer Rick Fisher, with the show directed by Diana Sfeir, designed by Takis, with projection design by FRAY Studio, costume design by Fontini Dimou, and sound design by Sebastian Frost. Production electrician Fraser Hall led the lighting installation, with technical production for the show by Ammonite Studios.

For the show Rick and Rob made use of the theatre’s comprehensive house stock, supplemented with some additional equipment - particularly Ayrton Eurus and GLP X4-Bars sourced locally from PRG in the region. Control was from the venues Eos Ti console, with the show documented for future revivals using Rob’s FocusTrack software as well as VOR.

The World of Abdulhussain will run from 1-11 May 2024.

Further information: [link]

Season’s Greetings - and A Sense of Theatre by Rob Halliday

Season’s Greetings to all….

And a last minute reminder that A Sense of Theatre, Richard Pilbrow’s wonderful new book about the history of the National Theatre, with which Rob has been involved for the last eight years and is now working to bring to the world after Richard’s sad and untimely passing earlier this month, is available for pre-order for just a few more hours on Kickstarter.

If you’d like to buy the book, or even better if you’d like to actually be part of the book with your name inside it, you have until 11.59pm TODAY, 26th December 2023, to sign up.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/asot/a-sense-of-theatre

Presenting: Classic Gear Live, September 3-5th, Kensington Olympia, London by Rob Halliday

For the last sixteen years, Rob has been writing about the products that have shaped the entertainment industry - lighting, sound and more - in his monthly Classic Gear column for LSi magazine.

This year, Classic Gear is jumping off the page and into real life with Classic Gear Live, part of the PLASA Show which takes place this weekend (Sun 3-Tues 5 Sept) at Kensington Olympia in London.

The stand will feature some remarkable products, loosely themed around big anniversaries. There will be the pioneering, still remarkable Vari-Lite Artisan console and VL2 and VL4 moving lights from the mid-1980s. The first ever Cadac mixing console made for theatre from 1983. CCT’s Silhouette spotlights, which became the standard spotlights for a generation from 1973 onwards. Strand’s MMS memory console, launched in 1973, and their Patt 263 and Patt 264 spotlights (from 1963) and the lantern that is perhaps the ‘classic of classics’, the Patt 23, from 1953.

Alongside this will be audio equipment from some of the defining artists of the 1960s and 1970s, including th PA system used on Pink Floyd’s 1973 Dark Side of the Moon tour.

And because equipment is nothing without people, there will also be chances to meet and talk to the people who designed, made, sold, used or now preserve these remarkable products, including lighting designer and programmer Andrew Voller re-united with an Artisan console for the first time in twenty years, Dik Welland talking about looking after the Vari-Lite products over the years, Alan Luxford and John Wright talking about Strand’s products and history, Don Hindle talking about CCT Lighting and its Silhouette range, Mike Walker talking about the designing the sound for shows using Cadac mixing desks, plus Jon Primrose from the Theatrecrafts website, Paul Johnson from the Historic Stage Lighting Collective and Chris Hewitt from CH Vintage Audio.

It promises to be quite an event, quite a chance to hear the stories, to reminisce, to discover, or re-discover according to your age, these products whose influence is still felt today.

Classic Gear Live: [link]
Products On Show: [link]

Back and now in London: Crazy For You by Rob Halliday

After it’s smash hit, sold out season in Chichester last summer., the wonderful musical Crazy For You, is now playing at London’s Gillian Lynne Theatre, for a season that runs into 2024.

The show continues the long-standing collaboration with lighting designer Ken Billington, that stretches all the way back to the original London production of Chicago and concluded the remote lighting of the musical Waitress in Japan during lockdown. It also sees Rob working once again with director/choreographer Susan Stroman, with whom he first worked on the National Theatre’s Oklahoma!, in London in 1999 and New York a couple of years later.

Also on the lighting team are associate lighting designer Dale Driscoll, assistant lighting designer Lucy Adams, production electrician Gerry Amies and his team, and the electrics team at the Gillian Lynne, with the rig suppled by PRG.

Crazy For You is previewing now, opening on Monday July 3rd.

Crazy For You [link]