Rob is currently programming the musical Waitress in Tokyo from the front room of his home in London - working with the lighting designer Ken Billington, who is sitting in his office in New York!
One of those things that would have been dismissed as nonsense a year ago, before Coronavirus hit, now feels almost normal - and while it’s certainly not an ideal way of lighting a show, it does at least allow a show to be lit at a time when travel restrictions mean there was on other way of lighting it.
Rob was originally scheduled to work on the show in Tokyo, having programmed the London production of the show for Ken a couple of years ago. However, as Japan closed its borders to arrivals from America and the UK yet the show’s producers decided to press ahead with the musical, an alternative plan had to be formed. The question: was it possible to light a show with the production desks spanning the world?
The immediate challenge was whether it was possible to connect two ETC Eos consoles across the internet. It seemed that a Virtual Private Network (VPN) would be required, ideally one that was easy to configure. Research led to the discovery of the company Just Networking, who it turned out were making the perfect pandemic product: theBRIDGE, a hardware VPN solution aimed at the entertainment industry. They’d tested it with grandMA consoles successfully; their UK distributor LCR supplied a couple of units and tests were carried out using Eos consoles between two locations in London - successfully! Additional units were immediately dispatched to Tokyo and London.
Next, Ken Billington’s associate Aaron Porter designed a system of Zoom calls to effectively replace both the traditional comms in the theatre and the traditional view of the stage from the auditorium. Finally some additional equipment - consoles, large monitors to provide a stage view - was delivered to Ken Billington’s office in New York and Rob’s home in London by the show’s lighting supplier, PRG.
Finally, all of the elements were put together as the show loaded-in in Tokyo: the consoles came on line, Zoom connected everyone together, there was some adjustment of cameras to make the picture look like everyone remembered the show to looking like (since the rig and showfile are from earlier productions), and off the show marched into a rapid tech… The will to make it work and the support of the team in Japan, particularly production manager Takaaki Tanaka, head of lighting Wataru Okazaki and his team from ASG, and interpreter Sonoko Ishii.
It’s not an ideal way of lighting, and not definitely not how you’d want to work if you had a choice. But it works - and as a result the show will open on time in Tokyo next Tuesday, March 9th, before touring.
Waitress Japan: [link]
theBRIDGE: [link]
Ken Billington talks about the project: [link]