It felt less like a concert, and more like being invited into someone’s living room, one local critic wrote of Mary J. Blige’s My Life, My Story residency at Dolby Live at Park MGM, which opened May 1st. And oh, what an enchanted living room it is!
Lighting designer Ryan Healey of 22 Degrees, and set designer Shaun Motley are providing an engaging, richly textured setting for the nine-time Grammy winner as she takes fans on a 42-song, nearly two-hour journey through her legendary career. Artfully balancing lighting and scenic elements, the production flows in harmony with the beloved star as she performs hits like Family Affair, I Can Love You, and Real Love often accompanied by enthusiastic singalongs and punctuated by stories from Blige herself.
Working on a roughly 70-foot-wide section (not counting SL and SR IMAG screens) of a 120-foot-wide stage, the designers created a vista that was welcoming and personal while also being bold and versatile enough to reflect the many facets of their client’s music and persona.
We knew the show had to shift between big spectacle and very intimate moments, said Healey. Because of this, it was important we could turn different parts of the set on and off.
That approach helped create a cohesive picture. We used pixel tape on the stage left and right staircases, and edge lighting along the entire balcony and band risers to create this sense of cohesion. Vanish screens and blow through fixtures upstage created added depth.
This gave us the flexibility to build looks that were fully lighting driven, fully content driven, or a mix of both, he continued. The scale of the stage was a real challenge in terms of filling the space within budget, but I’m happy with how we used the fixtures to make it feel as large as possible.
Chief among those fixtures were 110 COLORado PXL Bar 16 motorized battens, 54 Color STRIKE Mmotorized strobe-washes, and 59 Rogue R2X Wash IP units. Making up most of the residency’s lighting, the 223 CHAUVET Professional fixtures were supplied by Volt Lites, a huge supporter of many of Healey’s projects.
Describing the role of the COLORado PXL Bar 16, the real workhorse in the rig, Healey said, They were spread throughout the set to help ground it. On the deck level, they sat on the downstage side of the staircases left and right, in front of the band risers, and all the way upstage at the base of the video wall. On the second level, they were mounted along the back of the scenic balconies on both sides, and across the bridge in front of the video screen. They also were located on the lighting ladders acting as caps to the SL & SR side of each video screen. They gave us soft, washy looks with a lot of pixel control, but they could also zoom in and create a very crisp beam. That let us use full groups as light curtains for certain numbers.
In keeping with the vision of creating a varied, continuously fresh lighting narrative, Healey did not activate the COLORado PXL Bar 16 units on the vertical tower until the show’s second act. We wanted to introduce a new lighting language for that part of the show. It was great being able to play between the bars as vertical elements and as horizontal elements across the set. They also created some great moments for the dancers, especially on the bridge, where we could silhouette them or have them cut through big beam looks and throw shadows out into the house.
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