One of Tasmania’s leading lighting designers, Gareth Kays, used an ultra-compact
Quartz console from British manufacturer Avolites to programme the magical
lighting and special effects on the Australian island state’s production of blockbuster
Broadway musical Wicked. The show ran at Hobart’s Theatre Royal from 27 January
to 11 February.

Featuring spectacular staging and a 17-piece orchestra, the musical was put on by
local production company The Show Company. Kays was brought in to design and
programme the entire lighting package. The owner of GK Productions, Tasmania’s
premier performance technology consultancy, Kays controlled the show using an
ultra-compact Avolites Quartz console running the latest Titan V10 software.

For the Wicked production, Kays added an additional touch screen and the Avolites
Titan Mobile Wing during the design and programming stages of the show.

Kays was faced with the challenge of limited programming time, he started plotting
on a Monday afternoon, with the musical opening on the Friday. During this time
there were five runs of the show, which further cut into an already limited time
frame. He consequently had to adopt a highly efficient approach using pallets and
programmed the entire show on a single cue list. The rig was spread across eight
universes of data, conveyed via Art-Net.

Kays relied heavily on Titan V10s latest ‘Shape Tracking’ feature in cue lists – which
allows designers advanced intuitive programming capabilities. The feature means
that when creating a cue list that includes shapes, the shapes automatically track
and follow the normal tracking rules. The ‘Playback View’ shows where they are
blocked and tracked – meaning a designer has the option to block the shapes,
preventing it from tracking to the next cue.

Kays was first introduced to Avolites consoles 15 years ago, when he started
working with Sapphire 2000s and Pearl 2000s. In his opinion, a key benefit of the
Avolites Titan software is that it has retained the same intuitive, easy-to-use,
interface over the years – while accruing increasingly powerful features.

Wicked is described by The New York Times as “the defining musical of the
decade”, and is one of Broadway’s longest running and best-loved musicals. It tells
the story of the Witches of Oz – Glinda the Good Witch and Elphaba the infamous
Wicked Witch of the West. Based on a 1995 novel of the same name by New Yorker
Gregory Maguire, it serves as a prequel to the classic children’s novel The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. It reveals the astounding happenings in
the Emerald City before Dorothy and Toto were dropped there by a tornado.