Royal Opera House Turns to Stage Electrics for New Opera Anna Nicole

	Photo credit: The Royal Opera/Bill Cooper

It's not often that contemporary celebrity culture finds itself in the elegant surroundings of the Royal Opera House, and the recent run of Anna Nicole, the tale of a young Playboy model, an octogenarian billionaire husband, intrusive media, and a tragically early death, led to as many rave reviews as raised eyebrows among operagoers and the media. Anna Nicole is the work of composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, librettist Richard Thomas, and director Richard Jones, with Eva-Maria Westbroek playing Anna. Miriam Buether's sets are vividly stylized, with flamboyant nightclub scenes and garish cartoon-type characters - and are accompanied by lighting looks, by lighting designers Mimi Jordan Sherin and D M Wood, rarely seen on this hallowed stage.

The looks called for some special additions to the Royal Opera House lighting stock, and its head of lighting, Nick Ware, brought in Stage Electrics to help select and supply the specials, which included a single strobe flash bright enough to white out the entire stage, a high power automated lighting fixture with framing capability, and a club lighting effects fixture.

Ware explains: "When the commissioned piece was announced as the story of Anna Nicole Smith, we knew it would be quite a diversion for us as a lighting department, although we've worked a lot with Richard Jones and Mimi Jordan Sherin, so there was already a relationship there.

"For the Royal Opera House and The Royal Ballet we have a very specific style of lighting, but this was more like a musical, which has challenges in its own right - the biggest of all for us being time. Staging a West End musical normally involves weeks and weeks of technical rehearsal, even continuing into previews, and we literally had days of rehearsal before seven performances.

"Richard's and Mimi's whole ethos was a very fast-moving show: in two-and-a-half hours there's about 280 lighting cues and then part cues and sequences within those, and programming it all in the time available was a real challenge. As was the style of the show's design, compared to the type of equipment that we have."

A standout lighting cue was to be a massively bright flash that would "white out" a pink set. Jordan Sherin, says Ware, suggested several fixtures to try out. Stage Electrics sourced an 85kW Hungaroflash T-Light Pro strobe and demonstrated it to the ROH team and, says Ware, "We decided we'd purchase it, because I felt it's a unique piece and it would be a good thing to have in our stock; something that could also be quite interesting for other companies to use."

Stage Electrics also arranged shootouts of luminaires required for Jordan Sherin's favored low angle lighting position in the orchestra stalls. Ware notes: "Mimi is always looking for very intense discharge sources, which our standard rig doesn't contain. We have a lot of HMI kit available but we wanted more controllability. Ultimately, we were looking for a large profile fixture, with high power and shuttering, and low noise; our audience has very high expectations including no equipment noise."

The result of the shootouts, and a visit by Ware to the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre, also equipped by Stage Electrics, was a choice of Martin Professional 1,500W MAC III fixtures with full framing capabilities, a new addition to Stage Electrics' rental inventory and hired for the show through the company's London office. "They did the job very well," comments Stage Electrics' Mark Burnett, "as did some fixtures from a quite different part of Martin's product range." Another scene is set in a strip club for which, says Ware, "We needed a classic, flashy disco lighting effect...so we went to the other extreme of Martin's range and the Wizard Extremes filled the brief fantastically! I found it quite funny that we had one of Martin's latest, largest moving lights and one of their disco units, both in this newly commissioned opera." The fixtures have now joined the Hungaroflash units in the ROH's lighting stock. "There's a Christmas party coming up," quips Ware, "but more seriously, this show will get revived at some point, so they were worth purchasing for our general stock." "It was an unusual and exciting challenge," comments Burnett, "and we were very pleased to be a part of this exceptional project."