Ayrton, Zactrack, Green Hippo And MA Lighting Power Lionel Richie's Tour

A wide array of Ayrton luminaires, a zactrack automated follow system, Green Hippo Hippotizer media servers and MA Lighting grandMA3 consoles toured with Lionel Richie on his co-headlined 'Sing A Song All Night Long Tour' with Earth, Wind & Fire, taking the artists' back catalogues to arenas and major venues across North America.

ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of all four brands in the region.

The 26-city itinerary opened in June in Saint Paul, Minnesota, with stops including Toronto, New York and Los Angeles, before concluding in Austin, Texas, on 14 August.

Production Designer Eric Wade, a Partner and Senior Designer at Crossfade Design in Garland, Texas and New Albany, Indiana, headed the visual team, alongside Associate Designer Keith Hoagland and Crossfade designers/programmers Sam Brown and Brandon Wade. Wade, who has collaborated with Richie for two decades and serves as Lighting Designer for the singer’s ongoing Wynn Las Vegas residency, leaned heavily on Crossfade’s Ayrton stock. “Ayrton is my workhorse – it’s what we choose first only filling in with other brands for specialty lighting that Ayrton doesn’t make,” says Wade.

Creative Director Brian Burke and Co-creative Director Sagiv Karpel set a streamlined brief that informed the rig and staging. "Brian wanted a linear look, so we kept the design linear and beamy with lights above the videowall and blasting through the screen, positioned up and downstage and angled at the sides of the stage," Wade explained. "There was very little modification from venue to venue. When Keith and I started putting things together we figured what fit the smallest stage – at Madison Square Garden – would work anywhere."

A multi-level set placed the band on two risers: aligned with Richie at the piano on the upper tier for ballads, while guitar and bass dropped to the lower tier for up-tempo numbers. "The goal was not to have the piano on stage when it was not in use," noted Wade. "So we designed it so the piano, a custom clear plexiglass Yamaha, would hide under the stage and come up and down when Lionel needed it."

A 64-foot-wide LED videowall split down the centre with angled side screens, revealing Richie via a tunnel-style entrance and a floor-centre hit from an Ayrton EagleStrike. Four additional EagleStrikes operated as followspots driven by a zactrack SMART automated follow system, with the EagleStrike key lights hung on truss an average of 137 feet from stage.

"I love zactrack. We own several systems for our use and do a lot of rentals, too," reported Wade. "In our business, we're always at the mercy of who’s behind the spot, and very few people are good at spot operating. So zactrack is absolutely the best option for us today. Keith just calibrated and tweaked zactrack for 20-25 minutes for each new show, and it worked. It was spot on! Extremely consistent, and that’s what you want in a tour situation." Hoagland added that the latest software made it more straightforward than ever: "The band just dropped the trackers in their pockets. We tracked four guys with a total of eight tracks."

Ayrton Veloces supplemented the followspot package for Richie and the band: six units on the downstage truss provided static key light when players held position, while a single Veloce on the upstage truss was zactrack-controlled to track Richie. Twelve Ayrton Eurus Profiles covered band members moving to join Richie downstage.

Forty Ayrton Kyalamis delivered the core aerial and prism effects from a four-fingered truss layout over the stage, splaying into twin V formations. Two Ayrton Mambas on the upstage truss created striking backlight statements, such as at Richie’s piano during “Lady” with the late Kenny Rogers on screen. “The Mambas are huge, bright and dramatic, but we didn’t use them for big beams in the sky,” says Wade. “We zoomed out and used them as a high-power shadow light that gave a big silhouette look. It was cool, like a giant wash light.

Crossfade Design specified a pair of Green Hippo Hippotizer MX Series Meuse media servers, mounted in custom Upstaging-built racks. “We were very excited to have them, and they ran amazingly,” Wade says. “They gave a big jump to our processing and power. They were fast, with no glitches and no lag we could see in live IMAG video.”

grandMA3 control featured extensively in previsualisation and on the road. "We had a dozen or more people from the creative team in our large previz studio for a week straight working with our six grandMA3s to program all the lighting, video, pyro, lasers and TAIT Navigator machinery automation," recalled Wade. "With Sam as Head Programmer and designer as well, we walked out with the show, so in rehearsals we were just finessing." On tour, two active and one backup grandMA3 full-size handled lighting, two further consoles drove the Hippotizer Meuse servers, a grandMA3 compact XT at stage left managed effects and pyro, and another grandMA3 compact XT at FOH controlled the lasers. The compact XTs were provided by ImageSFX, headquartered in Las Vegas.

At Crossfade Design, Brandon Wade and Sam Brown were pivotal in assembling the show and overseeing the bulk of the programming, including zactrack. The team reconvenes with Richie in October and November for his return to The Wynn’s Encore Theater residency in Las Vegas.

Photo credit: Toni Wade

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