The next time you attend a performance at downtown Vancouver’s Magenta Theater, take a look overhead at all the new light fixtures. Take special note of the four lights hanging just before the tech booth, in the back corner of the auditorium.
From south to north, those lights are Gail Ludowise, Ed Warner, Tom Hubbard and Bill Roberts. They’ve been named after “supervolunteers” who have given their all to the nonprofit theater.
In other words, founder and artistic director Jaynie Roberts said, “They’re all Magenta fixtures.” Get it?
Fixture volunteer Ed Warner spent most of last week supervising the delivery and installation of a sophisticated new lighting system at Magenta. He’s been the theater’s lighting manager for the past couple of years, and said he returned to theater lighting and technical design, his first love, after retiring from a career in the lighting industry.
A couple of years ago, Roberts recalled with a laugh, Warner came into Magenta’s Main Street theater and marched straight past a volunteer orientation, then underway, to check out the lighting system overhead in the auditorium. He was impressed enough to get involved with the group, he said — clearly this was a serious outfit — and yet, what he really wanted to do was replace all those aging lights with newer ones.
Why? The previous, incandescent lights were old-fashioned in every way, he said. They drew a whopping 45,000 watts of current, and burned hot enough to light cigarettes. They also burned hot enough to trigger the whole theater’s air conditioning system — so audiences were treated first to heat from overhead, then a cool breeze. You really don’t want changing weather inside your theater, Roberts said.
Warner said he spent his first few months with Magenta fixing lights in his garage. Then a light bulb went on over Warner’s head; he called Clark Public Utilities and asked if the same lighting-efficiency rebate would be available to a theater that’s available to other commercial enterprises replacing older, incandescent lights with high-efficiency LED lights. The utility was ready, willing and eager to help out, he said.
“They came up with a lighting calculator for us,” Warner said, and in the end wrote Magenta a $15,000 rebate check.
That came after Magenta applied for a grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust and spent most of last year raising matching donations from friends and audiences. Magenta amassed $62,000 toward the new lighting system, Roberts said, and won a matching grant from Murdock. The whole lighting replacement job cost a total of $128,000, Roberts said.
“It’s like wearing used clothes all your life, then you get a brand new outfit from Macy’s,” she said.
The 48 incandescent lights and dimmers that used to illuminate Magenta’s stage came down right after “Jeeves Takes a Bow” closed on Feb. 16, and were donated to Pacific Stageworks, a sister theater company restarting after a hiatus. Then Warner worked with two staffers from Hollywood Lights last week to install new wires and cables, 56 new LED light fixtures and a digital control console that’s “a quantum leap” beyond Magenta’s previous technology, he said.
If you wanted colors on stage, Warner said, you used to have to physically install color gels (filters) in some of the lights before the run of the show. All the lights were controlled by individual dimmers. But now, he said, “The lights don’t use dimmers. They use data.”
“Each ones has fans and heat sinks and a little computer inside it,” said Sean Forsythe of Hollywood Lights, and weighs approximately 25 pounds.
Up in the tech booth, Warner showed off the sleek new control board and twin monitors. “Each fixture has its own address,” he said. “Every light can be set for any color of the rainbow at any intensity.”
To master all that, Warner has a little light reading to do, in a hurry. The new lighting manual is 512 pages long, and Magenta’s next show opens March 29. It’s an edgy Cold War drama called “Pack of Lies,” which is presented partially in living color and partially in “historical” black-and-white, with the actors stepping back and forth between those zones on stage, Warner said.
“This is an example of be careful what you wish for,” Warner said. “Tech rehearsals should be an adventure.”
