BONNIE AND CLYDE
My design for Bonnie and Clyde focussed on a contrast between naturalist lighting during dialogue and spoken scenes, and bold, colourful, rock and roll lighting during the upbeat musical numbers. The production budget was large, and the venue - a conference auditorium - had four bars but no lantern stock, and so everything was hired. Every fixture except for 3 specials and 6 PAR64s were LED, including a cyclorama lit by ETC ColorSource Spots with cyc flood adapters at the top, and by battens at the bottom, and four MAC 250 Entours. The director encouraged an abstract and surrealist design - the aim being to focus on the lighting fitting the atmosphere of the music as opposed to maintaining a realistic colour palette. One particular stand out number was 'God's Arms' - as the music descends into full gospel choir blues at rapid pace, the lighting on stage was moving at an equally high pace in a variety of exciting colours - be that the Mac 250s dancing around the stage, or the colour battens on the cyc in a rainbow chase. As the music sharply cuts out to Clyde in the middle of a hold up, the light too cut to a dim blue backlight as all the choir on stage freeze, and a single followspot on Clyde, perfectly reflecting the sharp contrast in the music. Equally striking was the use of jail gobos to create the cells which would've been impractical to create through set, the use of a crisp blue moonlight shade for many of the outdoor forest scenes, which created a perfect sense of time, and beautiful sunrise and sunset colour combinations on the cyclorama.
Production by Pembroke Annual Musical
Director - Maddie Lawless
Musical Director - Nicholas Heymann
Set Design - Emily Stevenhagen
Costume Design - Arianna Zobra
Photographs by Vicky Alexiou
