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“Boyband Tour” kicks off with Robe

“The Boyband Tour” is a two-hour set inspired by some of the greatest international “boyband” hits from the nineties and noughties - Westlife, Backstreet Boys, SpiceBoys and many more. It is delivered by five Danish musical theatre professionals - Silas Holst, Kim Ace Scherlund, Teit Samsø, Jeff Ace Scherlund and Joakim Traneberg - who are also the show’s producers.

Lighting, visuals, staging, and technical production is right at the heart of this project, which is the brainchild of Silas Holst. Sune Verdier was asked onboard to co-ordinate these aspects and also to production manage the first leg of “The Boyband Tour” which kicked off in Aarhus in December 2022 and continues around Denmark through February 2023.

Verdier specified some of his favourite Robe moving lights for the show with Esprites, LEDBeam 150s, MegaPointes and Pointes plus other lighting and LED fixtures all supplied by Copenhagen based rental company European Touring Productions (ETP) along with the audio and LED screen.

Integral to Verdier’s show design is the video content that is crafted into the show which he commissioned from media specialist Faceoff Media House, which also produced coherent graphics, imagery, logos and promotional and marketing packages and content for the whole Boyband tour concept. Video and lighting cues work in harmony with the choreography (directed by Kim Ace) to help produce the performance.

Verdier established the position of the 12-metre wide by 2-metre-deep screen, upstage of and above a raised catwalk with stair access at each end and a set of toaster lifts at the back. The screen is a vehicle for narrative information - from pastiche music videos to song lyrics to stylised graphics - as well as for effects, some synched with the music and lyrics.

At the start of the interval, a perforated elastic projection screen - also visible as a “ceiling” piece in the first half - flies in and shows a projected countdown clock for the start of the second act. For “Dirty Pop”, the first number, a music video is projected onto the front as the guys periodically burst through the screen onto the forestage in sync with the video images - and back again through the screen.

To capture the pop aesthetic, there is a lot of back, side, top and bottom lighting and around the screen. The three side booms a side are all on wheels and movable for re-scaling in different sized venues. Kicking in from the upstage corners are two - left and right - matrixes each comprising twelve Robe LEDBeam 150s.

At the top of the side booms and above the screen is a row of eleven MegaPointes, which are are used for massive beam looks, as well as for silhouetting and framing the five artists from behind and above. Below the screen, peeping through across the top of the raised catwalk, are ten Robe Pointes. For front lighting, the keys and specials on the front truss are seven Esprites.

In addition to these, there are some other moving head spot lights on the rig plus substantial LED lighting inside the set including eleven strobes. These and serious amounts of haze have all been programmed by Sune Verdier onto a GrandMA3.

It is not a huge rig, but everything on it had to work hard to get the variety of looks needed to propel the show over two hours and 1500 cues. Verdier had initially scheduled three weeks of basic pre-viz programming for himself prior to a three-week tech period in the Burning Snail Studio in Odder, just outside Aarhus. However, for multiple reasons, this boiled down to just two days of pre-viz.

The “Boyband Tour” take of the classic Backstreet Boys “I Want It That Way” airport video was filmed in the Værløse Aviation History Hangar at Værløse Airport. A series of “backstage” VT-play-ins on screen delineate the different sections of the show as the performers do their quick-changes and morph into the next artists. All of this was developed working closely with the five artists, and Verdier notes that it was a “different but very productive” way to work so collaboratively with the cast.

Video content is stored on a Disguise server and triggered via the GrandMA3. As a timecoded performance synched to the backing track, the entire show is run by FOH sound engineer Jonas Jørgensen.

(Photos: Louise Stickland/Paul Clarke)

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