Automated lights help maintain the standard. “Everyone needs to know moving lights and the Wholehog II,” insists Drayton Allison, production electrician and board operator on tours of The Secret Garden, The Full Monty, and the marching-band extravaganza Blast!, which will take on Tokyo this summer. Quigley's experience with the WholeHog® II (and his ability to move big tours like Kiss) got him his 1999 engagement with Riverdance, which carried more than a hundred moving lights. From 2001-2003, he traveled with Disney's Aida, which had a load-in time of 16 hours and a load-out of eight, with 60 moving lights. “A VL3000 ^™ I can take apart in a dozen screws,” he says of the ease of maintaining current “far more bulletproof” equipment, adding that Tomcat crank truss and Tait Towers service truss for the tour's three dimmer racks helped escort Aida. “We only had four dimmer racks plus our front-of-house package, whereas, in New York, they had eight or nine electrics. Natasha Katz, the LD, cut it down with a chainsaw for the road. We were doing as much with less to keep the look and feel of what you paid $100 a ticket for on Broadway.”

“When I was touring shows myself, you used to have one light that was a down special…and also a backlight and a sidelight. Now, we're able to put almost all of Fosse on with moving lights,” says Juenker. “On the road, they fill gaps and smooth things over. It used to be that three on a show was amazing, but they exploded in use a few years back, when Vari-Lite opened up its process and allowed ETC and Wholehog II consoles to work with its lights, and tours no longer had to travel with a Vari-Lite tech. Plus, High End and Martin Professional have really cleaned up their acts in terms of customer service, and prices have gone down over the past four years.”

One thing there cannot be enough of when touring a show is communication, from every standpoint. Before a tour starts, Quigley says the producer should have “as an overriding main concern, from the get-go, moving the show. The minute he says, ‘We're going to have a tour, but it has to move quickly,’ then he has to give the freedom to the lighting designer and the production electrician so that they can make the best choices that further moving the show.” Says Nelson, “The better prepared the house is for the road crew, the better the day goes for everyone, and with complete paperwork from the tour, there are less surprises during the entire process.”

Leone, who also handles The Phantom of the Opera tour, and J.T. McDonald, its head electrician for 11 years, work together to minimize surprises. Typically, Leone only visits when a staff member changes. “Long-range tours turn into a game of telephone,” Leone says. “I say it's really important that the followspot be hard-edged and bright, and after two changeovers in frontlight personnel, the person says it was supposed to be soft and dim, and I'm like, ‘Hello?’ I try to give them as much knowledge of the show so they can solve the problems of the move-to-move autonomously.” Says McDonald, “When she is here, and that may be once every two years if she's busy, my aim is for her to be able to look at the show and not have any notes.”

Phantom, McDonald says, was the last big Broadway musical to tour without moving lights. Currently, he and Leone are discussing a few changes to keep the music of the night in sync with changing times, like upgrading the front of house package to all ETC Source Fours to help save cabling and move the show more efficiently as well as fixing its DHA Light-Curtains.

Finding audiences on the road by early next year will be the Broadway hits Little Shop of Horrors and Wicked, a little less grand, perhaps, than the New York editions but no less innovative when it comes to lighting. “The use of moving lights, projections, and even automation on smaller shows is something that wasn't there years ago,” says Juenker. “I went to see the current tour of Miss Saigon, by Big League Theatricals (a company I toured with in the past) and was amazed by its use of projections and the sheer amount of moving lights in the air. If you have a chance to go see some of these ‘little’ shows, a term I use lightly, you should. They really know how to push the limits of design and technology.”