A Chorus Line

Marquee Steps up to the Line

September 30, 2004

 

Recently, a member of our development team, Robert Bell, joined resident TD and LD Al McMillian of the Stage West Dinner Theatre (www.stagewest.com) for their fit-up of the theatre s new production of A Chorus Line. Nancy McCune, the ALD, programming the show on a new Marquee console hot off the line. For Bell, it was refreshingly relaxed. Horizon

Control is finding out that so much of Marquee is spot on . The desk ran in heavy tech for a week straight without a hiccup. The interesting thing we found was even late in the tech week, Bell continued to pipe up with suggestions on how to program things in different and easier ways. This speaks volumes on how rich the feature set is in Marquee.

 

For the last eight years, this house has been run on a Strand LBX (Golf Ball) conventional desk. For the last production, they had to load three sets of disks to get through a show due to limits on memory. Marquee s  no-limits philosophy is a welcome change for them.

Sitting in the green room one day during a break I heard the deck-techs asking Nancy if the new desk was any better than the old one:

 Oh ya   way! 

Why?

 Nicer looking, nicer to touch, way better displays, can see what s going on, less

keystrokes, more features, easier, faster  just plain better.

 

For the more technically minded, things that really shine in Marquee include:

-Very high reliability (no crashes or hang-ups) 

-Very high trust factor (given certain key-strokes the operator is sure what is going to happen)

-Fast response on buttons (things like @ Full or bump buttons feel like analog control)   

-Lightning fast save to disk operations (between the automatic checkpoint times and effortless     Save function, operators are sure what they have is on disk)                                            

-Flexible record options (record only changes, only selected, cue list state, stage)          

-Perfect execution on editing functions (blind editing, loading, updating, deleting cue-only,            renumbering cues, deleting multiple cues, cue labeling)                                                 

-Simple, yet powerful cue timing and cue action properties (they were thrilled to put a wait on the down time  something the LBX never had)                                                                  

-Printing (nicer formatted reports than Stage West has ever seen)

 

Stage West will run A Chorus Line until the end of November, then mount up a music review show called California Dreaming. Each Monday night, Marquee is also used to program one-off special events using the same stage rig.

An amusing footnote to this story is that the head of the Marquee development team, Gordon Pearlman of Entertainment Technology, gained notoriety in this industry for putting the first-ever digital lighting desk on Broadway. It was for Tharon Musser’s original design of A Chorus Line in 1975!