Note: Below are Rob Halliday's full comments on LES MISERABLES. The notes for each separate production also appear at the beginning of each of those sections.
The Lighting Archive thanks him and David Hersey for their contribution.
LES MISÉRABLES
Rob Halliday, 8th Jan 2020
The very first production of Les Misérables, quite different from the show as we know it now in terms of both content and physical production, was staged at the Palais des Sports in Paris in 1980.
The production was brought to the attention of producer Cameron Mackintosh by sound designer Andrew Bruce, who had been brought in to work on the French production by the show's authors, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil. Mackintosh decided to make a new production for the UK, including a revised book and new lyrics, ultimately written by Herbert Kretzmer.
To mount the production, Mackintosh turned to his collaborator on Cats, director Trevor Nunn. Nunn was then still artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and felt that the show would benefit from the RSC's ensemble spirit and the kind of long, evolutionary rehearsal process that had worked so triumphantly on his earlier production of Nicholas Nickleby. It was agreed that the show would be a co-production between Mackintosh and the RSC, opening at the RSC's London base, the Barbican Theatre.
Nunn then invited his other collaborators from Nickleby on board: co-director John Caird, designer John Napier and lighting designer David Hersey. Andreane Neoufitou was brought in as costume designer; Andrew Bruce and his company Autograph continued their involvement with the show as sound designer.
The production opened at the Barbican on 8th October 1985, with a cast that was a mixture of RSC stalwarts (Roger Allam as Javert, Alun Armstrong as Thénardier), big names from musical theatre (Colm Wilkinson, who had been Che on the original recording of Evita, as Jean Valjean, Patti LuPone as Fantine) and newcomers who would go on to be big stars (Michael Ball as Marius, Francis Ruffelle as Eponine, Rebecca Caine as Cosette)
It received decidedly mixed reviews.
While a transfer of the show to the West End had always been the intent, the reviews threw this into doubt until, legend has it, Mackintosh called the Barbican box office to hear the bad news about sales, couldn't get through, and when he ultimately did discovered it was because the phones had been ringing off the hook with people trying to buy tickets. The transfer was quickly confirmed, to the Palace Theatre. The show opened there on 4th December 1985 and played there for the next 19 years. The London production then moved to the Queen's Theatre, opening there on 3rd April 2004, becoming the world's longest running musical (a record previously held by Cats) on 8th October 2006.
Confirmed as a monster hit, this production of Les Misérables rapidly appeared in other cities around the world. In the US it premiered at the Kennedy Center's Opera House in Washington DC before moving to New York, opening at the Broadway Theatre on 12th March 1987. It moved to the Imperial Theatre in October 1990 and played there until 18th May 2003, returning to New York from 9th November 2006 to 6th January 2008. During this time the show also played multiple tours across the UK and everywhere from Toronto to Japan to Australia - 425 cities, 52 countries, in 22 languages according to the show's publicity.
The last performance of this "classic" production of Les Misérables was on 13th July 2019 at the Queen's Theatre in London. The show has been replaced there by Mackintosh's '25th Anniversary' production created for an earlier tour. This production uses video projection in place of Napier's minimalist, transformative scenery.
This archive covers the "classic" Les Misérables. That production was a remarkable piece of stagecraft created by a tight-knit team formed over long years prior to Les Mis. What they delivered is a box of tricks, each moment in what is a long show covering a vast number of locations and enormous period of times delivered relatively simply by a few key elements that combine and re-combine to ever-changing effect. The core set is a rendering of a Parisian streetscape: heavily textured, dark coloured brick walls supported by thick wooden buttresses, a heavily textured floor of swirls of cobbles and bricks. Set into that floor, a large turntable (in the original London production with a second, smaller turntable in the centre) that allows the show to have a constant sense of motion, particularly as it follows Jean Valjean's journey early in the show, constantly walking as new places and new people are carried around him. On either side of the stage, two structures seemingly made of the junk of the city - wooden beams, wagon wheels (Napier had originally wanted four; the budget-conscious Mackintosh reduced this to two). These start the show almost invisible, on either side of the turntable. They travel on-stage as the show shifts to Paris; in the shows biggest transformation they track on stage while tilting, appearing to 'fall over' to create the barricades built by the rebelling students. In this position they rotate to reveal the two sides of the ensuing battle. Other variations are achieved by the simplest means: shutters in the backwall light up becoming the night-time windows of the city. For Javert's suicide a bridge flies in, then as he jumps over it the bridge flies out in view leaving the performer appearing to fall. It should be noted that though a show of a different style and with quite different lighting, the physical production of Hamilton is a descendent of that for Les Mis - again a static set used for a variety of locations, two turntables to allow things to stay in motion, and light directing you where to look and where not to look. Lin-Manuel Miranda has commented that they wanted a second turntable to upstage Les Mis, of which he is a self-confessed enormous fan; perhaps no-one told him that Les Mis once had two turntables as well...
Making all of this work is David Hersey's lighting: Les Mis gained a reputation in some quarters as a "dark" show, but it really wasn't, it was just incredibly precisely controlled lighting. It always gave you just enough in just the right space to show you what you needed to see, while ensuring that everything else was concealed, characters rotating upstage on the turntable swallowed up by the darkness, scene changes happening in full view of the audience yet invisible to them. The lighting never actually touches dark at all: apart from one very precise moment (the transition into the wedding) where it just kisses black, it ensures that you are constantly driven forward with Valjean's journey.
Throughout the show's history there have been two key elements of the rig, both of which had also been used to great effect in Nicholas Nickleby. Firstly, the light curtains - strips of Par56 VNSP lamps extending the width of the stage, giving intense, movable, solid sheets of backlight through which, with some smoke in the air, people could literally appear or disappear just by walking through the light. In the original production, these were motorised using an radio ham antenna rotator motor and controller (the controller was a dial that said 'north-south-east-west' then had a 360° scale around it); each bar could only move as one unit, and only had one colour, Lee 202. In the original production the light curtains were deliberately very much in view of the audience, 'topping out' the very tall spaces of the Barbican and then Palace Theatres. Subsequently for the original Miss Saigon (1989) a scroller was developed for these units, then for the New York production David's company, DHA Lighting, developed an "intelligent" version, the Digital Light Curtain, which had a built in scroller and individual movement control of each 8-lamp-long section of the light curtain. For Les Mis the DLCs were used for the show's 10th Anniversary Concert at the Royal Albert Hall, lit by David and Patrick Woodroffe, then retro-fitted to the New York and London productions and used on subsequent productions of the show.
The second: the 1kW beamlight followspots, which provide the principal lighting for key characters during the show. These are not a traditional hard-edged "showbiz" followspot. Rather, a crown-silver tungsten lamp in a parabolic reflector which creates a parallel shaft of light with a tight yet soft, hard-to-define edge. Used in a high-side position front-of-house or on-stage these create a finger of light which lands around a performer, lifting them without making them feel "spotlit". Les Mis uses six of these followspots, one either side FOH, two either side on-stage. However, the show only uses four operators: the two on-stage operators moved up and down side-stage walkways between two spots during the show. A key feature of the show's lighting is the motif used to indicate character's passing to the "world beyond" - their beamlights, which have typically been running at around 25-35%, rise to full and in doing so shift from the warm glow of dimmed tungsten to an intense white - then after a beat they fade away to nothing. One of David's proudest "reviews" of his work on the show was a letter from a Catholic priest commenting on how "the individual was, upon death, brought into a brighter light."
Notes On Paperwork
The period covered by these documents - 1985 to 2019 - covers a seismic shift in the tools available to help lighting designers do their work. The earliest plots for the show at the Barbican and the Palace are hand-drafted. They are very "British" - style plans with all of the information concentrated on the plot rather than separated out into other documents (hook-ups, magic sheets etc). Related paperwork, such as patching and plugging, was likely also hand-generated - and looking at the way channel numbers run sequentially across bars, it is highly likely that the channel number was also the number of the dimmer the light was plugged in to.
David Hersey was an early adopter of computer technology, in particular the Apple Macintosh, to help manage the many shows he had in circulation at any one time. By around the time of Chess in 1986 and certainly of Miss Saigon in 1989 his light plots were being computer drafted, the earliest using hand-drafted symbols in the application MacDraw. He and his associates, led by Ted Mather, later moved to using PowerDraw which later became PowerCADD. Drawings for the first New York productions exist in PowerDraw format, but PowerDraw no longer runs on modern Macs: accessing old documents (particularly those that pre-date the PDF format, which now provides a standardised format approved by the US Government, amongst others, for the archiving of documents that must remain accessible) is problematic! Later versions were drawn in MiniCAD which then became VectorWorks. These are generally accessible though there is a limit to how many versions back a current version of VectorWorks will open a file created in an older version.
Ted Mather carried out a lot of work creating his own rig management database using the Claris FileMaker software. The examples of rig paperwork from New York are from this database; others would adapt this database to suit their needs, so the Berlin paperwork is an adaption of the database made by Richard Pacholski attempting to integrate moving light information.
The tour moving light focus information is in a simple database I designed, also using FileMaker, to handle this kind of information while relating to Ted's database for information about the rig. At this point the database included written notation and was accompanied by traditional hand-drawn focus sketches. From about 2004 digital cameras suddenly made it viable to document focuses using photography, which was provided a considerable speed increase for this process. This led to the development of the FocusTrack software (also based on FileMaker) to automate the creation of this information (by processing the showfile from the console) and then simplify the process of taking the photos (by controlling the lighting console to set lights to the right place). FocusTrack became usable for this slightly later in 2004 than the Les Mis transfer (it was a side project during Mary Poppins), so for the Queen's Theatre production the use of the moving lights was analysed by hand and manually entered into the database, with the digital photographs then also inserted manually. FocusTrack was used on the New York revival of the show.
Through all of this there is a definite sense of people figuring out how to deal with this as they went along - firstly dealing with using computers, then dealing with how to manage the extra data created by more complex rigs of moving lights. Many of the techniques developed on Les Mis and other show of the era are just considered standard now.
The People
Probably worth also noting the many, many people involved with this show over the years. This would include, in no particular order, Howard Eaton, Keith Benson, Bobby Fehribach, Mike Ward, Mike Pitzer, Fraser Hall, Chris Buddle (chief at the Palace), Mike Cordina (chief at the Queen's), Ted Mather, Jeff Whitsett, Jenny Kagan, Rachael McCutcheon, Alan Boyd, plus Alistair Grant and Richard Pacholski, these last two sadly no longer with us. Plus, the countless crew members and spot ops who have looked after it all over the world. (I realise there are no spot cue sheets in the above list of files; Ted may have those, but particularly in London most of the information was just carried by the spot ops in their heads!)
There are doubtless many more that I do not remember or never knew of since my involvement with the show only began with the 1995 Tenth Anniversary Concert and then the 1997 tour.
Plus of course directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird, designer John Napier, costume designer Andreane Neoufitou, sound designer Andrew Bruce.
In History
I find it interesting that the lifespan of the show encompasses the arrival of the Source Four, the arrival of moving lights, many generations of memory lighting control, and lots and lots of other new technologies which changed the way we kept track of everything, hand-drawn lighting plans to CAD, hand-drawn focus notes to digital photography, floppy discs (photo included) to USB sticks, telex to email. And yet through all of that the show playing at the Queens was clearly, recognisably the same Les Mis that opened at the Barbican all those years ago, and was still a remarkable, beautiful, powerful piece of work - the collective talents and experience of all of the creative team rehearsed on all those other shows from Nickleby onwards all brought together.
The Archive:
1985 Barbican - original production
Scan of the hand-drawn paper light plot, dated just after opening night. Scratched out on one of the FOH bridges (above chan104) is "FSP1" - the traditional front centre followspot that was never used. For the rest of time the remaining followspots (6 x 1KW Beamlights) were numbered 2/3/4/5/6/7 in honour of their lost comrade. Six spots but only four operators: the operators on the side stage bridges moved up and down between spots 5/7 and spots 4/6.
As with so many pre-CAD era plots, the joy is being able to get glimpses of what changed as the show evolved through the erased but still visible fixtures on the side bridges, and the line of fixtures denoted as "UV" upstage. No-one can now remember what these were for, except perhaps an idea for lighting the underground sewer scene.
The very big FOH rig is the RSC permanent rep rig that existed in the theatre anyway, rather than something put in specifically for the show.
It is interesting to analyse the colours used, since while some are familiar from David Hersey's other work (particularly R68 and R03) others are less so, particularly 850 and L144. On the latter David has commented "Yes I did have a 144 period which was replaced by R71." The L144 did not make it to the Palace.
Colour changers were four-colour semaphore colours, made by CCT Lighting. Control was the theatre's in-house Strand Galaxy. Not shown on the plan is the Kodak Carousel slide projector used to project the captions which narrate the big time jumps during the show.
1985 Palace - the transfer of the original production to the West End
Scan of a paper copy of the hand-drawn light plot from the show's transfer. Initials suggest drawn by Adam Grater, who now runs DHA Designs, the company that evolved from David Hersey's architectural design work. Date is missing from the paper copy (the bottom of the paper was torn), but the different title box style/logo compared to Barbican version suggests this plan was an updated version of the original - probably updated by hand with a new title box placed over the original. The telephone numbers scribbled bottom-right suggest this paper copy was in use much later as the 0171area code for central London phone numbers was only introduced in the year 2000.
However, this represents the rig as it was through to about 1997 when the original antenna-rotator driven light curtains were replaced with DHA Digital Light Curtains, the semaphore colour changers were replaced with scrollers, some of the original rig was replaced with Source Fours, and the original lighting console (again a Galaxy) was replaced with a Strand 500-series console. (The rig was I think originally supplied by Theatre Projects, but at some point was purchased the producer, Cameron Mackintosh Ltd, with the additional equipment added during these changes supplied by rental company White Light.)
The rig as shown is fundamentally as the Barbican minus the RSC rep rig. The Barbican had a big 5K Fresnel upstage which is gone at the Palace, perhaps because the RSC had it in stock but it was expensive to rent in the West End, though David remembers it getting cut while working to fit the show into the much smaller Palace. You do occasionally see a production photograph of the man with the flag on the top of the barricades where this 5K is visible, identifying this photograph as being from the Barbican.
Channel numbers are quite different between the two productions, and it is likely that these channel numbers were just the same as the dimmers the lights were plugged in to rather than being a carefully designed softpatch.
1995 New York
The paper here reflects the rig in New York as it was updated (principally replacing the original light curtains with Digital Light Curtains and replacing some lighting fixtures with ETC Source Fours) as part of the show's 10th anniversary celebrations. The rest of the rig was an updated version of that London design. The cue synopsis from the show at this point is here, as are examples of the rig paperwork generated by David's US associate for the production, Ted Mather, using his self-made rig database.
1997 UK Tour/Australia - the 'Tenth Anniversary Production'
This UK tour was the first 'ground-up' re-design of the show, using moving lights to make it more easily tourable. Digital Light Curtains instead of the earlier traditional light curtains (the retrofit of these to London came after the UK tour opened). High End StudioColors replacing a twocolour Par Can backlight wash for speed of focus but adding a great deal more flexibility. The show didn't become 'colourful' but certainly acquired a greater tonal range since the light curtains could now change colour - so, for example, the prologue became a warmer sepia colour. Most extreme colour moment was the tricolour light curtain added in the curtain call. This was descended from the light curtain tricolour created for the 10th Anniversary Concert at the Royal Albert Hall lit by David and Patrick Woodroffe. The difference: in the concert it went red-white-blue. When setting up the tour Claude-Michel Schoenberg, the composer, looked at it and said "non, non, non, that is a union jack, the French flag is blue-white-red", so we swapped it around and it's been that way ever since. (Deeper confession: the original red-white-blue cue WAS actually a union jack, which I made for the Scout Annual Gang Show in the Albert Hall, which 'borrowed' the Les Mis concert the night before the concert itself. I stole my own cue when we needed an act 1 finale!. Don't tell anyone...)
This version also replaced the Carousel slide projectors that originally did the show's captions with Source Fours fitted with custom glass gobos to achieve the same effect and used Source Fours generally through the rig including for the battleflash effects. Followspots remained unchanged, 1kW Beamlights by Pani.
Scenically, the set became "glossy black" rather than the "dark brown" of the original. That change was carried through to all subsequent productions.
This design became the basis of all subsequent productions, which included Australia later the same year, Antwerp in Belgium, Mexico (using the Australian touring set), Berlin and others that I've probably forgotten but I tend to think of them all as a set. In all versions there were various changes to the lighting to accommodate the slightly different sets (particularly different revolve/barricade sizes), since in many cases the sets were re-cycled from earlier productions rather than built new. The most interesting difference was in Australia where the revolve was automated rather than manually controlled, which meant it was almost impossible to achieve some of the transitions that were easy with manual control, particularly timing the end of the movement to land with the end of the music as different conductors varied the tempo.
Included are the lighting plan from the UK Tour, a Cue List from Australia, and various bits of paperwork from the tour, Australia and Antwerp including hand-drawn focus notes (highlights - the whole set might be a bit much!), plus a Cue List and the 'private' list that formed the basis of the translation from the 'conventional' version of the show to the moving light version. The most interesting document, I think, is the one showing what changed from version to version (mainly staging changes that led to lighting changes, but also differences in the lighting, particularly the practicals that came with whatever version of the set it was - ie. were the stars fibres in the back wall or flown pea bulbs, or, best of all, both!). I find this the most important document on these big long-running, multiple versions shows, particularly when you go to production 5 which has the associate director from production 3, the associate designer from production 2, the associate LD from production 4 and they all have their own take on what the 'correct' version is! But John Caird would also always show up and try to change one revolve cue - Eponine top of act 2 - to go the other way before discovering what a mess it made of the very tightly organised revolve/scenery track on the show for the rest of the act and so changed it back.
Control from a Strand 500-series console running both conventional and moving lights. DLCs running from their own Mac, triggered from the 500-series console. One programmer dealing with everything (whereas, by contrast, on Martin Guerre in1996 two consoles had been used with two operators, one for moving lights and the other for conventionals, with the data then merged into one console post-opening). I think it was on this show that I invented the term 'Lighting Programmer' (rather than 'Vari-Lite Programmer' or 'Moving Light Programmer') for myself, a term that seems to have been adopted by everyone now doing this job.
David's associate for these productions was Jenny Kagan.
2003 Berlin
Hookup from the Berlin production of the show, which was the 'moving light' version from above but with adaptations to suit local equipment availability, particularly using Amptown Washlights instead of StudioColors and an MA grandMA console. Richard Pacholski (R2) looked after this production, having looked after the Australian production as it toured around Australasia and then went to Mexico.
2004 Queens Theatre - the 'West End Tour'
This was the transfer of the show from its original home at the Palace (which Andrew Lloyd Webber owned and wanted for his new musical The Woman In White) to the Queen's Theatre, which Cameron Mackintosh owns.
The Queen's is smaller than the Palace, so a new set was required; the one built for this was designed as a touring set since there was some feeling that the show would not have an extended life in the theatre. Ultimately it was given major boosts by the Susan Boyle rendition of 'Dreamed a Dream' on the 'Britain's Got Talent' tv show, and then by the Les Mis movie, so it kept on selling. Watching the show a couple of nights before it closed I realised that the side bridges (supporting the side light position and the side followspots) actually still had their wheels on the bottom, ready to tour. The set was quite considerably smaller. This made it quite hard work to make the lighting work as it had, particularly in the positions where people vanished from site as they spun upstage on the revolve. They were sometimes just a little too close to truly vanish as they had previously. The rig also became a bit more concealed than it had been in earlier versions.
The rig was an expanded/updated version of the 'tour' rig. StudioColors were replaced with VL2000 Washes. Many conventional gobo lights (including the 'whirlpool' effect) were consolidated into a number of VL2000 Spots. Some of the DLCs became Pitching DLCs, opening up new options. Captions came from a VL3500 Spot, which added the ability to shift colour or zoom the captions at the danger that if the light failed you lost all of the captions, not just one. Additional VL3500 Spot overhead to do a giant whirlpool effect. Some VL500s on the perch as roving specials. Early use of LED lighting hidden away in the scenic portals in front of the proscenium arch.
Little changes were made to the rig during its run, mainly caused by Cameron Mackintosh refurbishing the theatre and deciding he didn't like intrusive lighting fixtures, so for example the FOH VSFX cloud projectors became, I think, the City Theatrical cloud effect. Quite late in the run I think the original Pani beam lights were replaced with a different kind of beam light, presumably because of spare parts availability.
Control originally from a Strand 520i, with control of the Light Curtains via DMX now integrated into the console. During the run this was replaced by an ETC Ion. Rig rented from White Light.
I've included the lighting plan, plus the moving light focus list and some samples of the moving light focus plot, which had now moved to digital photography. There's also a printout of the lighting console data from the ETC Ion, as at the closing performance. Anyone picking through all of this might well notice that some of these cues have timings that are noticeably different from those on the tour cue sheets. That's because the tours all ran on relatively modern touring dimmers (Avo or ETC), whereas on the Queens we were using their installed, much older Strand dimmers and however much we tried to make curves to compensate for this, in some cases the only solution was to amend the cue timing. As is so often the case there was a lot of 'science' of trying to match things that was over-ridden by a simple dictum from David, that the stage should never go black, even momentarily, during a transition so that the show is always being driven forward rather than interrupted by the lighting. There are only, I think, two actual 'no light' moments during the show, one of which is the setting up of the wedding. Originally in the transfer to the Queens it often felt as if the transitions were going through black because the dimmers did very little at the bottom end of their fades.
Not included in this printout are the various other versions of the show lighting held in the lighting desk ready to deal with other issues, such as failures of the turntable.
2006 New York
This was the 'revival' of the show in New York, back at the Broadhurst Theatre. This production was very much based on the Queen's Theatre production and rig with just minor updates to the equipment (eg. VL2000 Spot/Washes becoming VL2500 Spot/Washes).
Ted Mather looked after this production, so the drawings and paperwork are very much more in the American style.
Included are the plot and section, Hookup, Instrument Schedule, Magic Sheets, Shop Order and a picture of the outside of the theatre just in case that's useful.
The Lighting Archive thanks him and David Hersey for their contribution.
LES MISÉRABLES
Rob Halliday, 8th Jan 2020
The very first production of Les Misérables, quite different from the show as we know it now in terms of both content and physical production, was staged at the Palais des Sports in Paris in 1980.
The production was brought to the attention of producer Cameron Mackintosh by sound designer Andrew Bruce, who had been brought in to work on the French production by the show's authors, Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil. Mackintosh decided to make a new production for the UK, including a revised book and new lyrics, ultimately written by Herbert Kretzmer.
To mount the production, Mackintosh turned to his collaborator on Cats, director Trevor Nunn. Nunn was then still artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and felt that the show would benefit from the RSC's ensemble spirit and the kind of long, evolutionary rehearsal process that had worked so triumphantly on his earlier production of Nicholas Nickleby. It was agreed that the show would be a co-production between Mackintosh and the RSC, opening at the RSC's London base, the Barbican Theatre.
Nunn then invited his other collaborators from Nickleby on board: co-director John Caird, designer John Napier and lighting designer David Hersey. Andreane Neoufitou was brought in as costume designer; Andrew Bruce and his company Autograph continued their involvement with the show as sound designer.
The production opened at the Barbican on 8th October 1985, with a cast that was a mixture of RSC stalwarts (Roger Allam as Javert, Alun Armstrong as Thénardier), big names from musical theatre (Colm Wilkinson, who had been Che on the original recording of Evita, as Jean Valjean, Patti LuPone as Fantine) and newcomers who would go on to be big stars (Michael Ball as Marius, Francis Ruffelle as Eponine, Rebecca Caine as Cosette)
It received decidedly mixed reviews.
While a transfer of the show to the West End had always been the intent, the reviews threw this into doubt until, legend has it, Mackintosh called the Barbican box office to hear the bad news about sales, couldn't get through, and when he ultimately did discovered it was because the phones had been ringing off the hook with people trying to buy tickets. The transfer was quickly confirmed, to the Palace Theatre. The show opened there on 4th December 1985 and played there for the next 19 years. The London production then moved to the Queen's Theatre, opening there on 3rd April 2004, becoming the world's longest running musical (a record previously held by Cats) on 8th October 2006.
Confirmed as a monster hit, this production of Les Misérables rapidly appeared in other cities around the world. In the US it premiered at the Kennedy Center's Opera House in Washington DC before moving to New York, opening at the Broadway Theatre on 12th March 1987. It moved to the Imperial Theatre in October 1990 and played there until 18th May 2003, returning to New York from 9th November 2006 to 6th January 2008. During this time the show also played multiple tours across the UK and everywhere from Toronto to Japan to Australia - 425 cities, 52 countries, in 22 languages according to the show's publicity.
The last performance of this "classic" production of Les Misérables was on 13th July 2019 at the Queen's Theatre in London. The show has been replaced there by Mackintosh's '25th Anniversary' production created for an earlier tour. This production uses video projection in place of Napier's minimalist, transformative scenery.
This archive covers the "classic" Les Misérables. That production was a remarkable piece of stagecraft created by a tight-knit team formed over long years prior to Les Mis. What they delivered is a box of tricks, each moment in what is a long show covering a vast number of locations and enormous period of times delivered relatively simply by a few key elements that combine and re-combine to ever-changing effect. The core set is a rendering of a Parisian streetscape: heavily textured, dark coloured brick walls supported by thick wooden buttresses, a heavily textured floor of swirls of cobbles and bricks. Set into that floor, a large turntable (in the original London production with a second, smaller turntable in the centre) that allows the show to have a constant sense of motion, particularly as it follows Jean Valjean's journey early in the show, constantly walking as new places and new people are carried around him. On either side of the stage, two structures seemingly made of the junk of the city - wooden beams, wagon wheels (Napier had originally wanted four; the budget-conscious Mackintosh reduced this to two). These start the show almost invisible, on either side of the turntable. They travel on-stage as the show shifts to Paris; in the shows biggest transformation they track on stage while tilting, appearing to 'fall over' to create the barricades built by the rebelling students. In this position they rotate to reveal the two sides of the ensuing battle. Other variations are achieved by the simplest means: shutters in the backwall light up becoming the night-time windows of the city. For Javert's suicide a bridge flies in, then as he jumps over it the bridge flies out in view leaving the performer appearing to fall. It should be noted that though a show of a different style and with quite different lighting, the physical production of Hamilton is a descendent of that for Les Mis - again a static set used for a variety of locations, two turntables to allow things to stay in motion, and light directing you where to look and where not to look. Lin-Manuel Miranda has commented that they wanted a second turntable to upstage Les Mis, of which he is a self-confessed enormous fan; perhaps no-one told him that Les Mis once had two turntables as well...
Making all of this work is David Hersey's lighting: Les Mis gained a reputation in some quarters as a "dark" show, but it really wasn't, it was just incredibly precisely controlled lighting. It always gave you just enough in just the right space to show you what you needed to see, while ensuring that everything else was concealed, characters rotating upstage on the turntable swallowed up by the darkness, scene changes happening in full view of the audience yet invisible to them. The lighting never actually touches dark at all: apart from one very precise moment (the transition into the wedding) where it just kisses black, it ensures that you are constantly driven forward with Valjean's journey.
Throughout the show's history there have been two key elements of the rig, both of which had also been used to great effect in Nicholas Nickleby. Firstly, the light curtains - strips of Par56 VNSP lamps extending the width of the stage, giving intense, movable, solid sheets of backlight through which, with some smoke in the air, people could literally appear or disappear just by walking through the light. In the original production, these were motorised using an radio ham antenna rotator motor and controller (the controller was a dial that said 'north-south-east-west' then had a 360° scale around it); each bar could only move as one unit, and only had one colour, Lee 202. In the original production the light curtains were deliberately very much in view of the audience, 'topping out' the very tall spaces of the Barbican and then Palace Theatres. Subsequently for the original Miss Saigon (1989) a scroller was developed for these units, then for the New York production David's company, DHA Lighting, developed an "intelligent" version, the Digital Light Curtain, which had a built in scroller and individual movement control of each 8-lamp-long section of the light curtain. For Les Mis the DLCs were used for the show's 10th Anniversary Concert at the Royal Albert Hall, lit by David and Patrick Woodroffe, then retro-fitted to the New York and London productions and used on subsequent productions of the show.
The second: the 1kW beamlight followspots, which provide the principal lighting for key characters during the show. These are not a traditional hard-edged "showbiz" followspot. Rather, a crown-silver tungsten lamp in a parabolic reflector which creates a parallel shaft of light with a tight yet soft, hard-to-define edge. Used in a high-side position front-of-house or on-stage these create a finger of light which lands around a performer, lifting them without making them feel "spotlit". Les Mis uses six of these followspots, one either side FOH, two either side on-stage. However, the show only uses four operators: the two on-stage operators moved up and down side-stage walkways between two spots during the show. A key feature of the show's lighting is the motif used to indicate character's passing to the "world beyond" - their beamlights, which have typically been running at around 25-35%, rise to full and in doing so shift from the warm glow of dimmed tungsten to an intense white - then after a beat they fade away to nothing. One of David's proudest "reviews" of his work on the show was a letter from a Catholic priest commenting on how "the individual was, upon death, brought into a brighter light."
Notes On Paperwork
The period covered by these documents - 1985 to 2019 - covers a seismic shift in the tools available to help lighting designers do their work. The earliest plots for the show at the Barbican and the Palace are hand-drafted. They are very "British" - style plans with all of the information concentrated on the plot rather than separated out into other documents (hook-ups, magic sheets etc). Related paperwork, such as patching and plugging, was likely also hand-generated - and looking at the way channel numbers run sequentially across bars, it is highly likely that the channel number was also the number of the dimmer the light was plugged in to.
David Hersey was an early adopter of computer technology, in particular the Apple Macintosh, to help manage the many shows he had in circulation at any one time. By around the time of Chess in 1986 and certainly of Miss Saigon in 1989 his light plots were being computer drafted, the earliest using hand-drafted symbols in the application MacDraw. He and his associates, led by Ted Mather, later moved to using PowerDraw which later became PowerCADD. Drawings for the first New York productions exist in PowerDraw format, but PowerDraw no longer runs on modern Macs: accessing old documents (particularly those that pre-date the PDF format, which now provides a standardised format approved by the US Government, amongst others, for the archiving of documents that must remain accessible) is problematic! Later versions were drawn in MiniCAD which then became VectorWorks. These are generally accessible though there is a limit to how many versions back a current version of VectorWorks will open a file created in an older version.
Ted Mather carried out a lot of work creating his own rig management database using the Claris FileMaker software. The examples of rig paperwork from New York are from this database; others would adapt this database to suit their needs, so the Berlin paperwork is an adaption of the database made by Richard Pacholski attempting to integrate moving light information.
The tour moving light focus information is in a simple database I designed, also using FileMaker, to handle this kind of information while relating to Ted's database for information about the rig. At this point the database included written notation and was accompanied by traditional hand-drawn focus sketches. From about 2004 digital cameras suddenly made it viable to document focuses using photography, which was provided a considerable speed increase for this process. This led to the development of the FocusTrack software (also based on FileMaker) to automate the creation of this information (by processing the showfile from the console) and then simplify the process of taking the photos (by controlling the lighting console to set lights to the right place). FocusTrack became usable for this slightly later in 2004 than the Les Mis transfer (it was a side project during Mary Poppins), so for the Queen's Theatre production the use of the moving lights was analysed by hand and manually entered into the database, with the digital photographs then also inserted manually. FocusTrack was used on the New York revival of the show.
Through all of this there is a definite sense of people figuring out how to deal with this as they went along - firstly dealing with using computers, then dealing with how to manage the extra data created by more complex rigs of moving lights. Many of the techniques developed on Les Mis and other show of the era are just considered standard now.
The People
Probably worth also noting the many, many people involved with this show over the years. This would include, in no particular order, Howard Eaton, Keith Benson, Bobby Fehribach, Mike Ward, Mike Pitzer, Fraser Hall, Chris Buddle (chief at the Palace), Mike Cordina (chief at the Queen's), Ted Mather, Jeff Whitsett, Jenny Kagan, Rachael McCutcheon, Alan Boyd, plus Alistair Grant and Richard Pacholski, these last two sadly no longer with us. Plus, the countless crew members and spot ops who have looked after it all over the world. (I realise there are no spot cue sheets in the above list of files; Ted may have those, but particularly in London most of the information was just carried by the spot ops in their heads!)
There are doubtless many more that I do not remember or never knew of since my involvement with the show only began with the 1995 Tenth Anniversary Concert and then the 1997 tour.
Plus of course directors Trevor Nunn and John Caird, designer John Napier, costume designer Andreane Neoufitou, sound designer Andrew Bruce.
In History
I find it interesting that the lifespan of the show encompasses the arrival of the Source Four, the arrival of moving lights, many generations of memory lighting control, and lots and lots of other new technologies which changed the way we kept track of everything, hand-drawn lighting plans to CAD, hand-drawn focus notes to digital photography, floppy discs (photo included) to USB sticks, telex to email. And yet through all of that the show playing at the Queens was clearly, recognisably the same Les Mis that opened at the Barbican all those years ago, and was still a remarkable, beautiful, powerful piece of work - the collective talents and experience of all of the creative team rehearsed on all those other shows from Nickleby onwards all brought together.
The Archive:
1985 Barbican - original production
Scan of the hand-drawn paper light plot, dated just after opening night. Scratched out on one of the FOH bridges (above chan104) is "FSP1" - the traditional front centre followspot that was never used. For the rest of time the remaining followspots (6 x 1KW Beamlights) were numbered 2/3/4/5/6/7 in honour of their lost comrade. Six spots but only four operators: the operators on the side stage bridges moved up and down between spots 5/7 and spots 4/6.
As with so many pre-CAD era plots, the joy is being able to get glimpses of what changed as the show evolved through the erased but still visible fixtures on the side bridges, and the line of fixtures denoted as "UV" upstage. No-one can now remember what these were for, except perhaps an idea for lighting the underground sewer scene.
The very big FOH rig is the RSC permanent rep rig that existed in the theatre anyway, rather than something put in specifically for the show.
It is interesting to analyse the colours used, since while some are familiar from David Hersey's other work (particularly R68 and R03) others are less so, particularly 850 and L144. On the latter David has commented "Yes I did have a 144 period which was replaced by R71." The L144 did not make it to the Palace.
Colour changers were four-colour semaphore colours, made by CCT Lighting. Control was the theatre's in-house Strand Galaxy. Not shown on the plan is the Kodak Carousel slide projector used to project the captions which narrate the big time jumps during the show.
1985 Palace - the transfer of the original production to the West End
Scan of a paper copy of the hand-drawn light plot from the show's transfer. Initials suggest drawn by Adam Grater, who now runs DHA Designs, the company that evolved from David Hersey's architectural design work. Date is missing from the paper copy (the bottom of the paper was torn), but the different title box style/logo compared to Barbican version suggests this plan was an updated version of the original - probably updated by hand with a new title box placed over the original. The telephone numbers scribbled bottom-right suggest this paper copy was in use much later as the 0171area code for central London phone numbers was only introduced in the year 2000.
However, this represents the rig as it was through to about 1997 when the original antenna-rotator driven light curtains were replaced with DHA Digital Light Curtains, the semaphore colour changers were replaced with scrollers, some of the original rig was replaced with Source Fours, and the original lighting console (again a Galaxy) was replaced with a Strand 500-series console. (The rig was I think originally supplied by Theatre Projects, but at some point was purchased the producer, Cameron Mackintosh Ltd, with the additional equipment added during these changes supplied by rental company White Light.)
The rig as shown is fundamentally as the Barbican minus the RSC rep rig. The Barbican had a big 5K Fresnel upstage which is gone at the Palace, perhaps because the RSC had it in stock but it was expensive to rent in the West End, though David remembers it getting cut while working to fit the show into the much smaller Palace. You do occasionally see a production photograph of the man with the flag on the top of the barricades where this 5K is visible, identifying this photograph as being from the Barbican.
Channel numbers are quite different between the two productions, and it is likely that these channel numbers were just the same as the dimmers the lights were plugged in to rather than being a carefully designed softpatch.
1995 New York
The paper here reflects the rig in New York as it was updated (principally replacing the original light curtains with Digital Light Curtains and replacing some lighting fixtures with ETC Source Fours) as part of the show's 10th anniversary celebrations. The rest of the rig was an updated version of that London design. The cue synopsis from the show at this point is here, as are examples of the rig paperwork generated by David's US associate for the production, Ted Mather, using his self-made rig database.
1997 UK Tour/Australia - the 'Tenth Anniversary Production'
This UK tour was the first 'ground-up' re-design of the show, using moving lights to make it more easily tourable. Digital Light Curtains instead of the earlier traditional light curtains (the retrofit of these to London came after the UK tour opened). High End StudioColors replacing a twocolour Par Can backlight wash for speed of focus but adding a great deal more flexibility. The show didn't become 'colourful' but certainly acquired a greater tonal range since the light curtains could now change colour - so, for example, the prologue became a warmer sepia colour. Most extreme colour moment was the tricolour light curtain added in the curtain call. This was descended from the light curtain tricolour created for the 10th Anniversary Concert at the Royal Albert Hall lit by David and Patrick Woodroffe. The difference: in the concert it went red-white-blue. When setting up the tour Claude-Michel Schoenberg, the composer, looked at it and said "non, non, non, that is a union jack, the French flag is blue-white-red", so we swapped it around and it's been that way ever since. (Deeper confession: the original red-white-blue cue WAS actually a union jack, which I made for the Scout Annual Gang Show in the Albert Hall, which 'borrowed' the Les Mis concert the night before the concert itself. I stole my own cue when we needed an act 1 finale!. Don't tell anyone...)
This version also replaced the Carousel slide projectors that originally did the show's captions with Source Fours fitted with custom glass gobos to achieve the same effect and used Source Fours generally through the rig including for the battleflash effects. Followspots remained unchanged, 1kW Beamlights by Pani.
Scenically, the set became "glossy black" rather than the "dark brown" of the original. That change was carried through to all subsequent productions.
This design became the basis of all subsequent productions, which included Australia later the same year, Antwerp in Belgium, Mexico (using the Australian touring set), Berlin and others that I've probably forgotten but I tend to think of them all as a set. In all versions there were various changes to the lighting to accommodate the slightly different sets (particularly different revolve/barricade sizes), since in many cases the sets were re-cycled from earlier productions rather than built new. The most interesting difference was in Australia where the revolve was automated rather than manually controlled, which meant it was almost impossible to achieve some of the transitions that were easy with manual control, particularly timing the end of the movement to land with the end of the music as different conductors varied the tempo.
Included are the lighting plan from the UK Tour, a Cue List from Australia, and various bits of paperwork from the tour, Australia and Antwerp including hand-drawn focus notes (highlights - the whole set might be a bit much!), plus a Cue List and the 'private' list that formed the basis of the translation from the 'conventional' version of the show to the moving light version. The most interesting document, I think, is the one showing what changed from version to version (mainly staging changes that led to lighting changes, but also differences in the lighting, particularly the practicals that came with whatever version of the set it was - ie. were the stars fibres in the back wall or flown pea bulbs, or, best of all, both!). I find this the most important document on these big long-running, multiple versions shows, particularly when you go to production 5 which has the associate director from production 3, the associate designer from production 2, the associate LD from production 4 and they all have their own take on what the 'correct' version is! But John Caird would also always show up and try to change one revolve cue - Eponine top of act 2 - to go the other way before discovering what a mess it made of the very tightly organised revolve/scenery track on the show for the rest of the act and so changed it back.
Control from a Strand 500-series console running both conventional and moving lights. DLCs running from their own Mac, triggered from the 500-series console. One programmer dealing with everything (whereas, by contrast, on Martin Guerre in1996 two consoles had been used with two operators, one for moving lights and the other for conventionals, with the data then merged into one console post-opening). I think it was on this show that I invented the term 'Lighting Programmer' (rather than 'Vari-Lite Programmer' or 'Moving Light Programmer') for myself, a term that seems to have been adopted by everyone now doing this job.
David's associate for these productions was Jenny Kagan.
2003 Berlin
Hookup from the Berlin production of the show, which was the 'moving light' version from above but with adaptations to suit local equipment availability, particularly using Amptown Washlights instead of StudioColors and an MA grandMA console. Richard Pacholski (R2) looked after this production, having looked after the Australian production as it toured around Australasia and then went to Mexico.
2004 Queens Theatre - the 'West End Tour'
This was the transfer of the show from its original home at the Palace (which Andrew Lloyd Webber owned and wanted for his new musical The Woman In White) to the Queen's Theatre, which Cameron Mackintosh owns.
The Queen's is smaller than the Palace, so a new set was required; the one built for this was designed as a touring set since there was some feeling that the show would not have an extended life in the theatre. Ultimately it was given major boosts by the Susan Boyle rendition of 'Dreamed a Dream' on the 'Britain's Got Talent' tv show, and then by the Les Mis movie, so it kept on selling. Watching the show a couple of nights before it closed I realised that the side bridges (supporting the side light position and the side followspots) actually still had their wheels on the bottom, ready to tour. The set was quite considerably smaller. This made it quite hard work to make the lighting work as it had, particularly in the positions where people vanished from site as they spun upstage on the revolve. They were sometimes just a little too close to truly vanish as they had previously. The rig also became a bit more concealed than it had been in earlier versions.
The rig was an expanded/updated version of the 'tour' rig. StudioColors were replaced with VL2000 Washes. Many conventional gobo lights (including the 'whirlpool' effect) were consolidated into a number of VL2000 Spots. Some of the DLCs became Pitching DLCs, opening up new options. Captions came from a VL3500 Spot, which added the ability to shift colour or zoom the captions at the danger that if the light failed you lost all of the captions, not just one. Additional VL3500 Spot overhead to do a giant whirlpool effect. Some VL500s on the perch as roving specials. Early use of LED lighting hidden away in the scenic portals in front of the proscenium arch.
Little changes were made to the rig during its run, mainly caused by Cameron Mackintosh refurbishing the theatre and deciding he didn't like intrusive lighting fixtures, so for example the FOH VSFX cloud projectors became, I think, the City Theatrical cloud effect. Quite late in the run I think the original Pani beam lights were replaced with a different kind of beam light, presumably because of spare parts availability.
Control originally from a Strand 520i, with control of the Light Curtains via DMX now integrated into the console. During the run this was replaced by an ETC Ion. Rig rented from White Light.
I've included the lighting plan, plus the moving light focus list and some samples of the moving light focus plot, which had now moved to digital photography. There's also a printout of the lighting console data from the ETC Ion, as at the closing performance. Anyone picking through all of this might well notice that some of these cues have timings that are noticeably different from those on the tour cue sheets. That's because the tours all ran on relatively modern touring dimmers (Avo or ETC), whereas on the Queens we were using their installed, much older Strand dimmers and however much we tried to make curves to compensate for this, in some cases the only solution was to amend the cue timing. As is so often the case there was a lot of 'science' of trying to match things that was over-ridden by a simple dictum from David, that the stage should never go black, even momentarily, during a transition so that the show is always being driven forward rather than interrupted by the lighting. There are only, I think, two actual 'no light' moments during the show, one of which is the setting up of the wedding. Originally in the transfer to the Queens it often felt as if the transitions were going through black because the dimmers did very little at the bottom end of their fades.
Not included in this printout are the various other versions of the show lighting held in the lighting desk ready to deal with other issues, such as failures of the turntable.
2006 New York
This was the 'revival' of the show in New York, back at the Broadhurst Theatre. This production was very much based on the Queen's Theatre production and rig with just minor updates to the equipment (eg. VL2000 Spot/Washes becoming VL2500 Spot/Washes).
Ted Mather looked after this production, so the drawings and paperwork are very much more in the American style.
Included are the plot and section, Hookup, Instrument Schedule, Magic Sheets, Shop Order and a picture of the outside of the theatre just in case that's useful.
