Who said new technology had to look, well, new? Not vaudeville artistes in Palm Springs, California, where an old-time show is being supported by distinctly 21st-century digital displays.

The Plaza in Palm Springs, which opened in 1936 for the premiere of the Greta Garbo movie Camille and where Jack Benny, Bob Hope and Amos ’n’ Andy all performed in its heyday, fell victim – like many of its kind – to changing fashions in entertainment, and closed in the late 1990s.

Soon after, however, the 809-seat cinema was renovated by the city, and reopened as the home of The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies, a vaudeville revue.

From the beginning, The Follies used rollable curtains and billboards to change the appearance of the small stage for different acts. But the flexibility of this approach was limited.

“Over the years, we’ve done some fairly miraculous things in terms of scenery and backdrops,” said co-founder Riff Markowitz. “The Plaza Theatre was primarily a movie house. It was never intended for this type of production. The stage itself is small, and one wing is 15 feet by 15 feet while the other is eight feet by four feet, so there’s not a lot of room to keep boards on the side. There are no flies either, which means we can’t drop in scenery from above.”

A solution came to Markowitz last year when he noticed video walls in hotels where he stayed, and his team eventually settled on a 5x5 configuration of 25 46-inch NEC LCD displays, with a bezel width of just 7.3mm separating the screens to give a near-seamless effect.

“It had to be bright enough to withstand the high-power stage lights and spotlights we use, yet we didn’t want it to be so bright it was jarring,” said Markowitz. “Instead of looking like something you would see on an outdoor billboard or in a ballpark, [the NEC displays] were bright and colourful enough to see without becoming intrusive. When the show is on you don’t notice the bezels, either, which help us create more of the old-time stage look.”

First-night nerves

Follies staffers weren’t without their misgivings, though, both over technical issues such as colour calibration and on the broader question of audience reacion.

“The ability to add more backdrops and visuals to the show without requiring any more space was very appealing,” said the show’s technical director Bob Feudi. “But we also had some concerns, not the least of which was whether our audience would accept a video wall. It is a technology that didn’t exist during the time the show is portraying, so we had to make sure our approach to it fit. We also wanted to be sure it would be an enhancement to our live performers rather than a distraction from them.”

San Diego AV firm Fluid Sound installed the video wall, which shows content ranging from realistic backdrops – for example, a photo of New Orleans’ Bourbon Street – to more abstract renderings, or even recreations of the painted backdrops used for traditional vaudeville. Proof, perhaps, that the more things change, the more they stay the same?

www.fluidsound.biz
www.necdisplay.com

Share this post