White Light has been involved with this milestone British musical from the very beginning, supplying the lighting equipment for David Hersey's design at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1989. That production proved to be a milestone in the development of much of the lighting technology that is taken for granted today, featuring one of the earliest appearances of the Rainbow colour changer as well as moving light curtains and automated lighting from Vari-Lite. White Light supported the production throughout its ten year run, including upgrading the original light curtains to the DHA Digital Light Curtains developed for the New York opening of the show.
For the new tour, David Hersey and his associate Jenny Kagan have re-worked the rig to make use of the very latest automated lighting equipment, including the new VARI*LITE VL2202 spot luminaire and VL2402 wash luminaire from Vari-Lite, Inc which have been purchased by The Moving Light Company for the production; The Moving Light Company have also purchased additional units of both type to add to their already-extensive hire stock; these units are available for hire now, and will be on show on the White Light Group stand (stand F4) at PLASA 2001.
The rig will also include six- and eight-lamp DHA Digital Light Curtains, Rainbow colour scrollers, ETC Source Fours, White Light VSFX cloud effects, R&V 1K beamlights as followspots, Pani projectors fitted with PIGI scrollers as well as one of DHA's new YoYo+ indexing gobo yoyos (created for My Fair Lady, now running at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane also with lighting from White Light and The Moving Light Company), which will be used to create the show's opening image of a rising sun. The entire rig will be controlled from a Strand 500-series console running the GeniusPro 2.5, the latest version of Strand's console operating software.
Miss Saigon is directed by Nick Hytner, designed by John Napier and with lighting by David Hersey. The associate lighting designer is Jenny Kagan, with Alistair Grant serving as production electrician and Rob Halliday as lighting programmer; Simon Robertson is the production manager for Cameron Mackintosh Ltd. The tour opens at the Palace Theatre in Manchester in November.