A look at Cirque du Soleil’s Paramour on Broadway
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Paramour, which opened May 25, 2016 at Broadway’s Lyric Theatre, is the latest creation from Cirque du Soleil. The first Cirque show created specifically for Broadway, Paramour is a hybrid of the Cirque aesthetic of acrobatics and showmanship with the narrative and show flow of a traditional Broadway musical. Cirque shows, while all wondrous experiences, are not known for having plotlines, or as Broadway would call it, a book.
Paramour looks to change that model by taking the well-known Cirque magic for presenting astounding circus acts and acrobatics, using imaginative design and envelope-pushing technology, and marrying that to a book-driven Broadway musical. The resulting musical takes place during the Golden Age of Hollywood, with a ‘show within the show’ story that features a love triangle between a movie director, an actress, and a composer. The book cleverly retains the daring acrobatic and aerial routines that Cirque is so well known for but, weaves them into plot-motivated moments. In a company that features 38 singers, actors, dancers, aerialists, acrobats and circus arts performers, the traditional casting of the lead roles with actors who have Broadway and national touring credits allows the book to take center stage. The design and production team is also a rich mix of Broadway and Cirque talents, including technical supervisor/co-production manager, David Benken; co-production manager, Rose Palombo; lighting designer, Howell Binkley who co-designed with LD Patrice Besombes; sound designer, John Shivers; costume designer, Philippe Guillotel; scenic designer, Jean Rabasse; projection design by Olivier Simola and Christophe Waksmann; flying machine design and choreography by Raffaello D’Andrea of Verity Studios; and props design by Anne-Séguin Poirier.
A Home on the Great White Way
No stranger to shepherding technically complex and innovative shows to Broadway, Benken has a long list of Broadway credits including The Lion King; Aladdin; Motown, the Musical; Mary Poppins; and Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang. He and partner Rose Palombo were instrumental in fitting the Cirque-scale to the Broadway stage. “Cirque is definitely used to working in a different size space,” he says. “Luckily we were able to get the Lyric, which is technically the largest theatre in New York City from the backstage point of view. Still, relative to what Cirque is used to, we’re pretty small. Also in regards to time frames, which are much tighter on a Broadway show, we had a longer rehearsal period, a longer tech period, and longer schedule of previews than Broadway is used to, but not expanded nearly as far as they are for some Cirque shows.”
The Lyric Theatre, which has a landmarked interior, has undergone modifications to accommodate the technology of shows in the past and Paramour was no different. “There were several technical decisions that needed to be made in regard to the space,” comments Benken. “One of the biggest was that we needed to put a 45-foot-wide by 5-foot-deep elevator lift into the stage, so we had to take a large portion of the stage floor out. Early in the design phase we worked out a location to put that elevator that let us disrupt as little steel as we could in the basement.” There were still some design constraints to fitting the lift into the basement trap room, including the existing entry doors into the basement that would be blocked by the wall-to-wall lift—so the team did need to add new basement entry doors. Known as the “Filmstrip Lift” in context of the show, built and automated by PRG, it rises up to nine feet above the deck at a speed of three feet per second and weighs 20,000 pounds.
Along with stage work there had to be modifications to the house ceiling for performer flying. Since it’s not financially feasible on a Broadway budget to go in and take an entire theatre apart, Benken and his technical team looked at how they could work with previous modifications to the ceiling. “We need five points in the ceiling for what is called a strap act that takes place at the end of Act 1,” Benken explains. “This is a classic Cirque act performed by the twin Atherton brothers that has automated flying with a kind of a pendulum-type effect. They're on stage when the cue is given to lift the line up and they swing out over the house and meet each other in the house, it's really quite dramatic. Putting holes into the ceiling of a landmarked theatre involved getting a lot of approvals signed off, making sure we could do it in a way that after a hopefully long run, we would be able to restore it back to the original condition. We first looked for existing holes which were in the house to see whether we could use them. Two of the five holes did exist in a place where they were close enough to work with the act. There are two other flying effects out in the house but they worked from an existing catwalk out in the house, so it didn’t involve any modifications to the building itself.”
Moving with the Greatest of Ease
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Paramour has a lot of automation to facilitate the movement of both scenery and acrobats, as well as some drone “en-souled” lampshades. In fact, there are three main automation consoles on the show, two PRG Commander automation controllers—one for the deck and one for the scenic flying automation—and one Tait Navigator automation controller handling the performer/acrobatic flying effects. The scenic drones are controlled by a proprietary control system from the Swiss firm Verity Studios, who designed and programmed the drones as well. “Automation is always a challenge with any show,” Benken notes. “And this one is certainly toward the high end of number of effects. I’ve done shows with 60-80 effects in them and we’re close to that range here, and some of our effects are more complicated than other Broadway shows.”
Quite literally the first major scenic element is the show curtain itself, which consists of seven major tracked pieces that can iris open or closed in different arrangements. “There are the two downstage pieces of the iris, which are over a foot thick; there’s a lot of structure to them,” describes Benken. “Those two downstage pieces never fly, they just actually track on and off-stage.” The show curtain is an example of how experience can avoid limiting yourself. “One of the things we’ve learned over the years is trying to keep all your options open,” Benken comments. “When we first looked at this element with the designer, I asked ‘does the show curtain ever have to cross center?’ and the response was no. Then we started looking at it with PRG and we realized the way in which it was going to be automated there was no particular reason that we had to stop at center so we decided to let it go until it almost runs into the other piece. That turned out to be very helpful once we got into the theatre and started looking at some of the different scenes. Those two pieces now can go 12-feet past center to create a totally different look. It has worked out really nicely.”
One scene change that took careful technical consideration and design is the metamorphosis of Egypt into the American Wild West. “This is one of those design ideas that at first you looked at and ask, ‘wow, is this really going to work?’ It looked interesting on paper, but it’s a big piece. It did end up working really well. First for the Egyptian scene, the piece is a large 15-foot-wide by about 15-foot-tall golden staircase, with an opening in the middle that lays over at about a 45˚ angle. The set piece is supported on the back by another platform which has actors on it.”
Proof Productions also built a number of scenic elements in the show including the ‘rooftop set’ for the finale. “That’s quite impressive,” states Benken. “It’s the biggest set in the show. It literally fills the entire stage when it’s up and running. From the front, it looks like a large set of buildings and the tops of the two main buildings are trampolines, so the acrobats are able to do some pretty dramatic things.”
Projected Scenes
Along with the impressive automated scenery there is a sophisticated projection system that has been deployed for Paramour. Primarily using front projection, some rear projection is used in a couple of scenes. There are six projectors mounted on the front of house. “There are two groups of two stacked projectors that basically cover the entire proscenium and parts of the walls on the sides,” says Benken. “Those are doubled for intensity. There are two more, higher resolution projectors on the front of house that cover two smaller screens that are just off stage left and right out in the auditorium. There are also two rear projectors which are used in a couple of scenes.”
The control for the projection uses a proprietary product from the Montreal-based VYV. “It’s a pretty elaborate system,” Benken comments. “The projection system knows the entire space; in 3D. We’re able to project on any surface, not just the scenery, but the walls of the theatre and have it in the correct proportion and the proper way they should look. VYV did a 3D scan of the theatre six-months before we loaded in so we’ve been using the information from that study and we were able to program a lot of the systems before we got in the theatre.”
The team used Gerriets’ screens to project on, using the Studio screen, Opera gray blue screens for rear projection, and a Glitter blue screen for the sides.
Light You See and Light You Don’t
Binkley, who came on board to co-design the lighting for Paramour with Patrice Besombes, brings a perhaps unique combination of credits ideal for the unique marriage of Cirque and Broadway. In addition to his Tony-award winning Broadway lighting design experience, Binkley has designed for The Big Apple Circus, previously working with acrobatics, and has years of dance lighting experience. “In Jersey Boys or Hamilton, there’s not aerial activity involved but going in to Paramour I knew I had to be very cautious of the aerial work,” Binkley says. “A lot of the acrobatics had already been sequenced out. They had approved it and it was very comfortable for them and I needed to just adapt to them, understandably so, for their safety. There’s certain ways for acrobats to spot, like when a ballet dancer turns. It’s very, very subtle, but you don’t want to disrupt any of their spotting, how they prep for their aerial performance, or while they’re in the air. We have lit areas like the grid, so that when they’re turning, they can see above them. We also added lights in the wings that would only shine off-stage; this lighting doesn’t affect anything onstage but is very important to the acrobats and aerialists.”
In addition to highlighting landmarks for performers to spot themselves against, Binkley and the lighting team had to take into account keeping the lights out of their eyes so as not to disrupt their performances. “Again, the major importance was not to blind the performers, especially with any of the aerial work,” Binkley states. “We even had to be very, very cautious with the juggler, because he is throwing things 30-feet in the air; he’s got to be able to see them. Here, it wasn’t really the angle, it was just the intensity of the light. On other circus projects that I’ve done, where it’s in the round, it was the position of the light that distracted. Here, on a proscenium stage, it was more about levels than actual positions, so that was a blessing for us, to really be able to keep our back, or high side, or our front diagonals that we normally use, intact.”
Focusing audience attention was another aspect of the lighting design. “We would use lighting to enhance the storytelling,” says Binkley. “To focus down really tightly to when an actor is sitting in his chair; not only for the live feed camera work that was constantly going on throughout the show, but for something to be struck, or another scenic element or a prop to be put onstage so that we could advance to the next scene. For instance, in the first, big bar scene, the flowers on the table that the audience doesn’t see placed. That piece has a very sepia/beige look of the 1920s. First you don’t see the flowers get placed, and then when they are there, they have a colorfulness. That is the first time that color is introduced in the scene, so we could ride on that color motif through our cueing process, into the song.”
Throughout the show color, or the absence of it, is used in the lighting design to underscore a scene or to punctuate a moment. “Red was a great color to use, because of the costumes,” states Binkley. “It was also easy to apply color to the set. It was a nice black floor, and we used the air a lot; we found that we could use an abundance of colors to layer in. We stayed more with keeping the palette clean, but keeping the surround in a colorful mode, because we didn’t want to distract from any of the storytelling. We kept the scenes clean, yet tried to filter with color around the scene. A lot of blues and reds; warms worked really well on the set. So we just fluctuate back and forth in that with the music. Cooling things off, or being able to intensify, or increase harshness at times in some of the songs; so it still had that Broadway tempera that we incorporated into the show.”
A Fine Romance
In regards to bringing Cirque and Broadway together, Binkley sums up his thoughts on where Paramour fits in either world. “I think that Paramour is a new type of Cirque show; very different than the Cirque shows that you’re going to see in Vegas, still a Cirque show but with whole new added layers that I think work quite well. As a lighting designer, the challenges were huge; to be able to maintain that Cirque aesthetic and give it a Broadway feel—and being able to unify it as a show about a show that’s threaded with a story, instead of just acts that are continuous. It’s really outside the Cirque genre, but yet it is Cirque, with a whole new type of storyline. I think it the right mix for a Broadway/Cirque show.”
Broadway audiences certainly seem to agree as Paramour has been well-received. A credit to the hard work of the entire cast, crew and creative team. “I feel very good about it,” Benken says. “I think the audience response has been great. We get a standing ovation every night. It’s really something people haven’t seen on Broadway. It has always been my experience and I think Paramour proves it again, collaboration is generally the best way to pull off a show. Cirque people brought a certain artistic aesthetic with them, the Broadway people brought another slightly different creative aesthetic with them and together collaborated to marry the two worlds together, which I think it worked out very well.” Indeed, in the end there is no better tried and true Broadway tradition than collaboration.
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