NEWS
September 2024 Issue of PLSN Magazine
After opening the year with their own respective performances,
Styx and Foreigner joined forces for a summer
run, co-headlining the Renegades & Juke Box Heroes tour.
The bands have previously toured together, most recently in
2014. Tim Rozner, Tour Production Director for the Styx/Foreigner
2024 tour, notes that to balance the two bands’ touring
needs together, “we had to come up with a way to dial down
that natural competition between bands and keep that comfort
level of it being ‘Their Show.’” The solution was to create a
“universal production for the two camps, so everything is mutual.”
The universal sta , he adds, would consist of just four people:
“Rigger Bobby Carrell, Stage Manager JT McDonald, PA Mel
David, and myself as the Tour Production Director.”
One of the things that Rozner was adamant in formulating
this co-headline concept was “no one loses their job,” he says. “In
fact, with this structure where I’m dealing with the vendors, the
calls, catering… Steve Page (PM for Foreigner) and Brian Wong
and Je Heintz (PMs for Styx) are able to spend more time protecting
their artist, seeing to their needs. We make jokes about
it, but truth is, when everybody thinks I’m screwing them equally,
I’m doing my job. We’re all friends. We’re all very close. It’s very
much a family atmosphere. I know that gets said a lot on many
tours but really… there’s no yelling or disagreements. There’s
just a good plan that gets executed because everybody helps
everybody. That’s why we do 15- and 20-minute set changes
every night with considerable amounts of stu . We’re talking
complete riser switch over and backdrop strikes, coupled with
four modular oor pod of lights and a truss, loaded with ACME
Geminis, that ies in for the Styx performance and seven video
carts for Styx, because everybody pitches in. That’s part of
maintaining the neutrality because when everybody’s involved
it’s hard to beat that, you know, it’s hard to mess with it.”
AN EARLY START
Rozner started his conversations with vendors and the two
LD’s back in Nov. 2023 for the June tour launch. He has a working
philosophy that getting the lighting designers together
early on is absolute key to the success of the tour. “The harsh
challenge of doing a co-headliner tour is taking the one department
which out of anything involves creativity—lighting—and
getting two di erent lighting designers/directors to be able to
sit down and achieve two distinctly di erent shows out of the
same production on the same trucks. It’s been successful every
year. This year even more so than others. Libby [Gray, LD for
Styx] and Ben [Mo tt, LD for Foreigner] gelled right away. They
have totally di erent styles, but they had a shared vision of a
system that would work for both. It made pre-production for
this tour a whole di erent animal, and we were able to progress
much quicker because we had the lighting plan in hand.”
“It did seem rather early,” recalls Gray who has been the Lighting
Director for Styx the past 20 years. “Seven months out, that’s
a little unusual for me. But it did enable Ben and I to spend time
really talking about what makes our shows di erent.” Not only
is the music di erent between bands, but the stage presentation
is also di erent. One of the things that really informed their
design processes was they needed di erent ways to use the actual
stage space. “For example,” she continues regarding Styx,
“we don’t have a lead singer. There is no center stage position,
which means certain elements like an up to down stage or a
splay of ngers that concentrates xtures up center is useless
to me. I need to cover my guys who run edge to edge. I have
to light 60’ wide; every foot of 60’ of Marley left to right is used,
so I have to light up a very wide space, and my band plays fairly
deep; 26’ to 27’ of depth. I need my lights evenly spread out
across that entire square footage because my two lead singers,
like it or not, are extreme left and right on that mic line. I need
to light a huge expanse of space, and I need to be able to light
a lead singer at any one of several positions, but most notably
15’ or 16’ o center. That’s an unusual lighting challenge for Styx
and it always has been. Foreigner, of course, is much more traditional.
Kelly sings at center most of the time, although, he’s dynamic
and runs around. He doesn’t park with a mic downstage
right in the corner. So that was the biggest organic di erence
between the bands that we really had to gure out.”
BUILT-IN FLEXIBILITY
With the variety of size venues on the schedule, structure modularity was crucial. Rather than one superstructure, Gray and Moffi tt created a truss confi guration midstage, made up of six individual 20’ trusses in addition to two main upstage trusses and a big front of house truss. Each of the six trusses have two chain hoists so the structure can be “slid around.” The rig has the ability to expand and contract readily for the room instead of cutting elements. “That’s not to say that we haven’t had to cut one or two trusses here or there,” Gray quickly points out. “But we haven’t had to whack out wholesale pieces the way you have to with a unifi ed superstructure. With my design for Styx, individual lights have purposes. It’s never all the profi les in the audience do-ing this all at once, or all the washes doing that. Each of my guys on stage has a principal backlight profi le fi xture. Well, I certainly don’t want to cut any of the trusses those are on. That’s why our upstage truss is 40’. It gets expensive having to cut elements and compromise the show aesthetically. Because the people who are seeing us at Gilford, NH on that lawn deserve the same show as the people who are seeing us at the World in Chicago.”
Both Gray and Moffi tt agree there was substantial give and take on a few things. “Neither of us got exactly the fi xture list we wanted,” she says. “And we both got something that we really wanted. Like any good compromise, if anybody is completely happy than you didn’t give up enough. No light does it all. Al-though they are very long in the tooth, for my money, I’m still a big fan of the Quantum Vipers from Martin. There are newer and brighter fi xtures, but we have been burning these since June 1, and we’ve replaced only two fi xtures in the entire rig. Now that’s the kind of robustness I can get on board with.” She and Moffi tt also come down on the same side of the GLP X4 family. “They’re workhorses; GLP makes robust lights,” says Gray. “Benjamin was really excited about some of the new ACME
products; not a manufacturer I have a lot of experience with. He picked the Geminis, and they’re a great light. I got the Vipers, and he got his Geminis.”
They went with Moffi tt’s choice on audience blinders. “Typi-cally, if I’m going to do a colored audience blinder, I like a square unit so I can do graphics as well as color. But he didn’t need that. We did a little bit of compromise here and there using a Venn diagram approach to fi xture selection: what do you want, what I want, what we can aff ord, and what’s available. It’s never really tidy, but it was a very easy design process given that we both understood those were the four diff erent circles we had to work within. It was a real pleasure working with someone who understood all the parameters.”
KEY GEAR CHOICES
There were quite a few Zoom calls. “A few of the topics that come to mind is how we were going to do a 15- to 20-minute changeover with two full sets, soft goods, and special eff ects,” says Moffi tt. The lighting was supplied by Premier Global Pro-duction (PGP) led by Account Executive, Steven “Creech” An-derson. “I would drive to PGP and do shootouts between diff er-ent fi xture types and send videos to Libby, who was on tour. It wasn’t easy, but at the same time we didn’t dicker, we got the task done quickly. I really wanted to try the new ACME Gem-inis and RGBW Stage Blinders for eye candy on this tour, and they did not disappoint. We continued this until we were hap-py and then we sent the design to Creech. By the time Creech was ready to release the gear for prep, I was show ready when I walked into PGP for hands-on programming.”
“While our excellent techs prepped our rig, I spent my time programming our new set LED tape,” continues Moffi tt. “Those guys are a big factor in the success of this co-headlined run. I wanted to run my video content over my set lighting and the GLP X4 Bar 20s. I have been an Avolites guy for about 20 years now and for the last three years I have been creating and con-trolling my video content using Ai by Avolites’ [media servers]. It was so easy to create scenes with video. I now can run video over my entire light rig.” Gray’s platform for Styx was a grand-MA3. Video is a part of the Styx design as well. It’s built into a set of seven modular carts. Just this spring, the band upgraded to a Chauvet 4.8mm LED video panel. Gray notes that her palette of content needs to be color, texture, soft eff ects, being careful to create “atmosphere without creating something so interesting that the audience will watch ‘TV’ instead of the guy in front of it.” She uses Madrix for video control.
VENDER SUPPORT
When Rozner spoke about getting an early start on the cre-ative side with the LDs, there’s a critical step as a corollary to that. “You have to have a vendor that’s fully on board, and we have had a complete partner with PGP,” notes Rozner. “We have worked with everybody over the years and we’re still open for that, but we found this great partner, someone who really gets the co-headline philosophy. PGP has consistently provided us with handpicked crew who want to return to the tours each summer.” Gray echoes those accolades. “The support from PGP is phenomenal. Several times Creech has come out and sur-prised me just showing up to check out the show; make sure it’s going well. I love that. It’s never been: Just throw it out the door and expect ‘me’ to call if there’s a problem. He’s very hands-on monitoring his tours, and I have a lot of respect for that.”