I agree that subtle lighting changes are great for some shows, but I recently designed for Les Miserables, and there was nothing suble about it. My
point is that some shows ask for dramatic changes in lighting. I'm not saying that you're wrong. The thing with Les Mis was, it went to different locations constantly, and the show and set relied heavily on the lighting to make these suggestions. I also learned something very valuable from this show. Sometimes, when it comes to color, less is more. I used dozens of ellipsoidals from the electrics angled down in different degrees, crossing each other and stuff like that. They were very symmetrical with the positions, gobos and colors. The basic colors I used were just Light Bastard Amber (R02), and
No Color Blue (R60). The result was very crisp lines in mid air where the amber and blue either ran parallel to each other. (the
haze ran constantly for this show). I also took the 6 3-cell
cyc lights and distributed them among the first 3 electrics to create 3 color washes, since this show cannot use a
cyc. Most of the gobos in this show couldn't even be seen by the audience. What I wanted them to see was the razor-sharp lighting beams, which closely resembled multiple static intelligent lights. We ended up using almost all 192 dimmers, programming about 225 cues total, and a tech-in lasting from 12:00 noon till 3:00 am, when we wrote our final
cue. Fun. definately a highlight of my career.