It has been a long time sense I have posted anything here. Been busy with work and my theater life doing theater sound. Here is my question. Does anyone know the history of Lee Colortran? I know they were at one point a very large lighting company producing light and lighting consoles and controls for theaters.
The links provided by Dan have useful info.
Were they big in the Broadway theater wold in NYC.
Generally no, they were not popular on Broadway.
Strand pretty much owned the
conventional console market on Broadway for a period with various versions of the
Light Palette. When movers got introduced, most shows used a Whole Hog, then would
Midi link the Hog to a
Strand (maybe they only
Midi linked starting with Obsession, cant recall). Later,
ETC made a big push with the Obsession and later
Eos, while
Strand got pushed aside. GrandMA then made inroads as well and today you mostly see
Eos and GrandMA. Part of the reason
Colortran never got popular was the top
desk for them was Prestige, which while a good
desk (I owned 2) had very buggy software and
Colortran was not up to the task of supporting and fixing. As well and with Broadway under
IATSE contracts, the lighting shops that provided gear, also being
IATSE, never purchased
Colortran. The
IATSE local shops were 4 Star and Bash and they had mostly
Strand or
ETC, with
Altman fixtures being prevalent. And finally,
Colortran never made a great impression on the B-Dway lighting designers, so they weren't asking for them.
Were any theaters in NYC using there products
Colortrans were in use in assorted spaces, we had 2 at Brooklyn, the NBC Ave. M studio in Brooklyn had at least one, I think City Center had one. The local company pushing them was Production Arts (became 4th
Phase and then
PRG), they had a bunch of Prestige
console in rental, that were awful at touring and getting shipped (cards would come loose internally) with ProArts finally dropping the
line and that was the death knell in the NYC area for
Colortran.
and what happen to the company? Do they still exist today? Sorry of all of the long questions but I am sure there are people on here that are wondering the same thing.
They still exist, buried in the Levition on-line catelog. If you check out the website, they still show Picollo and Innovator consoles, the i series
dimmer racks and packs, as well as assorted
incandescent ellipsoidal's, fresnels, what look like either
ETC S4
Par knock-offs, or actual Pars sourced
thru ETC, plus open faced units, soft-lights,
etc.... They were purchased by NSI and moved to Portland, OR then subsequently purchased by
Leviton, who has done a Borg on them as they seem completely assimilated into the
Leviton family. I could find no actual information other than support seems to be in Portland.
2 add'l notes. I have an ENR 12 pack, it's my running light
system and it works just fine. You can get parts from Steve Short at Litetrol 516 681-5288. He has ENR and D192 rack parts.