Port Lighting Systems Helps Bring The Brook's New Secret Garden Outdoor Stage to Life with Elation When The Brook Casino in Seabrook, New Hampshire, set out to expand its live entertainment offerings with a new outdoor venue, it turned to a familiar partner. Port Lighting Systems, which previously designed the lighting for The Brook's Seasons Showroom indoor venue, led the lighting design and integration for the casino's new Secret Garden, a seasonal outdoor performance space that opened this spring. Designed to host concerts, comedy, and a wide range of special events from spring through early fall, an adaptable Elation lighting system provides flexibility. The setup includes Rebel Series profile and wash units, Proteus Radius beam fixtures, SoL Series strobe/blinders, and Six+ PARs. Ron Kuszmar, VP of architectural and theatrical lighting at Port Lighting, says, "The Brook just keeps expanding and growing. When they first came to us for this project, the vision called for a permanent structure, and together we landed on a seasonal venue as the smarter fit for the site and the opening timeline. We worked with them to rethink the approach, connected them with the right partners, and helped turn the concept into a venue that could be built in time for the season." Port Lighting's partnered with the venue to help guide the entire project forward. They helped coordinate key project partners, including staging specialist United Staging, which supplied the tent and truss structure that supports the lighting system. The compressed schedule proved to be one of the project's biggest challenges. Working toward an ambitious spring opening date, Port Lighting had roughly four weeks to design, source, install, program, and commission the entire lighting system. Kuszmar worked closely with Jon Schwille at Elation rep Peter E. Schmitt Co. and Ross Blitz at Elation to identify the best fixtures for the design based on what was available within the project's timeline. "With such a short schedule, availability was key," Kuszmar said. "Elation had the right fixtures ready to go, which let us keep the design ambitious without compromising the opening date." The installation includes 20 Rebel Wash 12 and 18 Rebel Profile LED moving heads, providing the foundation for the stage lighting system. "The Rebel Series offered an excellent balance of capability, value, and output, allowing us to build a fairly sizeable rig that gives the venue a lot of flexibility," Kuszmar says, adding that the choice of Rebel was an easy choice for a venue of that size. "It's not a huge venue, so we didn't need super high-power arena fixtures. Rebel was a perfect fit for the space." Twenty Proteus Radius beam fixtures add dramatic aerial effects and visual impact. Evaluated carefully by the Port Lighting team, especially given initial questions about how the tight beam would perform without a zoom function, it proved to be a suitable choice. The Proteus Radius uses a 100W laser-pumped phosphor light engine to project a narrow, ultra-intense 0.9° beam. "The fixture is just so clean," Kuszmar says. "It has such an incredible output that it just blows right through everything. There's enough in there with the prism and other effects that if we need to widen out the beam for something, we can absolutely do that. It's quite the impact when we have so many of them." Four SOL IV Blinders serve double duty as audience color-changing blinders during performances and as crowd lighting after events to help the audience out of the venue. Twenty-four Six+ PAR L fixtures line the stage perimeter, providing side light and illumination for smaller productions that require simpler stage looks. They also double as work lights at the end of the night when the stage needs to be cleared. "It's a multifunctional rig, and we wanted every fixture to serve multiple purposes," Kuszmar says. "The goal was to create a rig that could support concerts one night, comedy the next, and other events after that without needing to reinvent the system each time." 
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