CHAUVET Professional Helps Howard Hudson Reflect Essence of Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812

	"The color mixing was very even, offering a great selection of tints through to deep saturated colors with the brightness we're all used to today," says Hudson.

Seen in London this past winter, the Donmar Warehouse's production of the electropop opera, Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, taken from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, featured a diverse lighting design by the Olivier and Tony Award-nominated designer, Howard Hudson, who described his creative endeavor this way:

"The show is real a collage of different styles of music, which meant palette-wise we were able to go from a more restrained classical look to moments of intense color that reflected the more electric, contemporary moments in the score. So, whilst the show was predominantly relatively desaturated -- dropping at times right down to moments of simple candlelight, there were other moments when we had sections of inten

se neon green, or bright saturated pink in block color, or solid red for the opera." Helping Hudson achieve his vision for the show were three Maverick Silens 2X Profile fixtures from CHAUVET Professional, which were used for backlight, high side light and wall scrapes. Given that the Donmar's relatively small size (251 seats), every fixture in a rig there "has to work very hard," notes Hudson.

The Maverick Silens 2X Profile units were more than up to the task. "They offered us a really sophisticated quality of light within a compact unit," Hudson said of the fixture. "The color mixing was very even, offering a great selection of tints through to deep saturated colors with the brightness we're all used to today. The frost selection provided everything we needed for a hard-working fixture on a busy musical. Moreover, I was really impressed by the zoom range, which gave us a beautiful clean beam of light to cut through the rest of the rig."

Another key feature that Hudson appreciated was the fixture's quiet operation. "As with any space the size of the Donmar, the noise of the rig can become a real issue," he says. "We were able to put the Silens fixtures in their ultra-quiet mode, which I was really impressed with. Even the usual more subtle sounds such as lenses moving within the lights or shutters coming in and out was removed. It was as if they were not there!"

Collaborating with director Tim Sheader and scenic designer Leslie Travers, Hudson also adapted his lighting to account for the theatre's thrust stage. "When you have the audience around the three sides, you have to think much more sculpturally," he says, adding that "the actors become more three-dimensional in a way."