The Week in Review

And the Winner Is: The Broadway season came to an official end with the Tony Awards ceremony. As most industry watchers predicted, the awards for best play and best musical went to Red and Memphis, respectively. Showing a surprising amount of strength in the play design categories was Red, with the musical design awards being split between American Idiot and Fela! Red took six awards overall, but the commercial effect of a Tony Award isn't likely to be felt, as the production closes its limited run on June 27. (Similarly, Catherine Zeta-Jones, who won best actress in a musical for A Little Night Music, leaves that production at the end of this week, as does Angela Lansbury; fortunately, the producers have reserve star power in the form of Bernadette Peters and Elaine Stritch, who join A Little Night Music in July.) The other big winner was Memphis, which took four awards. A medium box officer performer all season long, it will be interesting to see if it enjoys any boost from being showcased on national television.

The Power of Trade Shows: To those who say trade shows have been made redundant in the digital world, we say, consider this: LightFair, the architectural lighting show, held in Las Vegas in May, had a record-breaking number of 22,000 registered attendees, a 10% increase over the show's 2008 attendance, also in Las Vegas. The 2010 show featured an exhibit hall of 160,000 sq. ft., with nearly 1,600 booths and 498 international manufacturers, 94 of them from outside the U.S. The show also featured 72 first-time exhibitors. And InfoComm, held last week in Las Vegas, enjoyed an attendance of 32,002, making it the second-largest commercial AV show ever held. Attendees came from more than 90 countries. A total of 925 exhibitors were on hand, up from 832 at InfoComm 09. Exhibitors occupied more than 475,000 net sq. ft. of exhibit and special events space.

The Fuel Cell: Is this a glimpse of the future? White Light, the London-based lighting gear supplier, and Arcola Energy are ready to launch HyLight, a portable lighting and power supply that allows you to run lighting in locations away from the electrical grid -- silently and without the emissions of traditional noisy, polluting diesel generators. It contains the new Hymera hydrogen fuel cell generator and two new lightweight hydrogen gas cylinders, both from the global industrial gas supplier BOC; a choice of low-energy LED lighting systems suitable for architectural, live event, or safety applications completes the system. Bryan Raven, managing director of White Light, notes that he expects his customers to react favorably to "a lighting system that is clean, silent, and portable, perfect for lighting events in gardens, parks, or remote, hostile, but unspoiled locations." The release of the product, which takes place at the ABTT Show in London this week, will undoubtedly raise new questions about how green the industry can become. Will fuel cell energy have a dramatic impact on productions? Stay tuned.