Walnut Street Theatre Elevates Lighting with Prolights EclProfile CT+HP

“I’ve never had much interaction with Prolights gear, but once I was introduced to this product, I knew it would be the perfect fit and never looked back.”

Founded in 1808, Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre (WST) is the longest continually running theatre in the English-speaking world. Annually, WST mounts five mainstage shows and two children’s series shows, attended by over 200,000 audience members.

To serve both incoming productions and audiences requires a constant focus on innovation and modernisation, which was the driving force behind replacing the theatre’s pre-existing Leko fixtures.

“They were about 12 years old and couldn’t keep up with newer technology’s intensity and colour rendering.”

Adding 18 Prolights EclProfile CT+HPs was part of an ongoing effort to ensure productions, and by extension audiences, have the best possible experience. Pushing the envelope and innovating consistently has helped sustain WST’s longevity and popularity.

“We’re continually working to upgrade and expand our technology for designers,” DeMascolo continues. “We needed something very robust that punches through with very saturated colours, while allowing us to mix soft pastels and maintain a tungsten feel. Dimming of the source is one of the most important parts of any theatrical LED unit, and the CT+HP did not disappoint.”

The CT+HP’s colour-picking fidelity and compatibility with WST’s ETC console also offered major advantages.

For DeMascolo, upgrading is always about playing the long game:

“I don’t subscribe to buying, say, four now and four next year. By the time you accumulate what you need or want those fixtures may have been cycled out. I try to be forward thinking: ‘What’s the newest thing out there that’s going to make sense for us and what’s going to last the longest?’”

The core challenge this time, he says, was:

“Finding an LED profile fixture that would keep up with the ever-increasing output of LED moving lights. The other fixtures we currently use are incredibly bright, so we needed something that could keep pace and stay true to colour.”

Given the fixture’s flexibility and power in terms of colour calibration, flicker-free output and advanced colour mixing, it does more than keep pace. It ensures consistency and efficiency in an intuitive, user-friendly package ideal for heightening the emotional impact of the shows WST presents.

“Lighting designers tell stories through pictures, and emotion is often dictated by colour,” he says. “Colour brings out emotion. So, having the colour spectrum of this particular fixture increases the range of emotion that can be told through light, and helps tell the story of what’s happening on stage.”

That creative potential was brought to bear on a recent show, Million Dollar Quartet, and also had an impact on the production’s LD, Ryan O’Gara of O’Gara Design Group:

“The units were very bright, had a great dimming curve, and I was able to mix a great assortment of colours to meet the show’s needs… I can’t wait to use these again, and can only say good things about the fixture,” O’Gara says.

“Ryan was the first LD who got to use them,” DeMascolo notes, adding that O’Gara is a seasoned Broadway lighting designer; the associate lighting designer for Hamilton and Come From Away, amongst many others, in addition to having worked on The Wiz and Clue on tour.

“This was his first musical here, and when he saw those lights up during focus, saturating the stage—and they’re only at 3%, well, he was impressed.”

“Whenever I needed a punch in the face of colour for a big dance number, the CT+HP’s were there to carry the load. They also worked really well to make interior house scenes look like they’re full of natural light.“

Without the right tools, DeMascolo says, it’s harder to deliver emotional impact:

“The way this fixture is designed, the colour option modes, the colour mixes, the way it fades and operates – it provides a much broader spectrum of light and colour rendering than any previous fixture we’ve had. The everyday audience member might not understand the technicalities, but it still deepens their emotional connection to the performance.”

Ultimately, he says, the Prolights EclProfile CT+HPs offer:

“High intensity output, incredibly smooth colour mixing, clarity of beam, sharpness of gobo edge to edge, smooth shutters, smooth dimming all the way to 0, and also the onboard UI.”

As with previous upgrades, the performance and support from A.C. Americas played a crucial role:

“A.C. has a great product line and distributes a lot of innovative products: Follow Me, Chroma-Q, Color Force, fixtures that have set a new standard. Think of Chroma Q, one of A.C.’s other lines, and something I’ve installed before,” he continues. “And the Inspires, the Color Force series, those have been fixtures that have shaken the market up and set new bars.”

But it’s also about the relationship and trust:

“If somebody said to me, ‘Hey, I need to buy a cyc light.’ I know, I would say, ‘get a Color Force. Period – end of story. And now I know that if somebody says ‘I need an LED Leko, well, Prolights and A.C. is the place to go.”

And that, he concludes, is the most important thing: that DeMascolo and WST can depend on a company and its brands to match their own forward-thinking approach.

“A company that asks: ‘How is this going to improve what we do in our industry?’ Follow Me does that. Prolights, Color Force, and Luminex are doing that. A.C. seems to have product lines that are setting the new standard. Take Luminex switches. They’re specifically made for the entertainment industry – that’s game changing. And I’m likely going to end up with Luminex switches in this system because of what they can do. And, A.C., again, is distributing that. They seem to associate themselves with brands that are forward-thinking.”