Staged for the first time at the Cagliari Lyric Theatre in Sardinia, Arthur Laurents’ two-act stage musical West Side Story, with music by Leonard Bernstein and loosely based on William Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, was a guaranteed success.
The staging offered by the Cagliari Lyric Theater was derived from three major US musical institutions: the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Houston Grand Opera and the Glimmerglass Festival in New York State. The performance, which blends the language of traditional opera with that of the musical, took place from 15 to 23 December, bringing to a close the 2022 opera season with 10 highly anticipated English-language performances.
Lighting Designer, A.J. Guban, nominated for eight Helen Hayes awards, opted for 12 Ayrton Bora TC and 25 Ayrton NandoBeam S6 fixtures for the lighting design taken from Mark McCullough’s original. “We chose Ayrton for the unique characteristics of Bora which include a convex plane lens with shutters and very high quality of light,” said Andrea Ledda, chief electrician of Cagliari Lyric Theatre’s stage lighting department.
“The NandoBeam S6 fixtures were used to provide more light sources and even more overlapping of the beams of light, while the Bora units were rigged on the front trusses from where it was possible, due to their wide zoom, to cover the entire stage (with a proscenium width of almost 15m) using just a limited number of fixtures. Using other profile units with the addition of a hard frost would not have achieved the same quality of light and light output compared to the Bora TC.”
Cagliari Lyric Theatre’s latest purchase of eight Ayrton Bora brings its total investment in Bora to sixteen, with other units from the Ayrton universe in its inventory including 28 NandoBeam S6 and 10 MagicBlade. “The Bora TCs, which we use mainly for work in-house, have proven to be very good and reliable, which is why we use them in almost every production, and with any lighting designer,” concluded Ledda. “The NandoBeam S6 and MagicBlades, on the other hand, due to their lightweight and quick assembly, are also used for events and tours when the Lyric Theatre Cagliari moves outside its main venue.”