Martina McBride Moons Her Audience

By the time this story starts, I’d already designed the set twice, the first time, which I hardly count since it’s not often one’s first thought becomes the final design, was the initial stab at a design, but the second one was a real design, and at this point I was pretty much on the home stretch, prototyping LED stuff for a giant pixel curtain and trying fabric ideas for a final reveal idea I was pretty confident about. 

Then the word came that Martina was worried that even though she liked the ideas, there was a concern that she’d be doing the same show as last time - just with a different set.  The McBrides were looking to hire a show director - so “stand down and await input.”

So it came about that the lovely Amy Tinkham came on board, and a week later was sending me her show treatment and a bunch of reference pictures to mull over.  I sat down and almost immediately doodled the first drawing you see here… “Is this what we mean?”...  Now built into that doodle were some givens… we wanted to use the same band riser from the last tour, along with the downstage ramps which housed two elevators.  John McBride had decided that we’d also use an upstage platform, built originally for the Christmas show, that also had elevators built in.  Amy had the idea that since there was a video of a rollercoaster that had ben made as the first promotion for the album maybe we’d start the show like that and the set would have some fairground vibe.  She’d sent me a picture of a ferris wheel so I popped that in as well.  She liked the idea of fragmented video, and version two had already been going that way so that became another element.  Looking back at it, it’s not much of a work of art but it told the story, Martina understood it and we went from there.

What intervened next was reality (of course) - while I loved the way the many small video cubes worked, it became obvious that rigging requirements and just what was affordably available video-wise meant that there had to be fewer bigger video panels. In any case Abbey Holmes, the lighting designer needed more lighting postions, and video and lights would have to live together somehow.

At some point we dropped the ferris wheel, and the opening video on the closed scrim at the top of the show became a mirror ball.  Also Martina started to feel uncomfortable with so many stairs from the back level and asked for ramps.  I took that suggestion and turned the ramps into something curved, and hoped it would survive the budget, since as every designer knows straight lines are cheaper!  Somehow the curves survived, and the shape gave me the opportunity to make an elegant break point half way down, which we needed to be able to fold them back for storage when the support act was onstage.

Finally I turned my attention to the moon, and finally found a shape I liked - the top coming to an apex and the base flaring out to be wide enough to support a seat.

In my prior design, however great it seemed, it would have been just another set, what Amy had brought to us was a show, I don’t think I could have suggested to Martina that she could fly out to the mix on the moon, but that’s what she did, and as Martina announced to the audience every night - “Ladies and gentlemen now you can tell everyone that you’ve been mooned by Martina McBride!” Ta-da!