Staged Invasion: Doctor Who Live

November 2010 - Issue 135

A virtual ‘doctor’, monsters, an orchestra and special fx come together for an action-packed, audience participation Doctor Who live show that takes to the arena stage for the first time. Rachel Esson reports...

Bringing theatrical TV series and films to life via the stage is a growing phenomenon. TPi alone has reported on the arena productions of Ben Hur, Walking With Dinosaurs and more recently Star Wars: In Concert. And the recent 31-date UK Doctor Who Live — The Monsters Are Coming arena tour, certainly added a new dimension (excuse the pun).

The October and November 2010 tour combined a live 16-piece orchestra, pre-recorded scenes of Doctor Who (Matt Smith) who ‘speaks’ to the cast and audience via one giant screen, live action, special effects and pyrotechnics, all meticulously strapped together in a production that lasted just one and a half hours.

The main character on stage, Vorgensen (the son of Vorg from one of the BBC series’ 1963 episodes, played by Nigel Planer), tours his freak show of monsters that he traps and conjures up scene-by-scene via his gadget, the minimiser.

He wants to add the object of his obsession, Doctor Who, to his travelling collection of cybermen, weeping angels, judoon, oods and the like (costume design by Millennium FX), and tries to entice the audience to help him, in what results in a dramatic, highly interactive panto experience. Monsters roam the audience, engage in battles and disappear, all to a backdrop of what is also the main event: the music.

After a week’s rehearsal at LS-Live Studio in West Yorkshire, Doctor Who Live spent three days at London’s Wembley Arena before the first gig on October 8, and visited eight more UK cities, culminating in Belfast on November 7.

The music from the series, composed by Murray Gold, was showcased live at the Royal Albert Hall in 2008 as part of the BBC’s annual Proms series of concerts, but the arena tour involved a huge amount of re-working and original pieces of music.

Executive producer for the stage show, Craig Stanley, explained: “About a year ago I started planning the concept with Steven Moffat, who is the producer and showrunner for the TV series, and developed the storyline with Will Brenton, who directed and co-wrote the piece along with Gareth Roberts.

“Murray and I discussed how we could turn the music into music for a live show. We decided to have a live band, with a rock band at its core, which is more approriate for arenas.” The orchestra and band were directed by Ben Foster.

“I wanted to create a show that added to the experience and exceeded expectations, so production values had to be very high,” said Stanley. In order to achieve these high standards, they put the contracts to supply production for the show out to tender and eventually decided on a team that included XL Video, Adlib Audio, Bandit Lites, MTFX, Knight Rigging Services, Halo Lighting, The Twins, Fabry Trading and Eat To The Beat.

Stanley said: “I have a long-standing relationship with production manager Nigel Mousley and long-term collaborator Mark Cunniffe [production and lighting designer], but I also like to bring in new people to keep it fresh so we have art director Keith Slote and an almost entirely new cast.”

Tour manager was Steve Hill and assistant director and choreographer was Jenny Arnold. The tour required seven artic trucks containing approximately 80 tonnes of equipment.

MULTI-DIMENSION LIGHTS
The renowned Mark Cunniffe, whose most recent work involved lighting and production designs for Il Divo, Stevie Wonder and Tom Jones, was aptly suited to apply his theatrical and rock’n’roll skills to create a dynamic environment for the show.

Doctor Who Live presented Cunniffe with another opportunity to work with Craig Stanley and Will Brenton, who together have been responsible for many of the UK’s live family entertainment shows, such as Tweenies Live and CBeebies Live, along with venue sound designer Rich Rowley and sound designer Richard Sillitto.

Said Cunniffe: “As you can imagine with a brand specific show like Doctor Who, the look and feel of the show is very much at the forefront of the producers’ minds. I took their guidelines and produced a set design that could be developed into the steampunk idea that made it to the arena floor.

“Beyond that it was a case of building into the set the numerous entrances and exits, traps, sliding door reveals and other gags that Will Brenton’s script required. It took several months to finalise, but it was worth all of the effort in the end. We were all extremely pleased with the final result.” The set and scenery was provided by Fabry Trading with the risers and lifts by Production North.

The stage was split into three performance levels, the floor, middle tier and an upper deck, all linked by staircases. The middle tier featured a doorway to backstage through which monsters entered and exited, although they also surprised the audience by appearing in random places throughout the arena.

Stanley said Cunniffe and Slote “deserved an award” for their work on the set: “For me it’s the best use of the front edge of the stage I’ve ever seen. Action constantly spills off the stage and the lighting effects on the front perspex system that constantly changes is fantastic. The white perspex and black lines create an effective ‘Dalek’ set.”

“I wanted to keep the lighting design clean but powerful, so i opted for a series of straight trusses at right angles to the stage instead of the more common across stage approach. This minimised the impact of the truss structure whilst maintaining the hanging space required for the instrumentation,” he said.

Cunniffe called on the expertise of Bandit Lites UK’s chief executive Lester Cobrin to fulfil his lighting needs for the show, which included almost 100 eco-friendly new LED fixtures such as the Thomas PixelPAR 90, Chroma Q Color Block DB 4 and GLP Impression, the latter used for orchestra lighting. He also adopted his favourite industry standards, including Martin MAC IIIs, MAC 2000 Washes, VL 3000 Spots, VL 3500 Washes, Lycian 1290 and M2 spots, Thomas 8-lites, and a large array of truss and cable.

The entire system was operated by Marcus Robinson on a grandMA console with an MA Lite as a back up. The lighting crew consisted of chief Roy Hunt, James ‘Jam’ Such and Joe Simpson.

Said Robinson: “I find the grandMA 1 Full Size desk very intuitive to use. When we arrive I load the master show file and get as much time as I can updating the preset focus positions for the new venue. The monsters and characters in the show enter from different places in the audience at each venue, so it is important to get these focus positions accurate for the overhead rig and the spot calls.

“Erica Southon, the show caller, calls LX cues from the book along with the all the other effects and moves. I step through the programmed cue stack as each cue is called and add a few busking cues for some of the musical elements and set pieces.”

The show had to have huge moments of impact, for example in the weeping angels scene, then other moments of pure intimacy such as the relaying of Amy Pond‘s heartfelt video to Murray’s score,” said Cunniffe.
Lester Cobrin commented: “It’s probably the best show I’ve seen all year, it gelled so well and not one department overpowered the other.”

Added Mousley: “Bandit have thrown everything at this to make it work, the crew are great and the lighting looks fantastic. Mark does a really nice job of shaping the lights so you can watch a bit of video then go straight back into the action and he also really brings the audience into it.”

VIDEO IN CHARACTER
Video played a pivotal role in the production, with the main screen morphing into the ‘character’ of Doctor Who as he addressed the actors and audience during pre-recorded footage. It also featured specially edited video clips drawn from the TV programme that formed part of the storyline on stage and served as introductions to the real-life monsters.

XL Video supplied the screen, LED screens, camera systems and show control for the tour, project managed by Rich Rowley, who was also the venue sound designer for the tour under XL Events. The installation of the central 44’ wide x 22’ high rear projection surface was no easy task due to the shortage of space backstage.

Explained Rowley: “We have had to rear project because we have instances where people walk in front of the screen and we have smoke, flames and light pollution on the stage. That has been our biggest headache as we don’t have a lot of space backstage to give us such a large image.”

Rowley and XL Events technical director Dave Mulcahy came up with a sophisticated solution using XL Video kit. Ten metres behind the screen they installed three overlaid Barco FLM HD20 projectors flown on top of each other with fish eye lenses and used the warp cards inside them together with the image correction feature within the Coolux Pandoras Box media servers to deliver the image accurately to the screen.

There are no extra I-Mag screens, but XL’s two camera feeds feature as part of the video content playback on the main screen at certain intervals to involve the audience in the show. Sony D50s — one in the pit on a spider dolly and one at FOH on a long lens — are processed through a Grass Valley Kayak PPU unit and fed to the Pandoras Box media servers, under the watchful eye of vision mixer/video crew boss Raymond ‘Moose’ Shaw.

“We also have some Pixled F-11 LED screens for a scenic element at stage right; we have effectively created a two-sided Tardis out of LED where the doctor appears at the end. The BBC took our suggestion and filmed the Doctor beforehand with two cameras to get a double perspective, so it looks like he is inside the Tardis,” said Rowley.

Another challenging aspect of the video, which required a vast effort across the entire production, was the playback system on the show. The integration between the audio playback system and video playback system required three timelines to be created.

Mulcahy explained: “One is manual cues [by Erica Southon], one is a timecode feed from the audio side of things with lots of click tracks and the third is a timeline to allow cameras to be overlaid at any point; that was quite complex!”

Added Mousley: “Dave and the guys at XL pulled out all the stops to get it edited on time. It was all very reliant on Pandoras Box.”

SOUND & EFFECTS
Sound designer Richard Sillitto, of RS Sound Ltd, looked after the audio content for the show, sourcing sounds from the BBC’s library, re-creating sounds and monsters’ voices from the show and creating new content such as the sound of the minimiser.

“Even in the modern series there’s a lot of harking back to the Radiophonic Workshop material so a big part is trying to create sounds that are retro but also have a modern spin,” he explained.

Whilst the video is produced by Pandoras Box, the audio is controlled by Figure 53’s “flawless” QLab software on a Mac, generating SMPTE timecode along with multitrack audio. The playback systems were supplied by Stage Sound Services, who Sillitto said had been “fantastic both in the kit they’ve provided and the support with it”. Sillitto was running two identical systems in tandem to provide redundancy in case of failure.

Stated Rowley: “The playback system is complex as it has additional instruments, sound effects, VT, audio, and in some instances audio is chasing VT and in other instances VT is chasing the audio from a timecode perspective; it has the complexity of a Cirque Du Soleil show.”

After building the QLab sequence, Sillitto handed the systems over to Fergus Mount, touring playback operator, who met Sillitto on CBeebies Live. Mount praised audio supplier Adlib Audio for its work on the production: “Adlib have been absolutely fantastic. It’s a complex system with lots of playback elements going to different areas and complicated timecode elements so they’ve done really well.”

The Doctor Who Live tour was the first arena outing for Adlib’s newly purchased L-Acoustics K1 rig, which it provided along with a Soundcraft Vi6 digital mixer at FOH, with a Vi1 for playback.

Adlib’s systems engineer Tony Szabo said: “It’s a standard PA system but the challenge was doing it in a certain amount of time, making it look good and putting the PA very high so you can see the massive screen at the back because essentially the pop star is the massive screen. So you add cable truss and cable management and it’s another magnitute of work.”

Achieving this effectively required 20 motors supplied by Adlib and Bandit. Knight Rigging Services handled rigging for the tour, with Phil Broad as head rigger.

Rowley implemented a 270° design for the arena; a hang of eight K1 per side with three Kara underhang, and Kudo upstage side hangs to maximise sightlines, with four SB28 subs per side on the floor in cardioid mode.

Said Szabo: “The big new thing for us is the Kara. We bought 30 boxes and we’re probably the first to tour the downfill. It’s spot on. The Kara provides 10° vertical coverage, whereas the dV-DOSC is 7.5°, the V-DOSC is 5.5° and K1 is 5°, so the Kara cuts down on the number of boxes you need at the bottom of the hang.

“The K1 is a great-sounding speaker, but the thing that people don’t talk about is that the horn design makes it sound amazing in the horizontal. If you walk in front of it from one side to the other it’s just spot on at all frequencies, right up into the side seats.”

Adlib also supplied the RTS PS31/BP 325 comms system, Dolby Lake processing, amps, cabling, Sennheiser G3 radio systems and DPA 4066F headband microphones.

FOH engineer Chris Leckie (Kaiser Chiefs) was mixing the band and the cast for the show, whilst Fergus Mount operated a Vi1 for the sampled sound effects.

Said Leckie: “This show is a very different discipline from what I’m used to. It’s a combination of theatre, TV and rock’n’roll so you’re trying to balance out mixing the music as well as it deserves to be, because it’s a fantastic score and band, but at the same time if you haven’t got the narrative you haven’t gone anything.”

Crew boss and monitor engineer, Adlib’s Marc Peers, also found himself out of his comfort zone on this tour, but following some “intense” rehearsals had settled in well to the job. “There are a lot of inputs (on his Soundcraft Vi6 console), outputs and mic changes, and we didn’t see the band until two days before the first show.” 

Peers was creating one monitor mix for all the cast, one for Vorgensen, and one for the band. “It’s my first time on the Vi6, as I usually use Digidesign, but it sounds great and it was a logical choice given the amount of inputs.”

ON THE MENU
TPi nipped backstage for a delicious a chicken tikka masala with poppadoms, chipatis, mango chutney and mint raita, cooked up by Eat To The Beat, whch has been doing BBC’s live shows for 10 years.
Said Mousley: “Their food is always great and they’re a good bunch of people to have around.”

At the end of the show Vorgensen’s plan is foiled as there is a greater power at work, the Daleks, who take the glory by quashing the enemy in a special effects-fulled fight. Producer Craig Stanley revealed they were “looking to see how it could be taken overseas.”
TPi

Photography by Richard Skins & Louise Stickland