"Stan & Ollie"

[gareth]

Old-style followspots were generally straight in from the back of the top circle rather than crossing in from the balcony slips.

[ImagineerTom]

I’m at the fringes of my memory here but as I recall it basically it was lights above the stage and only the follow spots FOH, a hangover from the gas lighting that most theatres were designed for and the lack of suitable electric lighting technologies.

 

The theatrical rabbit hole of http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk has pictures of just about every theatre at every generation and skimming through there I’m struggling to see any pictures of lanterns actually in the house.

 

It’s also key to remember the context of this story, by the 1950’s the variety circuit was virtually dead; they weren’t visiting magnificent venues flush with cash but rather the few surviving venues that had struggled for the last two decades and which within 5 years of this tour had almost all shut down completely. Whilst /theoretically/ they could have been illuminated by 1950’s built lanterns and lighting ideas the reality is that even the most successful and lavish of the venues wouldn’t have been updated for the past 10 years at least.

For me one of the most jarring technical points of the show was the wrong seating and seating layouts in the buildings follows post 1970’s seating layouts and condition rather than the reality that in the 50’s the majority of variety venues used bench seats and any upholstered tip up seats would have been 50 years old and shabby.

[Brian]

Instead of relying on memory you could all go back to a primary source as in back issues of Tabs which are all online from the very first issue back in Oct 1937.

 

http://www.theatrecrafts.com/archive/tabs/publications1.php?id=1&title=TABS

[Junior8]

As good a guide to the state of play in the 1940s as you'll find is in the latter chapters of Williams The Technique of Stage Lighting published by Pitman in 1947. Williams worked for Furse and it serves as a valuable corrective to the view that a)Strand were everywhere and b) Fred Bentham's views were universally followed. It's also worth remembering just why yards and yards of compartment battens were in use. What spotlights there were were incredibly ineffcient. I seem to recall it was as late as the mid fifties that the original Patt 45 Mirror Spot was uprated to 500w. and were fitted with a prefocus lampholder for the first time. 250w ES until then. Youngsters who have not read Bentham's Sixty Years of Light Work and, in particular, Tabs Volume 22 No 1 would find both very enlightening. The other thing to remember is that the equipment would have been invisible to an audience and any FOH spots would probably have been on a Balcony front in some kind of housing. The first time I personally recall seeing lighting equipment being purposely left visible was in a show at the Cheltenham Everyman in the late 1960s. I've just checked and my 1935 edition of Ridge and Aldred does recommend FOH spotting when planning new theatres and it also reminded me of the term Focus Lantern which gives a clue to what they were aiming for in those days if fairly simple lamp design.

[Bryson]

At last my weird hobby of buying very old backstage books has a use! I have a 1943 copy of Stage Scenery and Lighting by Selden and Sellman, first published in 1930, so that seems like a perfect contemporaneous source. Now, we're talking the USA here, but I imagine things were broadly comparable.

 

The illustrations in there show pros. booms (just upstage of the pros, anyway) as very much a "standard" way to go about things, although there doesn't appear to be much in terms of FOH positions as we would use them, and there is much discussion (as mentioned above) of methods of concealment for those fixtures that are FOH. Interestingly, they discuss FOH lights being called "Beam Lights" as the lighting positions were disguised as fake beams in the ceiling.

 

Other fun things I noticed:

It's all Majors and Kleigls illustrated in this book.

Ellipsoidal spotlights are discussed as the very "cutting edge" of lighting fixture design.

Uncompartmented striplights are referred to as "obsolete".

It mentions that you can get striplight glass filters in as many as 6 colours!

[xllx]

At last my weird hobby of buying very old backstage books has a use!

 

Ah, glad I am not the only one! I'm away from home at moment, but will have a look over the weekend and see what I can dig out...

[paulears]

When I worked for Linda lusardi kenny baker R2D2 was often at their house and he had a great scrapbook with pictures of him with movie stars throughout his career. A really good set with him and Laurel and Hardy.