Major upgrade for New York venue responsible for teching Broadway tours
With an eminent history dating back almost 100 years, Proctors is a 2,646-cap theatre based in Schenectady, upstate New York.
It had largely fallen into disrepair when the city took over ownership in 1977 and initially earmarked to be torn down, before it was saved—thanks to its historic status—by the National Park Service who offered to buy it for $1 and run it as a non-profit. In 2005, the stagehouse was rebuilt to accommodate modern Broadway touring productions, such as the original Phantom of the Opera and Disney’s The Lion King … and it has enjoyed a close association with Broadway, including the ‘teching’ of Broadway tours.
“Since then, we have done dozens of techs, including the huge national tour of Disney’s Frozen, which left here in over 20 semis,” records Dan Sheehan, Director of Operations. They will shortly be starting the tech for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast which has never previously toured.
The theatre itself is also part of Proctors Collaborative, a cooperative made up of Proctors, Capital Repertory Theatre, and Universal Preservation Hall, for which Sheehan also has a major role.
Part of the relics of a bygone age were the theatre’s PAR cans, its trusty stage lighting which has now been replaced by 35 of GLP’s new impression X5 IP Maxx.
“This upgrade was instigated by our desire to use less electricity—and the fact you can’t find a decent PAR 64 lamp anymore,” Dan Sheehan explains. “The industry was leaving us behind.” The 35 fixtures, purchased from GLP dealer (and long-term supplier) BMI Supply, replaced around 200 old school PAR cans, he says. Each fixture delivers an extraordinary luminous flux of up to 21,000 lumens, with an expanded colour space, from 37 powerful 40W RGBL LEDs.
The route to their adoption is fascinating, since their recommendation came via the house’s previous long term head electrician. “We’ve taken his advice on what he sees come through here, and he talks a lot with the guys who use the lights,” notes Dan Sheehan. “There was a bunch of the older version of these [GLP] lights on Hamilton, which made quite an impression on us back in August 2019.” And it was this that informed the purchase of the X5 IP Maxx.
This inventory, which will also include LED profiles and strip lights, is designed to cover all production requirements. “One of our best ‘clients’,” he says, “is our own Education department. Their two key productions include the High School Musical Theatre Awards, where the two individual winners of this go to the Jimmy Awards in NYC; the other big programme is our summer Broadway Camp where the kids do everything, including running sound, lights and everything else backstage, with our crew as mentors. It’s one of the programmes I’m the proudest of.”
In a perfect world, he says, the theatre will add five 50ft trusses “all wired and ready to go with the appropriate motors.” This is still subject to confirmation. “We think this would protect the units and make our turnarounds much quicker than hanging individual lights. We do have sufficient to have some on floor plates as well, and when not in use they’ll hang far upstage.”
Dan Sheehan is in no doubt that Proctors had made the correct decision with their new GLP purchase. “Now that we have them, we know it was the right choice,” he says. “As soon as we fired them up, we could see they were everything we’d hoped for!”
