Live at the Apollo

There's a new live musical on the stage of the famed Apollo Theater.George C. Wolfe's “Harlem Song” marks the firstlong-running show presented in the theater in its entire 89-yearhistory. Live performances, still imagery, and interview footagerecreate the nightclubs and speakeasies of Harlem's heyday in the1920s, as well as the struggles and triumphs of the community up to thepresent. Using live performance and a multimedia presentation, theproduction becomes a tour of the neighborhood most renowned for itsmusic, art, philosophy, and political thought.

For the show, Snug Harbor Productions hired the staging division ofNew York-based Scharff Weisberg, led by project manager Derek Holbrook.A three-screen Dataton Watchout system feeds three stacks of two NECNighthawks that front project onto the stage. To integrate the liveperformances with the video, two 7'×10.5' screens track across thestage and meet in the center to create one 14'×10.5' projectionsurface. In between cues, the screens are hidden offstage.

“We use the Watchout system to project a 10.5'×35' imagethrough which the screens track,” says Holbrook. “Most ofthe image is black except for two 7'×10.5' windows that Watchoutpans from side to side.”

The six NEC Nighthawk projectors and a Medialon Display Controllercreate a montage of moving video imagery, produced by Batwin + Robin(New York). Watchout projects the video and graphics so that they trackwith the moving screens and remain a seamless, single image withsmaller images moving across the surface.

The video sequences were created with the camera on its side for theunusual vertical orientation. The video was then rotated in AfterEffects and fed into Watchout, which rendered the pans.

“The reliability, high-light output, and DLP engine of the NECXT5000 are really what drove us toward using this projector in aBroadway-class show,” says Holbrook. “The small chassis andlow fan noise also enabled us to put six of the units on the balconyrail, right in the audience, without worry of harming the viewingexperience.”