Scott Richard Foster and Antoinette LaVecchia in You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up!

A touring production with too much going on uses technology to simplify

When the design team for the inaugural production of You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up!, by Annabelle Gurwitch and Jeff Kahn, sat down for their first design conversation, everything sounded pretty simple. It was a small, two-person touring show: unit set, props and costumes should fit into a couple of roadcases, minimal lighting requirements, a few atmospheric sound cues, that sort of thing. The requirements quickly grew, however. Set in the framework of an anniversary dinner, the play details the trials and tribulations of the couple’s relationship in hilarious vignettes covering first meeting, courtship and marriage as it travels back and forth in time and location—a challenging sequence for a small tour. By the time the show opened in Charlotte there were nearly 100 light cues, half a dozen practicals and around 50 sound cues, all needing to be run by one operator over the course of a 75-minute show.

In addition to the number of cues, there was the issue of transporting everything, so the control system had to be compact enough to fit into the same roadcases alongside the props and costumes. And everything had to be linked precisely enough together for a stage manager to call cues that frequently landed right on top of each other. In order to handle all of that, the design team leaned on QLab, a Mac-based show control system that is completely scalable and can run lighting, video and up to 48 channels of audio.

Sound Designer Jeff Montgomerie loaded his cues into QLab and was able to assign them to any channel of the audio outputs, giving him the flexibility to have some cues in the house speakers, some cues in the house and effects speaker and some in the effects speaker only. Changes in cue construction and timing were also quick and relatively painless using QLab.

QLab can also send MIDI triggers to lighting consoles, so the show’s lighting designer was able to program on a familiar console and simply fire the cue stack from the QLab. QLab also allowed the creative team to join sound and lighting cues together to fire simultaneously, or stagger them to fire sequentially with precise timing between a light and sound cue, reducing the number of calls the stage manager had to make during cue-heavy sequences.

Morgan Calma, house technician for the Blumenthal Center, with the QLab rig for You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up!

The show kicked off at the Stage Door Theatre at the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center in Charlotte, where QLab was running on a dedicated Mac Mini and fired lighting cues off an ETC Ion. Out on the road now, the lights run from an ETC SmartFade 1248, a significantly less expensive and smaller console to travel with. The touring QLab rig runs off a MacBook Pro laptop, which fits neatly into the bottom of a case along with the MIDI interface, cables, lighting console, tablecloths, menus and (empty) wine bottles from the props closet. QLab was not necessary for emptying the wine bottles.