Five-time Tony Award-nominated lighting designer, Ben Stanton, chose 58 Ayrton Diablo S fixtures for Broadway’s Maybe Happy Ending, the South Korean musical about human-like helper-bots who forge a relationship. ACT Entertainment is the exclusive distributor of Ayrton lighting in North America.
Maybe Happy Ending premiered in Seoul in 2016 and has enjoyed many international runs before arriving at Broadway’s Belasco Theatre in September 2024. The acclaimed production recently won six Tony Awards, including one for Best Musical with Stanton receiving a nomination for his lighting design.
Prior to Maybe Happy Ending Stanton had used various Ayrton fixtures for concert touring but had not deployed them on theatre projects. For this show he needed “a very small, powerful fixture that could be a workhorse for the design” and Diablo filled the bill.
“I needed a light that would fit nicely on the balcony rails of the beautiful Belasco Theatre as well as fit into very small spaces overstage,” he recalls. “The house electrician Justin Freeman recommended I look at Diablos since they were a compact fixture that fit well in FOH positions.”
Stanton notes that it wasn’t just size that was a factor in selecting Diablos for the production, however. “Their colour quality, optics and output also came into play,” he says.
PRG provided Stanton with 54 active Diablo S fixtures and four spares. Some are mounted on the balcony rail where they largely function as front lights. He uses the Diablo’s shutter assembly to shape the light to the apertures of the moving portals in the set design, a task for which he has found them to be “reliable and accurate.”
Additional Diablos hang over the stage on 12-inch trusses where they serve as side lights and back lights. “We can also lower these fixtures in between tiles on the video ceiling to down light certain places on stage,” Stanton points out.
“The Diablos have exceeded our expectations. For their size, their output is great and the colour quality is really beautiful. One of the hallmarks of the design is how we use colour. A lot of the musical takes place in small, white apartment-like boxes, and a big part of the story telling in Maybe Happy Ending is achieved through the use of saturate colours in these spaces.
The colour mixing in this fixture allowed us to create many beautiful fields of colour. This combined with the shutters, gobos and optics made the Diablo the perfect light for this production.”
PRG also supplied the show with active and spare MDG ATMe haze generators and MDG MAX 3000 APS fog generators. ACT Entertainment is also the exclusive distributor of the MDG brand in North America. “I specify MDG atmospherics for every project that I can; they are by far the best machines for theatrical productions,” says Stanton. “The CO2-based haze is much smoother and finer than other types of atmospheres. The ATMe runs throughout the majority of the show with more intense SFX requiring the fogger appearing toward the end of the show.”
For the production Ken Elliott is the Associate Lighting Designer, Kat Morrill the Assistant Lighting Designer in charge of followspots, and Ron Schwier the Production Electrician.
More information on Ayrton’s full portfolio of innovative LED and laser-sourced products can be found at www.ayrton.eu
