Stops Along The Black Parade
Creating Distinctive Scenery and Lighting for My Chemical Romance

By Catherine McHugh

Lighting and Sound America

April 2007

Fans of My Chemical Romance are being treated to two shows for the price of one ticket on the band's current tour. To kick off the proceedings, lead singer Gerard Way makes his entrance via hospital gurney as a black drape opens, revealing a white hospital drape. This scenario comes directly from the hit video off the band's latest album, Welcome to the Black Parade - its songs are showcased during the show's first half. At the end, Way announces: "We are the Black Parade. My Chemical Romance will be up next." Then, having ditched their matching silver and black outfits, they return to perform an energetic set featuring their earlier songs.

While theatricality is not unusual on the rock scene, production designer Tom McPhillips notes, "The band as a whole has a very strong sense of who they are, visually." Along with his Atomic Design associate, Mike Rhoads, McPhillips worked closely with the band, especially Way, a working artist in New York City before forming My Chemical Romance.

Among the touchstones Way mentioned for the design were two films: the 1991 black comedy Delicatessen and Fritz Lang's 1927 silent science-fiction epic, Metropolis. The latter inspired two helium-filled blimps (12' long and 6' in diameter) that appear for one number. "They're painted as if they were warships from World War II, with spirals and jagged shapes in black and white," McPhillips says. "Gerard was into Eastern European architecture and German Expressionism as a kind of aesthetic, so we combined that with other ideas, such as the show opening with Gerard on a gurney. The initial look had been all bed sheets, which became a kabuki idea."

"Gerard's renderings were so complete, they set the cornerstone for everything we did," Rhoads explains. "They really wanted a sense of a cityscape behind them, so we created scenic flats with sculptural carved bits on them."

It's done like a bas-relief, which makes it more interesting to light," McPhillips adds. "With some kind of dimension, even if it's only a matter of inches, you can get much more drama from it. So I concocted this amalgam of Paris rooftops with chimneys, dormer windows, and a church tower."

As clocks appear in much of the band's album artwork and videos, McPhillips designed a one-handed clock that's similar to one he'd seen years ago at a fashion show. "I felt it should continually rotate," he says, "so you know time is passing, but it doesn't necessarily have to tell the time." It's 9' wide by 6' high, with a 3' face and an Art Deco feel. "It has a variable speed motor," Rhoads explains, "so it can move fairly slowly - it would be distracting otherwise."

Atomic also created a big star cloth, as per Way's specs. "It's painterly and dark, with big, blotchy silver stars on a very splashed and grungy sky - it's not very high-tech," McPhillips says. "It was refreshing to work with a band that has such an anti-technology look, because everything's been so focused on video for so long. The biggest word in the whole design process was 'dark.'"

That sentiment could sound daunting for a lighting designer, but Ethan Weber says he and Way were simpatico from their first conversation. "I told him that, since the music is so dynamic, we should find ways to light it differently from the most of the shows out there," he says. "In keeping with that, I put a lot of strobes in the rig, but I use them as accents in the first set - kind of like lightning-strikes bumps. I also built one whole song totally around strobes and uplights on each band member's mic. It starts off kind of soft and slow; the strobes are at about 30% on a steady strobe. They go into bigger strobing and then full-stage, syncopated lightning-strikes bumps, and back to strobing. It definitely looks different."

Another difference, and a true rarity among current rock tours, is that the Black Parade tour features no video at all - not even IMAG. Budget cuts did away with the abstract video images Way originally wanted to tie into the backdrop. "He wanted snow, and maybe some planes flying around, but nothing that would take away from their performance or draw the audience's eyes to it," Weber explains. "I told him I personally don't like LEDs all that much, and he said neither did he. I thought it would be nice to focus attention on lighting the band, instead of having video images."

With a horseshoe truss already in place for the set elements, Weber had to fit his upstage lighting between it and the cityscape. "I wanted a multi-tiered look, so I staggered some trusses in between set pieces and added some vertical spokes to the back truss to create a few more angles, with some moving lights hanging off the bottom and some ACL clusters," he explains. "I also wanted to mix it up a lot. Before moving lights, you got different looks not only by varying your colors and lighting positions but also by using a lot of different instruments, so I went in that direction."

The lighting rig includes 26 Martin MAC 2000 Profiles, 36 Mac 2000 Wash units, 22 Mac 700 Profiles, and 26 Mac 700 Wash units, as well as a fair amount of conventional lights, including PAR cans (many with color changers) and eight ACL clusters, which are split between the floor and the fronts of the vertical trusses. Other pieces of the lighting rig include ten BigLite 4.5 units (distributed in the U.S. by Martin) and 42 Martin Atomic 3K strobes. Wybron color changers are used along with Reel EFX DF-50 hazers and High End Systems F100 smoke machines.

For one of the first act's most emotional songs, "Cancer," Weber uses 5K Fresnels to create a wall of back light, with no front light at all. "I also built a song pretty much around the white PARs and ACLs and made different looks with them," Weber says. "You still can't beat the look of a PAR can. My goal is to someday bring back a 1,200-PAR-can rig, because kids haven't seen it and there's still probably nothing quite as powerful as that look. Overall, it's a pretty dramatic show."

One of the Weber's favorite moments occurs during "Teenagers," which becomes an audience-participation number. "During a guitar solo, Gerard puts a spotlight on the audience - and they love it," Weber says. "I know it's been done before, but he works it in really well with the vocals. I've even had stagehands tell me they think it's great."

Interestingly, the band members aren't used to having spotlights trained on them. "I told them I thought they were important," Weber says. "The fans have spent money and want to see the band. So I light the drummer and keyboard player with lekos, and underlight them with Moles - but everybody else has a spotlight. I don't use them for every song, but they know which ones - so, if they want their faces to be lit, they can walk into their key lights. They were really receptive to that, and were excited about having some direction, especially because the first half is really theatrical."

The lighting crew is comprised of crew chief Travis Robinson, head moving light tech Richard Allison, dimmer tech Brian Kasten, and general lighting tech Wade Wilby. "Upstaging was chosen as the lighting supplier," Weber says. "It's always a pleasure working with [account executive] John Bahnick. It's a decent-sized rig, and there aren't a lot of us, so it's a lot of work. And I put myself in as a working member of the crew because I feel it's all part of the process." Pyrotek Special Effects supplied five double-headed dragons for flame looks, one concussion rack, four turbo-blowers for confetti cues, and one gerb waterfall harness for a silver waterfall look.

Weber trained with Joe Cabrera at A.C.T. Lighting in Los Angeles to learn how to program the tour's grandMA lighting console. "I thought the show was better off on the grandMA, because I wanted a console that has the one big playback button in case I didn't tour with the show," he says. "But, while I'm out there, I have it spread across faders where I can use accents and have bumps on certain songs. It's a fun, dynamic show to run. Especially in the second half, they just come out and go, and it's just great, fast rock and roll.

"For the second half of the show, they asked me to work in a lot of red and white, so I built a few songs around that," Weber continues. "There are a lot of highs and lows but there's a lot of action. The moving lights are working a lot, but I try to pace it, going back to the old days with conventionals, where you would do songs by running the lights at 30% or 50%, because it gave them a different temperature. I've tried to use the moving lights that way as well, to vary the intensities to fit the mood of the song, and pace it so that not every light is on for every song. I feel I've been able to give every song a totally different look. The band loves it. I worked hard on it, and I'm really pleased with the results. They're also some of the nicest people I've ever met, which makes it all really pleasant."

This leg of the parade is scheduled for stops through mid-to-late May, followed by several festivals.