One Lighting System To Support It All: Concerts, Comedy And Beyond

When The Brook Casino in Seabrook, New Hampshire, set out to expand its live entertainment offerings with a new outdoor venue, it turned to a familiar partner. Port Lighting Systems, which previously designed the lighting for The Brook’s Seasons Showroom indoor venue, led the lighting design and integration for the casino’s new Secret Garden, a seasonal outdoor performance space that opened this spring.

Designed to host concerts, comedy and a wide range of special events from spring through early fall, an adaptable Elation lighting system offers the creative flexibility to ensure every show looks its best, while its weather-ready design keeps productions running regardless of the forecast.

The setup includes Rebel Series profile and wash units, Proteus Radius beam fixtures, SŌL Series strobe/blinders, and Six+ PARs — an ideal combination for delivering reliable, high-impact visuals in New England’s famously unpredictable climate.

Bringing Secret Garden to Life
Led by Ron Kuszmar, VP of Architectural & Theatrical Lighting at Port Lighting, the design team developed a flexible house rig capable of supporting everything from touring music acts to community events.

“The Brook just keeps expanding and growing,” said Kuszmar, who notes that Port Lighting has done a lot of work with them in the past. “When they first came to us for this project, the vision called for a permanent structure, and together we landed on a seasonal venue as the smarter fit for the site and the opening timeline. We worked with them to rethink the approach, connected them with the right partners, and helped turn the concept into a venue that could be built in time for the season.”

Port Lighting’s role became much more than providing lighting—they partnered with the venue to help guide the entire project forward. They helped coordinate key project partners, including staging specialist United Staging, which supplied the tent and truss structure that supports the lighting system. The result is a seasonal venue that can be dismantled after the fall season and reinstalled the following year.

A Fast-Track Design Challenge
The compressed schedule proved to be one of the project's biggest challenges. Working toward an ambitious spring opening date, Port Lighting had roughly four weeks to design, source, install, program, and commission the entire lighting system.

Kuszmar worked closely with Jon Schwille at Elation rep Peter E. Schmitt Co. and Ross Blitz at Elation to identify the best fixtures for the design based on what was available within the project’s timeline. “With such a short schedule, availability was key,” Kuszmar said. “Elation had the right fixtures ready to go, which let us keep the design ambitious without compromising the opening date.”

A Versatile House Rig
The installation includes 20 Rebel Wash 12 and 18 Rebel Profile LED moving heads, providing the foundation for the stage lighting system. “The Rebel Series offered an excellent balance of capability, value, and output, allowing us to build a fairly sizeable rig that gives the venue a lot of flexibility,” said Kuszmar, adding that the choice of Rebel was an easy choice for a venue of that size. “It’s not a huge venue, so we didn’t need super high-power arena fixtures. Rebel was a perfect fit for the space.”

Twenty Proteus Radius beam fixtures add dramatic aerial effects and visual impact. Evaluated carefully by the Port Lighting team, especially given initial questions about how the tight beam would perform without a zoom function, the Proteus Radius quickly proved to be the right choice for the application, delivering the impact and versatility the design required.

The Proteus Radius uses a 100W laser-pumped phosphor light engine to project a narrow, ultra-intense 0.9˚ beam. “The fixture is just so clean,” said Kuszmar. “It has such an incredible output that it just blows right through everything. There’s enough in there with the prism and other effects that if we need to widen out the beam for something, we can absolutely do that. It’s quite the impact when we have so many of them.”

Four SŌL IV Blinders serve double duty as audience color-changing blinders during performances and as crowd lighting after events to help the audience out of the venue. Twenty-four Six+ PAR L fixtures line the stage perimeter, providing side light and illumination for smaller productions that require simpler stage looks. They also double as work lights at the end of the night when the stage needs to be cleared.  

“It’s a multifunctional rig, and we wanted every fixture to serve multiple purposes,” Kuszmar said. “The goal was to create a rig that could support concerts one night, comedy the next, and other events after that without needing to reinvent the system each time.”

In addition to designing and installing the lighting system, Port Lighting developed an easy-to-use console layout for venue staff and continues to provide a master electrician and lighting designer/operator for most performances.

Exceeding Expectations
With more than 40 years of experience from its Seabrook, NH, headquarters, Port Lighting delivers creative, technically driven solutions for event production, architectural and theatrical lighting, controls, rigging, rentals, and service. “There were a lot of people internally in our team who had a hand in making this project happen,” Kuszmar states. “This project came out great thanks to the collaboration between our team, The Brook, United Staging, and Elation.”

Despite the demanding schedule, the finished system has exceeded expectations, with the first two acts to perform under the new rig reportedly blown away. “The response has been outstanding, and the venue loves it,” Kuszmar shared. “In fact, one of the employees at the venue told me it was much more professional than they expected, especially considering how fast-tracked the whole process was. The fact that The Brook put that kind of investment into a system like this shows how committed they are to creating a feature venue for the area.”

About Elation
At Elation, we collaborate with leading professionals in the lighting industry to help bring extraordinary experiences to life. As a designer and manufacturer of a wide range of high-performance entertainment lighting products, we’re proud to be a trusted partner to top lighting professionals and production/rental houses around the world. Our commitment to quality, innovation, and creative solutions has made us a go-to resource in the industry. We also offer an advanced line of lighting control products through Obsidian Control Systems, and a full range of dependable specialty effects called Magmatic. Elation serves clients worldwide through offices in Los Angeles, Mexico City, Canada, and the Netherlands. We invite you to take a closer look at elationlighting.com

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