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Broadway musical “Maybe Happy Ending” uses Ayrton Diablo S fixtures in workhorse lighting role

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. “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 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 says. “The house electrician Justin Freeman recommended I look at Diablos.”

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. 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 downlight certain places on stage”, remarks Stanton.

As for the lighting design, he furthers: “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 storytelling 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. “I specify MDG atmospherics for every project that I can”, says Stanton. “The CO2-based haze is much smoother and finer than other types of atmosphere. 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.

(Photos: Matt Murphy)

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