Spain – With “Oliver Twist, the Musical,” one of the season’s major family productions, it is currently celebrating its premiere at the historic Teatro La Latina in Madrid. The production is by AMR Produce, the creative team that has already achieved great success with the multi-award-winning musical “The Chorus.” For Oliver Twist, the team once again sought to create a close relationship between the music, the set design, and the lighting. Renowned Spanish lighting designer Juanjo Llorens is once again in charge of the visual realization of the project and has once again turned to Cameo lighting solutions for his new project.
Light as an emotional storyteller
For Juanjo Llorens, the lighting design for Oliver Twist is much more than simply illuminating the stage action. Instead, he sees light as a narrative resource that visualizes the inner turmoil and vulnerability of the characters. “The vision for the lighting design was to use colors, unusual angles, and strong shadows to create a haunting atmosphere that reflected the abandonment and sadness of street children,” explains Juanjo Llorens. At the same time, the light had to give the young protagonists space to reveal their innocence and hope: a deliberate tension between darkness and humanity.
David Pizarro’s set design, with its staircases, arches, and passageways, provides the ideal backdrop for this. The light is deliberately placed outside the set, emerging from niches or illuminating geometric shapes on the stage, always serving the story.
Versatile Lighting
For the visual realization, Juanjo Llorens relies on a carefully selected lighting setup using Cameo’s OPUS and OTOS series. He places the OTOS W3 IP65 wash moving head directly into the set: under staircases, in galleries, or narrow corridors. “Thanks to their compact size, controllable light output, and zoom, the OTOS W3s give me confidence in confined spaces where heat buildup and light angles would otherwise quickly become a problem.” With just a few adjustments, both warm and inviting backlighting and harsh, aggressive accents can be achieved—a key stylistic device for staging.
The OPUS SP5 focus and profile moving heads are primarily used for atmospheric ambient lighting and structural effects. “They are reliable and give me the confidence to quickly and safely create specific combinations,” confirms Juanjo Llorens. Time and again, the OPUS SP5 with soft-focus gobo and continuous application is used to create deliberately “dirty” and refracted light images that fit the dark world of Oliver Twist.
With the even more powerful OPUS SP5+ focus and profile moving heads, Juanjo Llorens has added even more lumen output and precision to the setup. In the hands of the lighting designer, they create geometric patterns, like windows or grids, and lend scenes symbolic depth. At the same time, they allow for seamless transitions between individual lighting scenes without creating visual clutter.
Proven collaboration
Juanjo Llorens previously worked successfully with Cameo on The Chorus at the Teatro La Latina, at that time using OPUS SP5 and EVOS W3 fixtures—a production that won several MET Musical Awards for its lighting design, among other accolades. Therefore, for the experienced designer, the decision to once again rely on Cameo for Oliver Twist was a logical one: “I know the brand and I know how reliable the lights are. In terms of production costs, Cameo allows me to realize my entire visual world without having to make compromises.”
