LightSeeker was Resorts World Sentosa's third home-grown production — a roughly 90-minute original space-age fantasy musical at the Festive Grand Theatre, running 22 November 2013 to 23 March 2014. It was produced by Andrea Teo and directed by Michael La Fleur, with songs by Dick Lee. I was the production designer.
A world built from scratch
The story was wholly invented — a villain called "The General" trying to drain the life-force ("The Light") from a forest-goddess, Nova. With no existing reference to lean on, every environment — forest, throne room, the rest — had to be imagined, drawn and built so the audience would believe a place that never existed.
A wall of light
The show was anchored by a 10-by-20-metre LED backdrop carrying about 54 computer-generated environments. Instead of swapping painted flats between scenes, we changed worlds on screen. Weaving filmed sequences with live performers wasn't standard practice yet — we figured a lot of it out as we went.
Keeping the humans in it
The hardest part of designing around that much screen is making sure the people on stage don't get swallowed by it. The set work gave performers a real, tactile world to occupy — platforms, structures, scenic pieces — while the LED carried us light-years away. The two layers had to read as one continuous place, or the whole thing falls apart.
What it was
LightSeeker ran a limited season. Critics liked the spectacle and acrobatics; some wanted more from the characters. Fair enough. As a piece of stagecraft, it taught me a lot about working with screens at scale before that became normal — and a lot of what I now do at much bigger scale started there.
