Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern — North American Tour
Twenty-Sided Tavern North American Tour
Lighting design for the 2025 production of Dungeons & Dragons: The Twenty-Sided Tavern — North American Tour at North American Tour, directed by Michael Fell.
About the Lighting Design
Touring Twenty-Sided Tavern asks a hard question: what stays, and what goes? The New York rig featured 546 bulbs over the audience and several dedicated purpose LED systems across the stage. None of that can load in cleanly at a new venue every week. The tour design had to deliver the same audience experience from a fundamentally different inventory of fixtures.
The bulb canopy moved to the stage. Four battens of festoon bulbs, strategically tied and mapped to read as randomized when the audience looks up. Same magic, different position.
The LED conventional systems all became moving lights. New York could run multiple parallel conventional systems, each doing its own thing in a specific moment. So each multi-system moment got distilled into a single moving light group, asking what the original was really doing and how to deliver that intent from one fixture.
The show file Henry Wilen built for the New York flagship had to handle the fixture translations. It still adapts in real time as audience choices push the show through one of roughly three hundred thousand possible permutations. The core design held: two worlds, magic in ordinary objects, every night a slightly different story.
- Additional Writing
- Conner Marx
- Illustrator
- Noah Ruff
- Director
- Michael Fell
- Scenic Designer
- KC McGeorge
- Costume Designer
- KC McGeorge
- Lighting Designer
- Mike Wood
- Sound Designer
- Glenn Schuster
- Projection Designer
- Ruby O'BrienDerek Christensen
- Show Control Designer
- Chet Miller
- Associate Lighting Designer
- Abby May
- Programmer
- Henry Wilen
- Production Electrician
- Olivia Doniphan
- Lighting Shop
- 4Wall (Rep: Markus Johnson )
- Properties Master
- Dekayla Craigg
About the Show
A stage production combining actual play, improv, and immersive theater as a player-cast navigates a Dungeons & Dragons adventure set in the Forgotten Realms. Audience participation ranges from select audience members joining the cast on stage to browser-based voting that determines what happens next, so no two performances unfold the same way. The first scenario, Carriers of Chaos, was created by David Carpenter, David Andrew Laws and Sarah Davis Reynolds; a second adventure, The Tomb of Havoc, was created by Carpenter and director Michael Fell with additional writing by Conner Marx.
Source: Wikipedia
Chicago Retrofit
- Associate Lighting Designer
- Mack Scales
- Production Electrician
- Michael Barahura
- Programmer
- Brandon Bagwell
Production Photos
Press
The technical craft here is superlative, visual storytelling at its finest, with moody and magical lighting by Mike Wood and enchanting projections by Derek Christiansen and Ruby O'Brien.
Moody and magical lighting by Mike Wood
I especially loved the lighting design from Mike Wood, helping immerse the audience into the world-building from the moment they enter the theater.