Steve Paladie is a Las Vegas designer, artist and manager with over 20+ years of professional theatrical and entertainment design experience. He is currently working with Sin City Scenic, a full service theatrical and entertainment fabrication shop in Las Vegas, as Production Manager and Designer. Steve’s design credits go for miles and his corporate design clients including Cirque du Soleil are numerous. His production and stage management credits includes a number of high profile companies such as HBO and Verizon and he’s managed productions and events at every major Las Vegas Strip property. You could say, “he’s got some skills.”
The first time I met Steve Paladie was through, my now, business partner Stephanie Villaluz. She called me late summer in 2007 and asked if I could go to the set construction space and help Steve build the Peter Pan set for Signature Productions. “Sure, why not”, I said. I hadn’t had the chance to build anything for a while and I was itching to get back into the game. A couple of days later I met The Man, The Dude, The Silver Fox...it was “set build love at first sight," because his vision, design and set build technique were very similar to my own way of working and we went straight to work.
Thirteen years later, over the course of our interview with him, the one thing you notice right away is his passion. He is passionate about what he does and he’s proud to be a part of various collaborative efforts to bring entertainment to the masses, especially in this time of crazy we’re all going through. In Episode 3 of the "What's Next?" Series we talked with Steve about a number of areas in the entertainment industry and a couple of interesting comments were voiced:
Let’s not reinvent the entertainment wheel, and
Collaboration.
Focusing on the first for a minute, Steve stated that Hollywood and Broadway are the masters of the creative entertainment world, but, because the world literally had to shut down, no new content is being produced, in either Hollywood or Broadway. So the question then became, “How do we create new content?” The answer is simple, Live Streaming and On Demand theatrical/live performances. The answer is simple, yes, but the doing is difficult. We in the theater world are not used to the two dimensional reality of working in front of a camera, we perform on a three dimensional platform that requires an audience. We, on stage, give the audience the chance to laugh, cry, smile, sing, and it’s this guttural response that gives us the impetus, the power to shift their emotions around as we see fit.
With this in mind, Steve and the team at Sin City Scenic built a stage on the back of a flatbed truck and created a one performer (drag) show, driving around neighborhoods, music blaring, hanging glitter-balls glittering with the different colored moving lights. It gave people in their homes the chance to come out to dance and sing and most of all laugh and smile. The entertainment wheel is still turning, but it’s doing it on a local level. This is where collaboration comes into play and it’s where Live Streaming and On Demand content flexes it’s muscles.
It’s all well and good to say theater companies are going to be performing their show via a Live Streaming service or film a concert or short play in a studio and edit it for On Demand viewing. Theoretically, anyone can do it, but in practice it’s complicated, expensive and difficult. Collaboration is needed. You need to find a large enough studio space that is affordable and can be at your disposal, bring in a lighting designer to maximize the placement of lights, buy/rent/borrow the camera gear and all the other gadgets needed, bring in people to teach you how it all works, work on the content you want filmed and find a group of people to perform that content. All areas where a new approach is needed and I will be blogging about each of these aspects as I tackle these areas for local groups in Las Vegas. So come back for more on ‘how to-s and streaming hacks.’
Collaboration is the key to everything. Pooling resources, contacts, ideas, content and talent is what we know how to do and at the local level we do it well. As terrible as COVID-19 is, it is making us think, stop, and is forcing us to regroup, come together, modernize, and collaborate. Great things are coming and I am truly excited to see what people come up with in the future.
