PRD-2026-055 · Tour Feature · p.27
Andrew Jackson Hall — three nights, four dimmer circuits, one MA3 swap.
For the TPAC Mainstage Spring Repertory on 2–4 May 2026, three productions across three consecutive nights in Andrew Jackson Hall: The Crucible, Sweeney Todd, and a one-night dance program from Nashville Ballet. House-panel audit, four dimmer-circuit reroute, MA3 console rack swap, and a follow-spot circuit reborn. No recordable incidents; AHJ sign-off on the first walk.
TPAC’s Andrew Jackson Hall is a 2,472-seat proscenium house with a fly tower, an apron, and a 100-foot grid above the deck. It’s been our most-frequent venue for theater repertory work since 2018; this Spring Repertory was our seventeenth show in the hall. The work is unglamorous: a house-panel audit, a dimmer reroute the touring rep needed for its specific cue list, and a console-rack swap because the production’s MA3 desk has a hard-wired PSU that draws differently than the venue’s standard. Three nights, three productions, no truss rigging on our part — TPAC house staff hangs the rep’s touring grid the day before our load-in.
Why a panel audit
The venue’s lighting service is a 600 A 3-phase 208/120 Y panel feeding the dimmer racks (ETC Sensor3 48-channel, two banks per side, two more in the under-stage room). The repertory’s touring designer (Geneva Whittaker, working out of New York) had built a cue list that demanded 28 simultaneous full-channel hits during a specific scene change in Sweeney Todd — a draw that TPAC’s house electrician (Devereaux Mathers, 19 years on the deck) wanted us to verify against the panel’s actual capacity before committing.
We pulled the panel labels, reviewed the dimmer rack circuit assignments, and ran the load arithmetic against the connected design: 28 channels × ~3.4 A per channel (the touring rep’s fixture pack averages 410 W per channel at full intensity) = 95.2 A on a single phase. Spread across three phases, that’s 32 A per phase, well inside the panel’s 200 A per-phase rating. The math worked. The problem was that the existing dimmer-circuit assignments had thirteen of the 28 channels landing on Phase A, with only five on B and ten on C — a 6.4× imbalance under the heaviest cue. We rerouted four dimmer circuits at the house panel to redistribute: four circuits moved from Phase A to Phase B, restoring approximate balance under the cue.
The reroute, four circuits
The reroute happened on 02 May at 14:30 CDT, before doors. We worked the panel cold; Devereaux signed the lockout-tagout cycle and stayed in the room throughout. PPE was Category 2 (we measured the panel’s arc-flash incident energy at 4.8 cal/cm² per the venue’s 2024 study). Each circuit move involved unbinding the existing termination, reterminating the conductor at the new breaker landing, updating the panel directory card, and Megger-testing the rerouted circuit feeder back to the dimmer rack before re-energizing.
Total reroute time: 78 minutes, including LOTO, PPE on, circuit relocation, Megger, label updates, and PPE off. Devereaux signed the panel directory update. We took photographs of the panel before, mid, and after — TPAC keeps the panel directory in a binder at the load dock, and the photographs go into the venue’s next audit cycle.
The MA3 rack swap
The touring rep brought an MA Lighting grandMA3 light console as primary and a CRV (compact rack-mount visualizer) as backup. The MA3 light has a hard-wired PSU expecting 100–240 V AC at 50–60 Hz, with a peak draw of 5.7 A at 120 V. The CRV is rack-mounted with an internal redundant PSU drawing 3.2 A. Together the rack pulls a maximum of 8.9 A — easily inside a 20 A circuit.
TPAC’s house-side console pickup at FOH is a 30 A NEMA L5-30 receptacle on a UPS-fed branch circuit. The rep’s rack was wired to a 20 A NEMA L5-20 plug. We could have used an adapter; we built a custom 30 A → 20 A pigtail cable in the bay during advance, with a 20 A integral GFCI module inline, and labeled it BSP-055-CON-FOH. The pigtail terminates in a NEMA L5-20R outlet on the rack side and the NEMA L5-30P plug on the house side; the GFCI module sits in a recessed pocket of the cable, accessible for reset.
The follow-spot reborn
Andrew Jackson Hall has two follow-spot booths in the upper gallery, both with NEMA L5-20 receptacles. The west booth’s receptacle was reading open ground when Devereaux tested it on his April house audit; we reterminated it at the gallery on 02 May before the first show. The cable junction box was original to the venue’s 1980 construction, with crumbling mineral-fiber insulation around the conduit — Devereaux had been waiting for a season-end rebuild to take it down. We did it on the spot in 22 minutes, with PPE on, with Devereaux signing.
Cue log, by night
Three nights, three cue lists.
| Night | Production | Cue count | Power-relevant cues | Issues |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 02 May | The Crucible | 86 cues | 3 (dim/up/blackout) | none |
| 03 May | Sweeney Todd | 142 cues | 7 (incl. the 28-channel hit) | none — reroute held |
| 04 May | Nashville Ballet · Spring Mix | 97 cues | 4 | none |
Credit card
- Productions The Crucible · Sweeney Todd · Spring Mix
- Venue Andrew Jackson Hall · TPAC · 505 Deaderick St., Nashville
- Lighting designer (rep) Geneva Whittaker
- House electrician Devereaux Mathers (TPAC)
- Lead — Briley R. Driskill (ETCP EE-15022)
- Crew E. Singh-Hartley · H. Polites
- Console MA Lighting grandMA3 light + CRV
- Dimmers ETC Sensor3 (4 banks)
- AHJ Metro Codes & Building Safety · Insp. M. Castile
References & further reading
- Tennessee Performing Arts Center — venue spec
- Nashville Ballet
- NFPA 70 — NEC Article 520 (Theaters)
- NFPA 70E — Electrical Safety in the Workplace
- ETC Sensor3 — dimmer rack
- MA Lighting grandMA3 light
- ESTA — ANSI E1.19 Class A power equipment
- ETCP — Entertainment Technician Certification Program
- USITT — recommended practices for theater electrical
- Andrew Jackson Hall — Wikipedia