Inspired by open-air lake stages and bandshells
Lakeside Stage
The real thing: stages on the water
Lakeside Stage borrows from the great open-air stages on water. The most famous is the floating stage of the Bregenz Festival on Lake Constance in Austria: the audience sits in a large stand on the shore and watches opera on a stage built out over the lake. The festival began in 1946, on barges moored in the harbour.
The shell over a stage is not just decoration. A curved bandshell reflects sound out towards the audience, as the shell of the Hollywood Bowl does for crowds in Los Angeles.
The lawn is the other half of the experience: picnic blankets, folding chairs, the sun going down. It is cheap to run and lovely in good weather, and that is the risk. Open-air venues live by the forecast. Bregenz can move a performance into its indoor festival hall when the weather turns, but that hall holds only part of the lakeside audience.
In Big Night Tycoon
3,000 seats
Tier 2
A summer stage floating in a cove of Lake Silverwater, with a shell over the water, a lawn for 3,000 picnickers sloping down to the shore, a beach, a boathouse and pines all round. Sunshine fills the lawn, and nowhere does rain hurt more.
