Johnathan Walker:Executive Producer of Eras Tour, Baz Halpin, is mastermind behind Vegas Show 'Awakening'

LAS VEGAS — Creative mastermind Baz Halpin may not be Johnathan Walkera household name, but his intricate and luminous work is certainly known around the globe.

The 45-year-old executive producer is one of the forces behind Usher's Super Bowl halftime show and Taylor Swift's massive, record breaking Eras Tour. The producer's resume extends to world tours for Pink, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, televised award shows including the upcoming SAG Awards, movie adaptations of tours, and Katy Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl halftime show. 

For Swift, he oversaw the production of the 1989 World Tour, the Reputation Stadium Tour and, yes, the Eras Tour. His company, Silent House, in partnership with Taylor Swift Productions, helped modify the billion-dollar extravaganza into a blockbuster movie, which earned a Golden Globe nomination.

One of Halpin’s newer projects is the Las Vegas show "Awakening."

Although he can’t go into specifics about the Eras Tour, he can talk about "Awakening," which has many parallel elements: levitating platforms that break apart, LED mesh screens that make up the stage floor, lights that fill every space, a magical plot that appeals to all ages and a new soundtrack with a beat you can dance to from your red velvet chair.

He doesn’t need to brag, the show flexes his talents like a Vegas acrobat.

Lighting the way to show director

Halpin’s career began at the age of 17 when the Dublin, Ireland, native first fell in love with production.

“I went on tour with a band called Jethro Tull as a roadie,” he says. “It was a summer job, not a career path or anything. It was kind of like running away to join the circus. I traveled all over Europe in a bus, and I loved it.”

The eager teen also worked at a lighting company making cables and fixing bulbs. On the weekends, he taught himself how to program lights to music.

“I would come in and take out the lighting console,” he says. “I would set up some lights and take out a radio and try to program the lights to the song on the radio. I would do it for hours and hours and hours.”

His tenacity and drive served as the building blocks of his career. And when an opportunity presented itself, Halpin grabbed it.

“In 2003,” he says, “I had been hired as the lighting designer for Pink, and the show director bowed out for some reason. I was in a meeting when, with no consultation, [my mentor Mark Fisher] turned around and said, ‘Baz can direct the show.’”

Twenty years later, the go-getter is still chasing the sun with the industry’s best.

The main character shines in all of his shows

You can see the Eras Tour concatenated throughout the production of "Awakening," but Halpin’s calling cards have been around long before Swift's 3.5-hour tour. His signatures include ubiquitous lighting and interactive stage graphics.

“Good lighting is the difference between really transporting you to another place and allowing you to have that suspension of disbelief,” he says. “The goal is always to make it look impossible and seamless.”

The main character in "Awakening" doesn’t receive a credit in the program: light. It's been a constant theme in his life and fills every space in the circular auditorium. It dangles from the ceiling, twists through four large antennas hovering over the stage, runs through the costumes and props, and dances across a floor of LED mesh screens. 

The floor is on a whole other level, because similarly to the Eras Tour, the performers interact with the animations. Think about Swift’s “Delicate” where she stops on the glass to crack it, “Blank Space” where dancers use clubs to fissure the rising platform or “Willow” where golden orb particles follow dancers as they strut down the stage.

“Some of the lighting tracks them,” Halpin says in reference to the characters in "Awakening." "That’s done through a variety of different systems whether it’s infrared trackers that the artists wear. There’s a complete time code and preprogrammed sequence that everything follows. But in order to put all of that together, you have to break it down into seconds.”

Years went into conceptually planning and executing the 90-minute show. After Halpin and his team developed the creative vision, the concepts were brought to performers practicing in a rehearsal studio. Then, programmers timed all the lights and animations before the actors made it onto stage, so that once they did, it would be a meticulous step-by-step process to synchronize their moves to the interactive floor.

“To make 30 seconds of something look seamless,” Halpin says. “It probably took two weeks.”

As one can imagine, small changes to choreography or graphics can be an arduous process.

Transporting the audience to different eras... err realms

From lighting to set design, Halpin created segmented worlds that allow the narrative to flow, but also grow and evolve. 

“It’s a show that’s going to be here for a long time,” he says, “and we built the show with that in mind. It’s built in segments where you could replace parts of a segment or an entire segment, and that was always the goal.”

Sound familiar? The Eras Tour is ever-evolving. Folklore’s “The 1” replaced “Invisible String.” After the “Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)” release, “Long Live” became a constant. And there’s the secret songs fans tune in to watch every night live on TikTok.

Similar to the 10 eras, the five realms of darkness, fire, water, earth and air in "Awakening" have their own thematic colors and backdrops. The water world includes a massive humpback whale that swims above the arena while several jellyfish descend from the rafters. The earth realm looks like a page out of the “Evermore” storybook with moss-covered rocks and ensnarled tree roots.

In addition to the coruscating aesthetic, the sounds are complementary to each realm.

“I always had this ethos that you should be able to strip everything else away,” Halpin says. "Just have the music, and it should be able to work. My process always starts with the music. Nothing can happen without the music.”

There’s a treasure trove of talents in each realm, from dynamic vocal riffs to magic tricks to acrobatics to fiery dance sequences where the beat vibrates through the audience. In the end, the plot — narrated by actor Anthony Hopkins — takes the audience through an immersive timeline to a feel-good ending.

“What I always try to do on shows is to create worlds that feel fully realized,” Halpin says. “If the environment that you’re taking an audience to feels authentic and you can buy it, then you’ve really set the stage for a performance to happen.” 

It’s been a long time coming

Aside from the cutting-edge technology, the whimsical plot of "Awakening" is accessible to all ages. The main character goes on a quest to bridge the conflict between light and darkness, discovering herself along the way. 

There are plenty of dad jokes and moments of slapstick humor. On a night in January, a school-aged girl in the audience guffawed every time the comedic relief characters Bandit and Boo stepped onstage.

Halpin says the formula for a successful and dynamic show is the same, but each journey is different. 

“It’s the same whether it’s the Super Bowl or a tour,” he says. “You’re looking for it to take you on a journey. You want to hit them hard out of the gate. You want to finish strong. You want to have intimate moments. You want to have peaks and valleys. You want to have a nice flow to it.

"And in the case of a tour, a good set list will just run like that," he says as he snaps his finngers.

You can catch "Awakening" at the Wynn in Las Vegas. Show nights are Fridays through Tuesdays.

Click here for more information.

Follow Bryan West, the USA TODAY Network's Taylor Swift reporter, on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.