Spectrama Lighting and Production, the company run by thruple Christopher Taber, Rusty Warning, and Evan Rose, has elevated our local nightlife scene with world-class production skills that wow audiences and pack dancefloors. Their work was a factor in their home bar, Rehab St. Louis, being voted “Best Gay Bar” by Riverfront Times readers during the poll’s final year in 2023.
Summer 2025 issue of Out in STL
I sat down with the guys to talk about their long journey to the pinnacle of St. Louis nightlife. For DJ Taber, music and entertaining is in his blood. “My Dad started a rock bank in the early 70s. They were incredibly popular in all the Catholic dance halls around Jefferson City. Dad even played at his own wedding,” Taber says.
Complex Circumstances
Christopher Taber at Trops in 2022. Courtesy of Christopher Taber.
Taber moved to St. Louis from Jefferson City in 1998. “I’d already made my way into most of the circuit bars at least once, and Complex was by far my favorite,” he says.
The Complex was also a regular spot for Rusty Warning. “During the Summer of 1999, Chris and I were bar buddies at the Complex, back when young queer folx had a circuit of places they would visit throughout the evening,” Warning said. “We would often start out at The Loading Zone, move on to The Complex, and if you were still wanting to stay out after hours, would head across the river to Faces. I remember watching Chris play sand volleyball outside at the Complex, and I eventually hit it off with both Chris and his roommate, and we would see each other out on Saturday nights. Fast forward to October 1999, and both Chris and I had recently ended the relationships we were in at the time. I was out at the Loading Zone on a random Wednesday night with my friend Jason and commented to him that I wanted to ask Chris out the next time I saw him. As luck would have it, Chris walked through the front door a few minutes later, and my friend Jason pushed me off my bar stool and moved it away so I would go talk to him. That was almost 26 years ago, and we’ve been together ever since.”
Mid-Missouri Maneuvers
The pair moved to Jefferson City in late 2000 to help raise Taber’s 8-year-old brother, after Taber’s father passed away. “Rusty and I worked our way into the scene in Jefferson City and the Lake of the Ozarks,” Taber recalls. “I joined a band and Rusty became our lighting director shortly thereafter. Rusty transferred that energy into a role as lighting director at the Miller Performing Arts Center where he eventually became the Center Director.”
“I started working at Miller in early 2006 as the assistant to the facility manager, and was promoted to facility manager about a year and a half later,” Warning says. “My job was to facilitate anything that the users of the facility needed, using the often limited resources I had. Though my specialty was lighting, I also had to be proficient in sound, stagecraft, and crowd management, among myriad other responsibilities to keep the facility running successfully. I was often the first person there to unlock the doors in the morning and the last person there to lock the doors at night. No two days were ever the same.”
In 2015, the couple moved back to St. Louis, lining up gigs at Meyer’s Grove and Handlebar. “We returned to St. Louis in April 2015, after visiting nearly weekly throughout 2014 to be with our new friends Wes Wagman, Desire Declyne and the owner of Meyers Grove, Dan Stoner. We felt at home at Meyer’s every time we visited, and figured we may as well save ourselves the five-hour round trip every week and just move to St. Louis,” Taber says. “After the move, my focus moved back to photography, and I made my way through the various LGBTQIA venues, trying to capture the performers in action. Immediately, I noticed that most of the time these amazing entertainers were barely lit, if at all, and found myself buying mobile light units to augment the stage lighting.”
A New Life Takes Flight
Evan Rose, center, in 2014. Courtesy of Christopher Taber.
Evan Rose had moved to St. Louis from Florida in 2014 to help open a Flying Trapeze School for Circus Harmony. “In June of 2015, I met a couple of people that would change my mind about going back home,” Rose says. “ I wanted to be involved in the Pride festivities any way I could, and that’s when I met a lot of people in the community. I attended a fundraising event at Meyer’s Grove one night, and Christopher Taber was the guest bartender. I got to know both him and Rusty that summer, and we quickly became close. We will celebrate our 10 years together this coming August! Throughout the process of creating our production company, I would involve myself as much as I could. With Chris being the sound specialist and DJ, and Rusty the light artist, I became a sort of jack of all trades to help with any gig we had on the books. From stage managing to screen graphics, even still performing fire spinning or aerial acrobatics from time to time!”
The guys realized they needed an official name for their company. “Entertainers were giving us their own names, like ‘Ginger Productions’ or ‘The Tabers,’” Warning says, “but those names weren’t how we wanted to present ourselves. I’m a big fan of mid-century modern, and one day Chris and I were workshopping some different names, and he came up with “Spectrama.” It’s retro sounding and it incorporates the word spectrum, implying not only the color saturation of my lighting but also is a nod to our queerness.
Rusty Warning, Christopher Taber and Evan Rose in the 2019 St. Louis Pride Parade. Courtesy of Christopher Taber.
In 2017, Prismatic Events asked the trio to do the lighting for their shows at HandleBar. The pair went to Guitar Center and invested $800 in lighting. “We bought our first set of can lights and got to work,” Taber says. “We built up quickly, learning what worked best and scouting other outfits throughout the city for best practices. We moved with Prismatic Events across the street about a year later and started up shop there. Eventually, we’d built a production space that we were genuinely proud of and we started branching out again. My photography was going great and we spent several weekends hanging our cans at Rehab for better shots, and Chasity Valentino took notice.”
Initially, Rehab owner Chad Fox was hesitant about Spectrama setting up their lights at his bar. “It wasn’t anything particularly doubtful about us on Chad’s part; he just didn’t know us yet,” Warning says, “and I remember he specifically told me that he didn’t like the idea of people providing him services and not getting paid for it. Chad doesn’t like feeling beholden to people he doesn’t really know, and understandably so. I asked him to let us audition what we do for a few gigs free of charge, and then we can review any further arrangements together. Chad was cool with that.”
A couple of weeks later, Chad Fox walked over to the show at Trops and asked Taber and Warning what they thought of coming over to Rehab to do production. “I’d been itching to get back into DJing for years,” Taber says. “Shortly afterward, Covid took hold and we found ourselves without any space to work in. We regrouped with the bar owners over the next year and doubled our efforts to plus up all of our productions so we were ready to hit the ground as the restrictions lifted. From then we’ve constantly built to make our creations as immersive and inviting as possible.”
Today, you can find Spectrama packing dancefloors from Rehab to Bar:PM, and working events from Pridefest to Art of Paws to the World Naked Bike Ride. I asked the team for their thoughts on raising the bar for St. Louis nightlife.
“I really hope we have, for the betterment of everyone,” says Warning. “It’s not just St. Louis—we’ve noticed that drag performers in a lot of major metros suffer from inadequate presentation, particularly with lighting. I approach my craft like I would at a theater—the audience is there to see the performer, and I design and operate my lighting with that in mind first. Performers all over the St. Louis metro and from out of town now come up to us with the highest of compliments regarding our production quality, and that really drives me to excel first and foremost.” Taber adds, “I would like to think so. There are generations that have poured their heart and soul into the community before us and we see it going on around us today. Being a part of it brings me life and purpose.”
