Why can't I make a narrow beam with a SpotLight?

Making a CodePen that would recreate the conditions is actually quite hard and I’m pretty sure that the CodePen would work fine. I’ve seen several of them and none of them have any indication of the problem I’m having.

Regarding using a new release, my code uses BoxGeometry a lot and I’m trying to make a deadline. Trying to do an upgrade now would mean I’d have two problems instead of just this one. After the deadline I can try that.

For what it’s worth, here the code for constructing the light. Nothing special I think?

// Create a mini-menu for this type of light.
retLightObj = new THREE.SpotLight(color, intensity, distance, angle, penumbra, decay);

I think it’s pretty safe to say this is due to really strange interacton between various parts of my code. I’m hoping someone has some kind of a hunch that would lead me to a solution. If not, I will to disable some really cool featured I wanted to show before the deadline and they are features I really wanted to demonstrate.