This past weekend, I wrapped up production on my first theatrical adventure ever: a 6-show / two-weekend run of “Lucky Stiff,” put on by Moonbox Productions and performed at the Somerville Theater in Somerville, MA. The show is something of a musical combination of “Weekend at Bernie’s” and “Brewster’s Millions,” whereby a hapless shoe salesman from England is bequeathed a $6 million fortune from a dead uncle he’s never met on the condition that he take his uncle’s corpse on a trip to Monte Carlo for one last round of gambling and womanizing. Should he fail to meet all of the requirements set forth in the will, the money will be awarded to a Brooklyn dog shelter. Love, intrigue, and hilarity ensue.
My role in this production was as Sound Designer and FOH Engineer. I was assisted by System Tech/A2 Brian McCoy from Myrna Johnston Audio, who provided the PA system. The rig was (7) Meyer M’elodie cabinets over (2) Meyer 600HP subs per side with a couple of Meyer Minas as center fills.
Same system in the same room, for a different show.
The rig sounded great. The Somerville Theater can hold about 700-900 people, depending on the configuration and this system was spec’d to cover a packed house. Our shows wound up running 10-15% capacity, so we had more than enough headroom. Interestingly enough, the subs were used more for ballast and elevation of the top cabinets than they were for actually providing low end. It’s not possible to fly speakers in this theater, so everything has to be ground-stacked. The curvature required to cover the lower seating area with a ground-stacked line array results in some precarious weight distribution – those speaker stacks were very top heavy and front heavy even with a couple of giant subs bolted to the bottom.
I had never used a digital console in a live show before, and I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to grab certain controls fast enough if things got hairy. This could have been an issue with other consoles I’ve tried out in showrooms and product demos *couch*LS9*cough*, but the SC48 was great.
The Dan Cave.
But there was a little more to the show than fancy toys. In theater, the “designer” (either lighting or audio) is the person who develops the aesthetics and the cues and specs the system, but is not necessarily the person who actually operates the console during the show. I did both and, in fact, the “design” side of this show was rather minimal. There were 1-2 dozen sound effects cues that were all rather simple and straightforward. The show is a campy farce and in my opinion, that aesthetic was best served by sound cues that were simple, straightforward, and relatively familiar. The bulk of my work was actually people-wrangling and engineering the show. I was responsible for interfacing between the audio equipment providers and the eager, yet audio-inexperienced folks at the theater company. This included not just the producer (who pays for everything), but also the director and (because the system was stacked on the stage) the set designer. It SHOULD have also included the lighting designer, but that didn’t occur to me at the time (sorry Jeff!).
Engineering the show was relatively painless. Not having worked in theater before, I hadn’t developed a preferred workflow, so I had to learn as I went along. My initial thought was to ride the vocal faders during the show, but one rehearsal was enough to convince me of what a bad idea that was, so I took the time to write out and program into the SC48 all of the mix cues for the entire show. “World of difference” would be an understatement. Beyond the technical side of engineering, the talent was really, really good. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a sound guy and you know what it’s like to have to deal with lousy talent or crappy source material. This was neither. These guys showed up and sang their asses off, and I just made them louder (and some of them didn’t even need that). The pit band was fantastic. I barely had them in the house at all, because they just mixed themselves for the entire show. Oh if only every band could do that.
Everybody on the show was extremely talented and wonderful to work with. I feel really spoiled, because for my first theater gig I got good talent, great people, a good budget, a killer system, an overqualified A2, a nice room, 
and a paycheck. None of these are ever guaranteed on a show and many are rather hard to come by.
As of about an hour ago, I’ve signed on to work with this same theater company for their upcoming production of “Floyd Collins,” which is a musical about a guy who gets trapped in a cave and dies. Folk music, surround sound, and copious slapback delay FTW!
I have to say, it sounded really good.
While I may not have been in the most advantageous position to get a good visual on the stage, from what I could tell, the lighting wasn’t too shabby either.