A World-Class Performing Arts Venue in Las Vegas
The mere mention of the words “Las Vegas show” usually conjures up a few images. Yet what probably doesn’t come to mind is a stand-alone, performing arts center serving as a home to the Las Vegas Philharmonic and the Nevada Ballet Theatre, a Broadway touring house, classical music venue, jazz speakeasy and rock or country roadhouse. The new Smith Center for the Performing Arts aims to change all that, and to place Las Vegas alongside Vienna, Paris and New York as a city with a world-class performing arts center built for the ages.
The intent was to “create a building that was timeless and would look appropriate the day it opened, 50 years from the day it opened, 200 years from the day it opened; one that was not a subject of fashion and that really held its own and was reflective of Las Vegas,” says architect David Schwarz.
The result is a clean, muscular building with a distinctly Art-Deco feel, buff limestone walls and a 16-story bell-tower topped with a stainless steel crown that houses a fully-functional four-octave carillon.
The Smith Center consists of two different buildings: Reynolds Hall, a European-style opera house and the Boman Pavilion, which houses Troesh Studio Theater (a 250-seat black-box theatre) and the Cabaret Jazz space, a 258-seat jazz performance space.
The mandate behind Reynolds Hall was to build a flexible, 2,050-seat multi-purpose hall that could present anything from the Las Vegas Philharmonic and other orchestras to the best in contemporary amplified music and touring Broadway productions.
Even with all those seats, though, the farthest seat in the house is only 128 feet from the plaster line. This was accomplished by stacking the five seating levels and having the upper seats encircle the main floor seating and reach towards the stage.
Sonic Challenges
But as beautiful as the space is, it would be worthless if the sound was horrible. A major threat came from a Union Pacific train line that runs less than 200 meters from the Smith Center. This posed two threats: airborne noise from the diesel engines and the train horns, and ground-borne vibrations.
After performing an extensive noise and vibration study to see how the trains would affect the site, Paul Scarbrough, of acoustic consulting firm Akustiks, came up with mitigation measures for the ground-borne noise in the form of tons and tons of concrete connecting the piles the building sits on.
“We determined that pouring a three-foot-thick concrete slab at the bottom of the hall would be sufficiently massive and sufficiently stiff to keep that vibration from being able to create audible noise inside the hall,” says Scarbrough. “And having stood on that slab, you never hear a train as it rumbles past outside.” The roof is similarly massive — it’s a 12-inch-thick concrete slab. The plaster ceiling for Reynolds Hall is also hung on springs, decoupling it from the concrete membrane and ensuring that no vibration gets through.
Another challenge was the size of the space. Reynolds Hall needed enough cubic volume of space to get the resonance necessary for a superb unamplified hall — yet keeping the space intimate was also a primary concern. Initially this would have meant that the ceiling height would have been “steep,” according to Scarbrough. “So we worked with the architects to come up with this idea of ‘acoustic saddlebags’ at the balcony level.” At the balcony level, there are two chambers that extend beyond the hall’s side walls to create the additional volume needed for resonance, while allowing the ceiling height to be lower, preserving the sense of intimacy.
Next, Scarbrough worked with the designers to create the perfect balance of flat and articulated surfaces — pilasters, sawtooth patterns in the ceiling and a “wedding cake” dome in the center of the ceiling — all assist in the acoustical signature.
Another twist? Las Vegas is a desert, and drier air is more absorptive at high frequencies, so any absorptive material in the space was kept at a minimum. For example, the typically carpeted box seating has a terrazzo floor. “Even that thin layer of carpeting in what seems like a relatively small area would add a little bit more absorption of those high frequencies and take some of the brilliance of the sound,” Scarbrough explains. The Reynolds Hall design also eschewed soft goods in the proscenium valance, which is a hard plaster frieze, rather than a curtain.
But the acousticians weren’t done yet. Reynolds Hall also had to support touring Broadway shows and contemporary amplified music. “Symphonic music needs a rich reverberant acoustic character, while amplified music needs a very dry, crisp, articulate acoustic character,” says Scarbrough.
Normally, this would be handled solely by deploying curtains, but the acoustics of the room didn’t support that as the sole solution. The design team decided on a novel approach, to use the building itself. The antechambers and sound and light locks leading into Reynolds Hall now serve as acoustic baffles. During amplified events, the doors leading out of the hall remain open, so the antechambers absorb the sound.
The Gear
Scarbrough and his partner Anthony Nittoli specified all of the speaker systems in the hall, with the main system being a Meyer Sound line array in the center and left and right on the proscenium. The center line array can be pulled up through a hatch in the proscenium, while the side arrays are lowered and rolled offstage for storage. A fleet of various Meyer Sound speakers — including UPJ, UPM, UPP and UPAs — are used at fill speakers throughout the space. (Meyer UM1Ps and UM100s provide monitor foldback for performers if necessary.) Nittoli calibrated the system.
Driving all that gear will be a Yamaha PM5D. “We did a survey with many different audio engineers for a lot of well-known, talented people in the industry, and we asked them what would be your console of choice,” says TD Tim Sage. The Yamaha made everyone’s list. “A lot of the engineers said ‘Look, we want to be able to take our flash drive from the night before, download it to your desk, sweeten it for the acoustics of your house and be good to go.’”
The Yamaha desk will reside in an audio cockpit 87 feet back from plaster line. The cockpit can be lowered into the basement. There, the audio gear can be rolled off of it and replaced with seats when an unamplified show is performing. There’s also an audio booth at the back of the orchestra level for events that don’t need a mixer in the space.
The stage is 125 feet wide by 53 feet deep and framed by a stepped proscenium arch that’s 57 feet, 8 inches wide and 40 feet high. The proscenium is not actually solid, but a grill that’s fairly acoustically transparent, and a solid orchestral shell flies down from the loft space. Normally, such a shell would occupy too much space in the fly tower, but Joshua Dachs and his team from theatre consultancy Fisher Dachs Associates came up with an ingenious solution: they hinged the ceiling of the shell to the back wall of the space. When the shell’s not in use, it hinges to lay flat against the back wall, taking the shell out of the way and clearing the fly space for scenery.
And the Rest
The Troesh Studio Theatre is both a performance space and a rehearsal room for the Las Vegas Philharmonic and Nevada Ballet. A compact Meyer Sound rig (combining UPQ-1Ps and 500HP subwoofers) handles the needs of the 47-by-67-foot space.
Next to the Reynolds Hall, the Cabaret Jazz space is a 258-seat, intimate club-style venue with a full backline. The house main system has two Meyer M1D line arrays with 500HP subs paired in a cardioid pattern and UPJs on the above/below mezzanine fills. A 32-channel Yamaha LS9 digital console handles mixing duties.
For the Locals
After years of planning, the Smith Center for the Performing Arts opened with a black-tie gala on March 10. A spirit of commitment and pride is evident in everyone who works there. Las Vegas is a city marked by transience, with buildings that appear and vanish in a cloud of dust. Finally, the people so used to putting on shows for others now have a hall of their own, and it’s built for the ages.
