Sounds of Sublimation
In the current Broadway drama Pictures From Home, photographer Larry Sultan (Danny Burstein) wants to create a photographic profile of his parents (Nathan Lane, a retired razor salesman and Zoe Wanamaker, who has become a realtor) who represent both the ideals and shortcomings of the mythological all-American family. The show was inspired by the late Sultan’s 1992 memoir of the same name, which documented a process that began during the Reagan ‘80s when ‘50s nostalgia was big.
The Listening Experience
One of the most striking aspects of the show is the sound design from Peter John Still and Scott Lehrer, who teamed up for the music and soundscapes from the former and sound reinforcement from the latter. Still has a relationship with director Bartlett Sher that goes back to their university days in 1984, and he estimates that they have done between 40 and 50 shows together. Still says that he has become “the unofficial dramaturg” in the room when collaborating with Sher, working out how the music will interact with the drama unfolding onstage. Lehrer has also worked with Sher before.
Beyond the subtle wireless miking of the actors, the sonic moments onstage are distinct. There is the overt and sometimes subliminal use of music at emotional moments including the raising of the upstage wall during a key narrative transition. There are surreptitious drum sounds that register on a subconscious level. There are the old-fashioned “ka-chunks” of slides changing in a projector. There are two airport moments involving ambient sounds and jets flying overhead. And there is the dramatic explosion of hamburgers on a grill located offstage that is enhanced by lighting and video effects.
That last scene is an example of quiet sounds leading up to a loud, dramatic moment that showcases the dynamic audio range of the production. It feels so natural that one would not walk away from the show immediately keyed into that over the drama in the dialog and acting.
“There were several layers there that I had deployed [for that scene], and then I left space for the actual sounds of the CO2,” Still recalls. “Visually, it was pretty spectacular. That continued to evolve a little bit the last week after I left, but I left everything broken down in layers and mobiles so it could be adjusted. I think lighting was experimenting with the timing of it, but they were doing that very solidly.”
But there is a quieter audio buildup leading to that big moment in the show.
“Towards the end of the big argument [between family members] before the hamburgers explode, rather like Royal Shakespeare Company battle scenes, there’s just under-the-audible level a drum gradually speeding up,” reveals Still. He adds that that sonic idea was inspired by the work of former RSC sound designer John Leonard. “When Dad really starts yelling a couple lines before the explosion, that drum comes up 2 dB. Then when Mom and Larry are having the heart-to-heart, the penultimate scene, there’s a very warm shamanic drum playing just under the level of audibility.” The drum sounds rise and fall with the moments.
Music in the Mix
Music plays an integral emotional part in a few scenes of the show, sometimes integrated within the dialog of the scenes, and at other times lurking just below the surface. “One of the things I have up my sleeve is a number of Arvo Pärt pieces and a number of pieces that feel like Arvo Pärt,” explains Still of the contemporary classical composer’s work. “It was novel that Bart asked for two of those in the course of the rehearsal.” (There are three specific Pärt moments in the show.)
Still created what Lehrer calls, through a lot of editing, “serious remixes of the Arvo Pärt stuff” that the former wanted to integrate into Pictures From Home. In one spot on a particular Pärt recording, there was a low note that Still wanted to get more out of.
“We recorded a few more of those at Scott’s wonderful little studio,” says Still. “Being the genius he is, he completely matched, with two nice mics, the sound of the piano on the recording. It’s a fairly standard piano configuration, but he has a beautiful grand [piano] and high-end microphones and knows exactly where to put them. They sound like exactly like the recording we were trying to match. It is actually spectacular how understated all of that was. A musician might not have noticed. The sound totally matches, so I can just drop in a few extra low notes to continue the shape of the second time through.”
According to Lehrer, Still wanted to stretch one thematic repetition and make it slower at a certain point, but they did not play along to the recording to achieve that effect. “The easy way to do that, although it’s time consuming, is to splice the decay onto itself backwards and that gets you another second or so of decay,” says Lehrer. “You use as much of that as you want. I was just adding tenths of a second or so. They were subtly varied and that way hopefully did not outstay their welcome. Also, [they] slightly more matched the moment that they were there with which also helps.”
During the scene when the back wall lifts up, a small loop from the George Crumb composition “Black Angels,” featured on the Kronos Quartet album of the same name, is played on two loudspeakers located high up and pointed upwards in the flies. Still feels that moment “was at it’s most magical when it was pretty darn quiet, and so it was a better compromise to have the second repetition be pretty hard to hear.”
The Production Setup
The sound designers worked on a DiGiCo SD10T board with three TC 3000 reverbs and 32 QLab outputs going to Meyer Sound Galileo processors and a variety of Studio 54 house Meyer speakers plus their own additions, including Meyer UPQ1-P for additional FX, EAW JF80 for onstage, and Meyer UP-4XP for delay and surround.
“We added a few speakers for some of the sound effects stuff,” reports Lehrer. “Peter wanted to bounce the music off the back of that big back wall of the set, so we rented a couple of [Meyer UP Junior] speakers to put off stage left and right facing the upstage wall. So he had a stereo pair of speakers bouncing off the upstage wall with a lot of music on the scoring work. We used a couple of Meyer XP 40s and 42s to the left and right sides for reinforcement, just because the way that I like to do my reinforcement is a little different than what they have with their rep system. We took a couple of their CQ-1s and put them up in the dome so that when Peter did the airplane effect he sent it to the dome speakers [facing upward] so that the jet sounds really flew overhead.”
Lehrer praises associate Tye Fitzgerald who worked with Still on “all of the programming to connect lighting to sound” including dozens of sound cues as photographic slides were projected onto the stage with different rhythmic intervals depending on the scene. The “ka-chunk-chunk” sounds emulated those of a Kodak Ektapro projector, and each slide drop has a lighting cue that triggers both video and sound. Lehrer also commends house soundperson Adam Rigby who “was a great host to us and was really generous in the getting the theater ready for us. He’s been doing a really great job mixing the show.”
Miking the Cast
Lehrer admits that getting the play’s three stars to mic up with Sennheiser 3732s was a little tricky at first. But he notes that there has been a sonic transition on Broadway over the last few years. “For a lot of the Broadway [plays], using area miking just doesn’t work anymore,” says Lehrer. “The audiences want a higher level of clarity in the reinforcement and a higher SPL of reinforcement than we used to do. At a certain point with area microphones, it’s diminishing returns. So we had discussions about why I want them to wear wireless. How much do I reinforce it? I never really put an SPL meter on that. I just bring it up until it feels like it’s enough, but not too much.”
One example of how wireless miking works better on straight plays is when characters turn away from the audience or walk off-stage and keep talking. All the actors here wear wigs, and during one scene where Lane is changing clothes behind a screen, area mics are used as reinforcement because of an odd sound reflection from the screen. Lehrer says 10 area mics in total were used in support of the actors’ three wireless mics.
“It’s an hour and 45 minutes of a one-act play,” notes Lehrer, “and to get the audience fatigued by having to listen too hard would have been a problem.”
In the end, Pictures From Home offers both a robust and nuanced sound design that feels natural.
