‘Taking the Show To The Road’
With music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Sunset Boulevard has been making a comeback in recent years. Inspired by the 1950 Billy Wilder film, the musical version ran for two and a half years in the mid-1990s and was revived with its original stage star Glenn Close in 2017. This new production opened on October 20, 2024 at Broadway’s St. James Theatre and stars Nicole Scherzinger as a faded movie diva and Tom Francis as a desperate young screenwriter who falls into a seemingly romantic but manipulative relationship from which they both hope to benefit.
This new version of Sunset Boulevard completely turns the tables on lavish past productions, instead going for a black box interpretation enhanced by onstage cameras and black and white video projected onto a large screen upstage. The show focuses on performance and has a meta quality to it, as if Norma Desmond (Scherzinger giving an intense performance) imagines herself in a movie about her comeback to movies.
Ultra-long Distance RF Communications
However, one big showstopping moment doesn’t take place on stage. At the start of Act Two, Francis descends four flights of stairs backstage (all captured on video), passing by crew and fellow cast members as the overture plays. He makes his way out into the street, then starts singing the title track. He’s by himself, walking and singing, hearing the live orchestra through an in-ear monitor. Passersby who don’t know what’s going on might think he’s a little crazy at first. But he is tracked by a Steadicam operator who’s also wearing an IEM. Other cast members soon come up behind Francis and follow him back into the foyer before he re-enters the theater. The audience erupts into applause at the execution of this tricky number. And yes, it is done live for every performance.
Sunset Boulevard’s sound designer Adam Fisher was the associate on the last Broadway production and worked on this current incarnation in London’s West End before it came here. Director Jamie Lloyd originally wanted Francis to sing the song around the theater, then the idea blossomed into him going out on the street. As Lloyd wanted a cinematic feel to the music mix, this extrapolation made sense.
Even though Fisher admitted he was skeptical of the street walk at first with regards to audio latency, video designers/cinematographers Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom made it work, and coordinating with the sound team, they pulled off this unusual feat, likely the first time it has ever been done on Broadway. In London, there was an alley adjacent to the venue, but when Francis leaves the St. James Theatre in New York, he has to walk part of the way up the block to Shubert Alley, then walk up and down part of that before returning to the venue. Along with Sennheiser transmitters and antennas in the St. James Theatre, including the foyer and stairwells, there are six discreetly positioned antennas atop the theater marquis.
“We had to prep and do research to see actually how far we could get a radio mic signal back, and also an IEM signal to him, without any latency, which involved antennas on the canopy,” Fisher explained. “We have a little cart with three antennas that goes up 44th towards Junior’s [restaurant], where Hell’s Kitchen is. We have a set of antennas on top of the canopy [marquee], so when he goes out, he’s on that set of antennas. As he gets halfway up the street, we switch to the cart which bounces it back to the canopy because we can get the antennas higher up. That acts like a little relay station back to the theater. He does his bit up there, and then as he walks back, we then take back over in the canopy.”
When Francis does come into the venue, audio transmission is briefly taken over by the Teradek system in the SLR-type video cameras used for the show. Then as he walks back onstage, the antennas in the building take over.
“We do have a backup system that uses the camera because the cameras are wireless,” Fisher said. “They live in a 6G band that nobody goes in, so the audio is clean. The only problem is, there’s a huge matter of latency involved in getting the audio to him, so he ends up hearing himself back 45 milliseconds after the fact. It’s a bit disconcerting to him hearing himself back, but in the theater it’s pretty clean.”
Trying to pull off this audio feat was easier in the West End than on Broadway. “It was tough, and it still is tough,” Fisher noted. “New York is an incredibly hostile environment for radio mics and RF. In London, it’s coordinated better, so you license the set of frequencies, and that show has those frequencies. Whereas in New York, it’s a bit more of a free for all. There is some coordination within the shops, but there’s nothing to stop someone legally jumping onto a frequency.”
A lot of redundancy is built into the audio system to deal with latency and transmission issues. Francis is double-miked with a DPA 4066, the mic used on the whole cast. He has an in-ear monitor, although one time it actually cut out on him outside. But he knew the title song so well that he kept singing, and no one noticed that anything went wrong.
Fisher said that the sound of the DPA 4066 is so good — no traffic can be heard outside — that people have thought the sound designer is using a plug-in. “Even though that microphone is omnidirectional, it seems to have this halo around the head of the person,” he said. “The only noise we ever really get is wind noise. If he goes down Shubert Alley, we might get some wind, but a small foam windshield protects from that.”
Sennheiser and Wisycom antennas are being used; the former for inside, the latter for outside. Sennheiser transmitters are being used on the show, with Fisher a big fan of the 6000 series. The company used Shure analog IEMs in London, but Masque Sound in New York recommended LectrosSonics IEM systems because they are low latency.
The System
Sunset Boulevard is run on an DiGiCo SD 7T Quantum console fed by approximately 120 inputs, with the Fourier transform.engine as a VST host. A Qlab v5 is used for FX. Plug-ins for the show include a McDSP FutzBox, TC Electronic VSS4HD and VSS3, and LiquidSonics Seventh Heaven. Nearly 220 speakers are used for the show (including surrounds), and all are d&b audiotechnik, including XSL8s and XSL12s for the main P.A.; a V7P cluster; 44S front fills; E6 fills, delays, and surround; d&b E8 foldback; d&b Y10P FX speakers; and d&b D40 amplifiers. Fisher loves d&b, and he said that the new show is “a bigger, better version of London, because it’s a bigger theater as well.” While there was a 40-piece orchestra in the West End, he said the show here sounds bigger. Every string player is double miked and the orchestra is mostly miked with DPA 4011s, 4061s and 4099s.
“There are very few sound effects,” Fisher added. “It’s actually quite a simple show, but I think because it’s so amped up, and Jamie likes his cast to be able to deliver everything at a very quiet level — and they all want to hear themselves on stage — there’s a boatload of vocal foldback. It becomes a very highly stressful and highly on-the-edge system for a lot of the show. That’s the difficult part.”
He said that placing transmitters on the cast has required a little creativity, especially with the choreography. Scherzinger moves around a lot on the floor, and at the end of the production she has to smear blood on her face, while avoiding shorting her main mic. The A1 has his hand on the button for the back-up mic every time, just in case. “Finding creative places to put transmitters has been quite interesting,” Fisher acknowledged. “That in itself was quite tricky, but everything else about it was quite simple. It is a deceptively simple show, but the whole top of Act Two is the bit that stresses everybody.”
The London run of Sunset Boulevard was only 16 weeks, whereas this one has an open-ended run. Luckily, no major audio snags have occurred.
“It’s a fun show to be involved in,” Fisher declared. “The score itself – and those David Cullen and Andrew Lloyd Webber orchestrations — is some of the best music that Andrew’s ever written. It’s nice that it’s had a bit of a resurgence.”
Sunset Boulevard Audio Crew
- Sound Designer: Adam Fisher
- Associate Sound Designer: Josh Hummel
- Production Sound: Mike Wojchik
- UK Sound Mixer & Programmer: Laurie Kirkby
- Shop Prep Associate: Maxine Gutierrez
- A1: George Huckins
- A2: Peter Karrer
- A3: Emile LaFargue
- Sound Shop: Masque Sound
