I was wondering how Alice Walker's deeply poignant and deeply disturbing drama The Color Purple would be interpreted as a Broadway musical, especially at a time when so many literary and filmic adaptations are gratuitously brought to the Great White Way, but I was pleasantly surprised. The wellwritten show has a magnetic lead in LaChanze, a highly talented ensemble cast, and a score that spans African music, R&B and blues. And the multilayered story–on its most basic level, about a woman named Celie who struggles through life with an abusive, controlling husband after having grown up with an abusive, controlling father–is incredibly powerful. Live engineer Carin Ford is behind the board for this intense theatre experience. She first entered the business in 1989 through Lily Tomlin's one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, working the sound effects for the actress. That sounds easy, but with 600 cues in the show plus background music, Ford stayed on her toes and really interacted with the lead. From there, she moved on to mixing shows including Les Misérables, Beauty and the Beast, Ragtime, Seussical The Musical, Mamma Mia! , Thoroughly Modern Millie and Caroline, or Change. Here she talks about working on this sonically-demanding production, which is her third with sound designer Jon Weston.
FOH: Effects were used sparingly here. I noticed the reverb on Nettie's voice when she was speaking her letter to Celie, and there were gunfire sounds during the African sequence. But was there anything else?
Carin Ford: Not really. The only thing that has background noise is the whole Africa scene, and that's the war stuff. The rest is just specific things like car horns and a telephone ring, but that's it. During production they wanted to try other things, like birds chirping in certain parts and horses and carriages in a town scene, but it just sounded like noise.
What kind of console are you running?
I'm using a Cadac J-Type. We're using three frames of a Cadac.
Just mics on the actors?
Exactly. Of course, there are mics in the pit. The woodwinds are double-miked, upper and lower, and then we're just using single mics on the trumpets [NeumannU89] and the trombones [AKG C12]. On the strings, we're using the Neumann M 147, just one for each instrument. There is an overhead [M 147] on the two violins and viola and one is over the cello. We're using the PLM 170s for the lower woodwind mics, and we're using Sennheiser MKH40s for overhead.
Is it normal to double mic the woodwinds?
Yes, because all the woodwind players play at least two or three different instruments. So when they're playing the piccolo flute, you're using the overhead mics. And then for saxophone and clarinet, you use both mics, but have a combination of the two for the different instruments.
There is hand percussion as well, correct?
We are using a Sennheiser MKH-40 on the toys and a Sennheiser MKH-60 shotgun mic over the African drums. The Sennheiser MKE-2s are used on the SK-5012 transmit – ters for the actors. There are two actors using Countryman mics. They're all single-miked.
What about the rest of the pit?
On the harmonica, we are using a Sennheiser ME 104, and we are using an AKG C-416 clipped onto the acoustic bass. The electric bass is on a DI. On the guitar amp, we were using a 441, but we changed it, and I don't remember what mic we are using now. For the acoustic guitars, we are using a Neumann KM-100.
Has any mic ever gone out during a show?
It has only happened once on a lead. On the leads, we don't tend to move the mikes unless they sweat, and most of them don't sweat. But the dancers, of course, can go sometimes, but surprisingly, they haven't been bad. Our backstage guys, Pete and Bob, are my RF guys and really good at catching those guys before they sweat. They're constantly listening, and they can catch these guys before they get back onstage. Sometimes they can't catch them because they blow them out just before they go onstage or as soon as they get onstage.
Are you using any processing or other outboard gear?
Not a lot. There's nothing really on vocals. We're using some gates on the drums just to keep our drummer under control. We use it on the drummer and the bass, and that's about it. We're just using a Lexicon reverb unit, I think the 480, for the band and for vocals. There's a special reverb for Nettie during her letter monologue.
Are you running any speakers in the back to fill out the sound?
Under the balcony are EAW JF60s. For onstage foldback, we are using d&b E3s. We have three stage left and three stage right in the wings. For the off-stage monitors, we are using Hot Spots hung together with a 9-inch black and white conductor monitor for offstage singers.
What are the challenges you have faced on this show?
The challenge for me–because this show is more R&B, which I haven't done a lot of–is to be able to mix and find a good balance between the band and the vocals. With R&B, you don't want the vocals to be too far out.
You have a lot of voices to mix, and some people have more powerful voices than others.
The desk has some automation. On the sidecar, the input faders for the ensemble are automated. The faders for the principal characters are not automated. Putting the chorus on automated faders allows us to program a mix for each cue so that I can bring up the men and women up on two VCAs and know that the balance is good.
Is it tricky when you have someone substituting for a
cast member?
That can be difficult. The woman who is the understudy for Shug, the nightclub singer, has a very different voice and acts very differently than the regular cast members.
Are subs in the pit also problematic?
That can be a challenge. I've had sub trumpets come in, and maybe one doesn't play quite as loud as the regular player, but then you can get somebody else who plays much louder. So I constantly have to keep my eye on that, but that's just the nature of the business, no matter what show you do. We're also dealing with the musical writers–Allee Willis, Brenda Russell and Stephen Bray–and all of them come from the pop world. None of them have ever done a Broadway show. So it's also difficult dealing with these folks because they don't understand that this isn't going to be like a rock concert. I remember Allee Willis coming to me and saying, "I can't hear these speakers here." I'm like, "If you do hear them, we're not doing our job." Things like that have to be explained. We had to explain to them that certain instrumentation in certain songs needs to be a certain way without competing with the vocals. That's a difficult balance, too. Mixing the show, I have to juggle what Jon Weston wants to hear, what the director wants to hear and what the music department wants to hear.
What's the most fun aspect of working on this show?
I love the music, and I know a lot of the cast members. I've worked with LaChanze, who plays Celie, and Kingsley Leggs, who is Mister. I worked with some of these folks in Atlanta on the trial run.
How did the show change from Atlanta to New York?
The basic framework is the same, but they added songs and changed certain things. The scene when Mister is drunk in the road and his son is coming after him used to always be between the two of them, but then they brought in Sophia and these townspeople. And "Big Dog" is a brand new song that wasn't in Atlanta. They also improved the transitions because they would just fall through the cracks. They really Broadwayized the show, meaning they took out some of the harshness of the story; certain key lines and key scenes that would have been a little more harsh, like how the film was.
What do you like most about this show?
I love the music, and I love the book, although I love the music most. When I heard that this was happening, I was determined to do this show because I love Allee Willis, Brenda Russell and Stephen Bray. I figured with that music, I had to get in on it, and I had worked with musical director Linda Twine before on Caroline, or Change. With all the other shows I did, I didn't pursue any of them. They all came to me. But this one I had to do. The other reason I wanted to do this was that I knew it was a powerful story that would really affect people. One of the great things about mixing this show is listening to the audience's reaction; hearing what they think during the show and after. The great thing about it, too, is that I've been in this business for 17 years, and this is the first legitimate Broad – way show I've done where the majority of the audience is black. So if this is what it takes to get black folks to come to a show, something other than Medea's Family Reunion, it's great. Things are slowly changing. Bombay Dreams recently pulled in a large Indian audience. Hopefully, we'll be seeing more shows like this on Broadway that cater to a broader audience rather than another revival of a tried-and-true show. They're talking about bringing The Wiz in, with a hip-hop version of the roles. They're talking about doing an interracial cast for that, even though it's a black show. It may work. Who knows? I'd like to see more of that, but I'm just glad that The Color Purple has really touched people.
