When Does a Tour Turn into an Install?
The LaSalle Bank Theater in downtown Chicago is a grand old house in the Broadway tradition. It opened in 1906 as the Majestic Theater and, for many years, was a prime stop on the Orpheum circuit. The theater went dark during the Depression, but was taken over by the Shubert family fol-lowing World War II. For years, it housed Broadway shows, both on tour (Cats, A Chorus Line) and on their way to Broadway (Spamalot, Sweet Smell of Success). In 2005, the theatre closed for a multimillion-dollar restoration project and reopened in 2006 to great acclaim. This October, it became the home of the Chicago tour of Jersey Boys.
For Jersey Boys, the 2006 Tony Award-winning musical about the rise of The Four Seasons, there are benefits and drawbacks to playing in the La-Salle. The classic design of the theatre echoes the period of the play. But the venue required some serious work to make it ready for the show’s ex-tensive surround sound system.
Andrew Keister, the associate sound designer on the show, visited the site early in 2007. What he saw presented a challenge. The theatre wasn’t designed with the access to run cables to the locations where they were needed. And the fact that the theater sits at the base of a 20-story office tower — the Majestic Building, recently renovated into a boutique hotel — made access that much more difficult. This was not going to be an easy install.
Work at the LaSalle began shortly after Labor Day. “We spent the first day stripping out the house sound system,” Keister recalls. “Then we spent a week rebuilding and upgrading the house cabling system. The wiring that was in place was not sufficient for our needs, so we had to upgrade all that. The first week felt less like installing a touring show and more like a construction site. We pulled in all new cabling and had to change the old connectors. I don’t know what the connectors were; I had never seen them before. So we had to upgrade to modern electric connectors. There was a lot of manual labor and a lot of soldering — not fun work.”
Michael Mix, head of the audio department at the theater, says the crew brought in literally miles of new cable. “We used 4,500 feet of Monster cable alone to wire the surround system,” he says. Because the theater had been recently renovated, the new cable had to be tied and wrapped and integrated as much as possible into the existing architecture. Much of it was hidden alongside existing plumbing and conduit. Keister appreciates Mix’s contribution to the process and says, “He’s a wonderful guy and was immensely helpful in terms of integrating the show into that theatre, which he knows inside and out. It would have been really hard to do without him.”
Once the upgrade was finished, installing the actual sound system was comparatively easy. Much of the system came from a production that had played at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. Masque Sound provided the gear for that tour and now sent additional gear to Chicago for the in-stallation at the LaSalle. Steve Canyon Kennedy, the sound designer on Jersey Boys, has a longstanding relationship with Masque, who supplied the gear for the Broadway production, as well as outfitting all of the tours.
Since this is an open-ended run, Kennedy and Keister were able to put together a system customized for the LaSalle Bank Theater. “When we de-sign a touring system, we look at the venues we’ll play for the first couple of years and try to build something that’s going to work in all those spaces,” Keister explains. “With a sit-down tour, we can go further in terms of the quality of the surround system we’re installing, versus what we can put into a theatre in 48 hours. This speaker package is designed specifically for the architecture of the LaSalle, as opposed to a speaker package that’s designed to work in 25 different theatres.”
Because of the work that went into upgrading the cabling, everything else had to happen fast. “It was done incredibly quickly,” says Keister. “We spent a week doing the renovations to the theatre itself. Then we installed the system in about six days. The cast had four days of rehearsal, and then they brought in an audience. It was done on an incredibly tight schedule.”
People may be surprised to discover that the sound system is primarily analog, rather than digital. Kennedy and Keister, who do not consider them-selves “gear heads,” had good reasons for choosing to go in this direction.
“What’s nice about the show from a sound perspective,” Keister says, “is that much of the storytelling occurs when the group is in concert or in the recording studio. This means the sound plays a featured part. In a lot of shows, sound is something that shouldn’t be noticed. If a critic says some-thing about the sound, they’re going to say something bad. In Jersey Boys, the sound adds an extra dimension to the piece. Des McAnuff is a won-derful director who understands the power that the sound can have in impacting the audience.”
Because of the importance of the sound, the designers were more interested in faithful reproduction than the latest gear. According to Keister,“ The goal of the design is absolute signal purity ¬— to capture what’s coming into the microphone and reproduce it as accurately as possible, while doing as little as possible to the signal between its input and its output.”
The heart of the system is a Cadac J-Type Live Production Console, with a 58-slot main frame and a 40-slot sidecar. Michael Mix praises the system for its reliability. “It has amazing circuitry,” he says. “There’s virtually no degrading of the sound.” Mix also appreciates that the board is completely modular, which makes his job of maintaining the equipment a little easier. Camco Vortexes 4.0 and 6.0 provide the amplification, while all the processing is by XTA.
The audience is more likely to notice the array of speakers that fill the house. The show depends on a combination of EAW, L-ACOUSTICS and Meyer speaker products. The adjustable center cluster consists primarily of L-ACOUSTICS, while the towers flanking the stage hold EAW speak-ers. The surround is created by a variety of speakers on each of the four levels of the theatre. Four speakers back each level of seats, while an addi-tional four speakers are located on each wall of orchestra seating. An additional three speakers on each wall serve the dress circle, mezzanine and balcony. The 16 rear speakers and 26 side speakers are complemented by delay speakers, which serve the orchestra, dress circle and mezzanine. Because nearly half the orchestra is covered by the dress circle above, that level has two sets of delay speakers — one row mounted at the front of the dress circle, and another midway back.
Jersey Boys regular Julie Randolph came along to assist with the install and the opening. “Julie Randolph is the original mixer of the Broadway show,” Keister explains, “so we take her to each production that we open. She works with the sounds mixers, and lets Steve Kennedy and me con-centrate on the overall sound of the show.” Ty Lackey, who worked the show in Los Angeles, will run the board at the LaSalle with Mix as his assistant.
Jersey Boys has settled into the LaSalle Bank Theater for what is likely to be a long run. And after that? “Most of the cabling and infrastructure modifications that we added we’ll leave in the theatre,” says Keister. “There wouldn’t be much benefit to us taking it out. We always try to leave a theatre a little nicer than when we arrived there. It’s our small gift to them.”
