It's out with the Blue and in with new as Las Vegas's Luxor Hotel bids farewell to its azure-painted performers The Blue Man Group and makes way for a brand-new draw–the hit Broadway show Hairspray. The musical turns the back the clock to 1962 when big 'dos ruled and plus-sized trend setter Tracy Turnblad just wanted to dance on a local Baltimore television show.
The show, which opened on Feb. 15, is a shortened, 90-minute reprisal of the multi- Tony-winning Broadway adaptation of the John Waters film that came out in 1988 and made actress and talk-show host Ricki Lake into an instant star. Condensing the show was a hairy proposition (90 minutes is about maximum time for a Vegas show. You don't want those folks away from the slots for too long…), but taking a room last used for big, drum-driven performance art and making it work for a show based on breezy early-era rock 'n' roll was a challenge that sound designer Steve Kennedy backed up by Jersey-based sound company Masque Sound were up for. In fact, Masque had a leg up on anyone else–having worked with Kennedy on the original Broadway production, it was a natural that they would be called on again when Kennedy was hired to bring Hairspray into a big glass pyramid in the middle of the Nevada desert.
We first caught up with Kennedy's associate sound designer Andrew Keister just one week prior to opening night amidst rehearsals and equipment checks. Later, we went down to the theatre to take some pics the on the final night of previews. The next day was the "hard" opening and Keister and Kennedy were winging it back to NYC. During rehearsals and previews, Keister also served as the production sound engineer. In most shows, these are two different jobs, but Kennedy often opts for the two-man system rather than three based on the needs of the project. "When you have one person, like myself, who is involved in the genesis of the system itself, it's almost as though one person is going from concept–as specified by the sound designer–to execution with little room for translational error,'' Keister said. Also, Keister and Kennedy have worked together for many years, so they are, as it were, "like-eared."
As most know, when it comes down to the end of technical rehearsals, "we really don't get a heck of a lot done during this time because sound just isn't the focus," Keister said. "At most, we'll get two shots with the band" at getting the sound adjusted before there is an audience, he said. "And that's just the way it is."
However, there is some recourse. The preview period–the time audiences are coming in before the show has officially opened–"is incredibly important to us. That's when all of our work takes place," he said.
So in the end, it's all good. "The acoustics of the theatre change drastically after the audience gets in the performance space anyway," he added. "Anything before that point, we're really guessing until we hear how it actually reacts."
At Luxor, the Hairspray performance space is very large. "This being a Vegas show room, it's really not a traditional theatre, per se," Keister said. "It's just one deeply-raked level." There's no mezzanine, loge, balcony, none of it. Interestingly, Keister said those micro-spaces actually make his job a bit easier. "Here, we just have one enormous air volume that we have to unify without any architectural assistance," he said.
The increasing use of line arrays actually exacerbates that issue. "Look at where those arrays are trimmed," said Keister, pointing at one stack of dV-DOSC cabinets flown stage right. "We could not go any lower without impacting sightlines and at this height, the speakers are basically missing the first four or five rows of seats." Time for front-fills, right? But, again height–in this case, the height of the stage–made placement an issue. But if you look very closely at the front edge of the stage, you can see the work-around that Kennedy and Keister came up with. Literally lining the front of the stage behind a custom-made scrim is a nearly solid line of Genelec-powered studio monitors that takes care of audio for the premium seats without sacrificing either stage view or sound quality.
Filling the front was not the only challenge Keister had spent several hours fine-tuning the show finale. "This stage show is a little unique in that the band appears onstage at the end of the show," Keister explained. He takes us backstage to show off the rolling bandstand (completely with the ubiquitous in-theatre Aviom monitoring system) that makes its entrance for the finale. "The band is actually split," he explained. "Guitar, keys, anything that runs direct, those players are on the bandstand throughout the show. But things that make acoustic noise–drums, horns, etc.–are in a soundproof room backstage. At the end of the show, they dash to the stage in time for the bandstand to roll out." How much time do the players get for this crossover? "Forty-five seconds," Keister replied. And that is far from the only challenge.
Sound issues particular to Hairspray stem from the fact that it's a high-energy show throughout. In order to cut the show down, some of the dialogue scenes were shortened, leaving all the singing and dancing. "You want to excite the audience particularly at the end…where we really need to impact the audience," Keister said. "But we don't want audiences to be uncomfortable. We don't want them to say that it's too loud, so there's a very unique structure to control the flow of the sound through the show." Essentially, the sound takes a two-steps-forward and one-step-back approach throughout the performance to achieve a gradual yet robust finish, all without offending the ear.
Keister attributes his audio sensibilities to several good teachers–both in college and real-world experiences with the likes of Kennedy, John Shivers and Jon Weston–and an extraordinary sense of focus. He really loves his job, reminding me that pasts are important in the sound industry.
"More than any other job in the theatre, when a sound designer picks their mixer, it's the sound mixer who really reinterprets the sound every night, so you really need to get someone who has the same sensibilities as the designer is trying to achieve with the system," he said. "So it's important what that person brings to the table, not just in skills but in personality and background –all that stuff is so unbelievably important."
Gear
FOH console: Cadac J-Type, 140 inputs, 58 outputs, 14X28 matrix
Monitor console: Midas H-3000 monitor console, 56 inputs with Aphex 1788-A remote controlled mic preamplifiers with 1788 TCP/IP RC
Input processing: Valvotronics Gain Rider 3 Tube compressors, Drawmer DL-441, DS-404.
Reverbs: Lexicon 480, PCM-91
System processing: 21 XTA DP-226
Playback: Akai S-6000 Samplers
Amps: 41 Camco Vortex 6 amplifiers
Main arrays, (left, center, right): 46 LACOUSTICS dV-DOSC and 12 dV-Subs
Front fills: 16 Genelec 1032As, eight Genelec 1029A
Stage monitors: Nine Meyer UPA-2Ps, six Meyer UPMs, Wireless capabilities are derived from 36 channels of Sennheiser SK-5012/EM1046 RF systems with a custom Masque sound antenna system (PWS helical antennae)
Monitoring system: Sennheiser MKE-2- Gold on all transmitters
Band monitor system: Aviom A-16 system with 24 A-16II and 5 A-16D Pro distributing hubs, Custom doghouse for A-16 mixers manufactured by Masque Sound
Mics: Klark Teknik DN-100 Direct Boxes, AKG C-414, Shure SM-57, SM-81, SM-91, Beta-52, Beta-56, Neuman KM-184, U-89, Josephson e22s, EV RE-27
