People who want to see Beatles music performed live, particularly with a variety of male and female singers, will get a kick out of Lennon. Approved by Yoko Ono, the show offers glimpses into John Lennon's life, from birth through the Beatles to his untimely death in 1980. The show is unusual in that several people portray Lennon, often in the same scene, and it offers a good blend of drama and humor. Despite the mixed reaction the musical has received from critics, no one can deny the superb vocal talents of the cast. And from a sound angle, the show's continual interplay of music and dialogue makes it a tough juggling act for any mixer. The live engineer working the Lennon board is Christopher Sloan, who began his career at Masque Sound in 1983 before hitting the road in 1987 for 15 years of various theater tours like Anything Goes, Chess and every American production of The Phantom of the Opera. His recent credits include Hairspray, Gypsy (with Bernadette Peters), Mamma Mia (in Boston) and Twelve Angry Men. He is certainly well-trained to deal with a show that has a 10-piece band and nine-person on cast on stage, particularly one with the brisk pace and demands of Lennon.
This is the first time I have seen a big Broadway show where there are no musicians in the orchestra pit.
Christopher Sloan: The orchestra pit is actually filled with all of our spare gear– cables, lights and stuff like that.
As far as mixing the 10-piece band onstage, how do you mix it loud enough that it's rock, but soft enough that it's Broadway?
If you balance the P.A. well, and if none of the speaker systems are overpoweringly loud, I think you can drive the whole system pretty hard without people holding their ears. First off, I think Bobby did a great job on choosing the types of speakers that we're using in the theater and setting them up. Bobby Aitken is our sound designer, and he's got an incredible wealth of experience across the entire audio spectrum.
If you set the system up well, you don't get into that ear-splitting thing. The show gets very loud, but two things make loud shows unpleasant: One is a sustained loudness, and the second is a harsh tone that assaults you in one very specific frequency area, like in the high mid-range, the 1K to 3K area. We seem to escape that, and we mix a very dynamic show. We're not trying to kill anybody with being the loudest show on the block. We wanted it to be dynamic and rock-like, but we come down very quickly to conversational levels for the book scenes.
You have a nine-person cast. What kinds of mics are you using?
I'm terrible at model numbers, but I believe it's the DPA 4061. We're using Sennheiser SK5012s as our transmitters.
What about the band? Is anyone DI'd into the board?
All the keyboards, bass and guitars are DI'd. The electric guitars are DI'd downstream of their PODs. They have a POD floor setup and small Fender amplifiers so they can hear themselves, and also so it sounds like a rock band onstage and coming out of the speakers. The acoustic guitars are DI'd directly and also fed through the stage monitors. The percussion is a fairly standard setup–we have AKG 414s and Sennheiser MKH-40s on the percussion rig. On the drums, we have Blue Dragonflys for the overheads, Audix D4s on the toms, an Audix D6 on the kick, a Beta 57 on the snare, MKH 40 on the cymbals and the Neumann KM 84 on the hat. It's all fairly standard.
What's been the biggest challenge for you working on this show?
The challenges haven't really seemed that large as we've been going along. It's really hard to come up with one single challenge. We had plenty of time to put the show up. There were a lot of changes in the show. They rewrote the book between San Francisco and New York, so we reprogrammed almost the entire show when we got here. Challenge-wise, there has never been any yelling in the theatre. No one was ever unkind or unpleasant. We had plenty of time to get done what we needed to do. The producers were great. Bobby gave us a system that is really fantastic, so nothing really seemed like a challenge. The challenge after six months of production is staying awake after doing long hours in the theatre. [Laughs] You nap when you can.
I can't say enough about the band, the cast and the production staff on the show. They've all just been fantastic. The cast has a good synergy. It's a tough show, especially because you have multiple people playing the same character. That was an interesting thematic challenge for us, but that's more like, how are we going to program the show so it flows under our fingers?
How often are you fading or muting people? People go on- and offstage quickly at times.
It's not an easy show to mix. The first 30 minutes of the first act is a bit of a log flume ride. You really have to pay attention. The show is loud, and in the loud parts, when you have nine people singing onstage or a couple people singing onstage, your challenge is to drive it as loud as the show needs to be and not get any feedback squeals or anything. We do have the vocals in the monitors, and they're quite big in the monitors. We have a lot of stage monitors that are quite large.
You told me that a week before I saw the show, the beginning, middle and end of the first act had been rewritten. How does that affect your job?
It affects my job because you come in at one or two in the afternoon, and you've got seven or 10 new pages of script, so you're reprogramming all the time. There was a week when they were making pretty dramatic changes script-wise, when I was programming a page ahead as we rehearsed. They would rehearse a page of script, then stop for some technical things, and I would take that opportunity to grab three more pages of script and get them into the show file and get them marked. There were a couple of afternoon rehearsals where I was a couple of pages ahead of the show, programming. The Cadac with the sound software is just so intuitive and so easy that it didn't seem like a struggle. We're using a Cadac J-Type on the show, and I have probably 12 or 13 years experience running shows on those things, so it's really effortless from that standpoint.
What processors are you using?
We have a TC Electronic reverb. We have a 4000 for vocals and a 3000 for the band. We have a TC Electronic FireworX that Bobby did a lot of interesting programming on for some special effects.
The only pre-recorded music used in the show is the clip from the "Imagine" video at the end, correct?
Yes. That was an interesting feat, getting all of that together, because we actually got the digital Beta master from Abbey Road Studios, and they did everything but bring it in an armored car. This was a very big deal to have this digital Beta master kicking around the theater. Our director had to sign for it.
You have fun with this show, don't you?
I have a ball mixing this show, but I have a ball mixing anything. I feel extremely blessed that I've been able to make a living doing this. I didn't plan it, and I still don't plan it that much, but I just love what I do. I have to put in a huge debt of gratitude to Masque Sound, who provided the sound for the show. They've been doing Broadway since 1936. I have a long association with them, and it's always great to have that.
I worked at Masque from 1983 to 1987, and I think I was the 14th employee. I did just about everything when I started out. I literally started off getting everybody coffee. My first job at Masque was as a carpenter rebuilding shelves and building new office space on the fourth floor (in their original Midtown Manhattan office). It would be hard to imagine how naïve I was. I didn't know you could actually make a living doing live sound. When I started for Masque Sound, I couldn't believe it. It was never like going to work. It was like running through the woods to the tree house to spend time with your friends, and to a large extent it stayed that way. The tree house is bigger, but it stayed that way. I never don't want to go to work.
