Moody backdrops. Exotic locales. Brooding characters. Vicious vampires. They're all part of the dark drama that is Lestat, the musical inspired by the novels of Anne Rice and set to music by Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Despite its epic story, the production finds a balance between over-the-top showmanship and intimate performances. FOH engineer Simon Matthews juggles a lot of audio for Lestat, and he has been with the production since its preview run in San Francisco prior to its Broadway debut. Here he talks about the transformation of this horror tale, which includes classic Broadway numbers, a gothic showstopper ("To Kill Your Kind"), and even a New Orleans dance number. How has the reaction changed between New York and San Francisco?
That's a subjective question. My perception of the reaction is about the same. It's a very different show now. They took an additional two weeks with cast in rehearsals in New York and reworked pretty much the entire first act and some of the second act to create a through-line that didn't really exist in the San Francisco production. The San Francisco production was a little more spectacle, and the New York production has been honed down to focus on the actors a little more.
Basically those "swoon moments," which is when someone gets bitten, those moments in San Francisco were anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute. They were quite long, and there was a lot of competition between what was transpiring on stage, in terms of the presentation visually and aurally, versus telling the story. So they refined that and brought it back down to something a little bit more theatrical and less spectacle.
Sound wise how did it change?
From San Francisco to New York, the system only changed based on the venue. Our package increased in terms of speaker count and some slight speaker position changes, but the system didn't really change. In San Francisco we did a little bit more with surround, a lot of times to do with the swoon visuals, the cinematics that were going. We still use surround for reverb. The band goes in surround sometimes, depending upon the moment, and occasionally a sound effect or two will be in surround as well. In San Francisco, Jonathan Deans, the sound designer, really created full soundscapes to these movies that are being played behind the bites. The swoons themselves are down to about 12 seconds each, and the only thing that is back is what we call a "vein rush sound". It's actually not played on all of them. I think there are currently 13 swoons, but they don't all begin with a vein rush. We found over the preview period that playing the vein rush back every time got a little bit old, so we chose the ones with the director that made sense to do and weren't competing with the action onstage.
What board are you running?
We're running a Meyer Sound LCS Console. It's a CueConsole II, which is a control surface that runs to an LCS LS300 mix engine, and it's a completely modular system in terms of building block engines. You can have up to 32 mix engines with huge I/O potential. I think we run physically 100+ inputs. We have 136 inputs on the show, including 24-track internal playback on a system called Wild Tracks, which is built into the sound console. We run 80+ outputs, and we send things around in the console to bring them to what's called loopback, and I believe we run 54 main outs. Because of the way it grows in production, we have the flexibility to add routing as we need. The control surface is modular and is all based on TCP/IP networking, so it's sort of off-the-shelf compatible in terms of editors. You can basically run multiple consoles.
It's incredibly flexible. There are fader packs, meter packs, a transporter and an editor. Those are the current modules that they make. We have at least one of everything. We have several fader packs and meter packs, and each one of those has their own IP address, so you tell it what control points it's associated with when you set it up. That can all be remapped on the fly in a cue or mapped to a button press on the console, so you can create layers and pages as you want them. We also use virtual grouping, which is the same as VCA. Its not really VCA, but in terms of analog consoles, V-grouping is the same as VCAing. Like Cadacs have for years, we do on-the-fly speaker changing during the show, so an ensemble member might be in an ensemble fader grouped with others. Then in the next scene, maybe halfway through a song, we might take a cue to put them out on their own fader for a solo line.
What kind of mics are you running?
On the actors we run Sennheiser SK50 transmitters with DPA 4061 elements, with the exception of one actress who is on a MKE2 Gold. Not everybody sounds good on every mic, so we tried switching her to a MKE2 Gold and found the frequency response was a little more favorable to her. This was for the role of Gabrielle, played by Carolee Carmello. There's a phase response difference between those and the DPAs, which makes it a little hard to mix together, not in terms of actual balance but line by line mixing.
We tried switching Claudia (played by Allison Fischer). The screen on the DPA capsule is pretty open mesh, and hair from her waist gets in there. It seems like once a month this happens, maybe even once every two weeks. Her weight curls under, and because she bounces her head around enough, her hair works its way in and sounds like a bad connector. It's actually the hair touching the elements in the microphone, so we tried switching her to the MKE2 Gold. None of us has ever experienced hair in a MKE2 screen, but it wasn't a good match for her voice. We've switched back to the DPA and are taking a roll of the dice.
Do you have any ambient mics on stage?
We do not have any. There are no foot mics. There are no shotguns or anything like that, just the RFs.
What about the orchestra pit?
We run a variety of mics AKG, Neumann, and a bunch of Rode mics, the NT2As, which are a large diaphragm condenser that we have on various instruments in the pit, as well as a Rode condenser mic that looks like a hand-held. There is a percussionist in the seventh floor dressing room, along with two keyboard players, and he is playing a contrabass drum, three timpanis, gong, cymbals, various mallets, plus a MalletKat MIDI device. He is very busy. The only thing that they can see up there is the conductor [through video monitors]. The remote pit all wear headphones, and they have the Aviom 16-channel personnel mixers. In the main pit, the string/reed/horn section all have the Avioms to a local speaker, which they just use for light enhancement, and the keyboardist, bassist, guitarist and drummer all play with Aviom headsets on.
What are the biggest challenges for you on this show?
Every show has unique challenges, but in the end they all seem to be similar. The biggest challenge on any show production is maintaining your health and stamina to be able to go in to work at eight o'clock every morning and leave at midnight for six days a week for almost six months. You get a little break here and there. During load-in you're maybe only going 'til five or six or eight. Production on a Broadway show is a really, really grueling process. We had a great team, so I could maybe come in a little later a few times, but it didn't happen many times. And you sit behind a console all day, mixing rehearsals. In terms of production, the mixing hopefully isn't going to be the hard part for you. But it gets increasingly harder as it progresses, only because it is very hard to maintain focus. In terms of the show, the show in San Francisco was very complicated. We were triggered by the projection lighting console, which is a grandMA that controls a network of Macintosh computers and projectors for the imagery. In turned it was triggered via MIDI Show Control by the light board. The show had a lot more complexity in terms of the cinematics and sound effects. The scale of it was much larger. Managing and programming that was tricky. Assistant sound designer Brian Hsieh and I programmed the show together. He worried about programming the sound effects, and I worried about programming the mics, although that's an oversimplification. It was a two-man program team, and we continued the relationship in New York. It was very much a partnership in terms of getting the show done on that level.
When you have the programming flexibility that the CueConsole and the LCS system has, with that also comes the pitfalls in terms of not just turning on and pushing the faders up. You really have to make sure that you program stuff in a safe manner so that it's going to do it the same way every night. It doesn't take more time, but it just takes a certain focus on the programming to make everything cue properly. The way that we set it up with the video computer programming, recalling cues, we didn't want them to be able to randomly call cues, even during rehearsal. We have to be waiting for their cues. So I might take a cue for a song, which in turn will enable a MIDI event trigger that will allow them to recall a specific cue. And then when they recall that cue, or if I take another cue, that trigger will be cleared.
So if I'm in the middle of act one working on programming, and they are working on the finale, they can send me all the MIDI notes they want and the console will ignore them, unless I happen to be sitting and waiting for those finale cues. We could have done that in a much more simplistic manner, but we wanted to build in a certain amount of safety, so there would several numbers of the lock before the lock would open, if you will.
Basically everything happens inside the LCS frame, in terms of I/O, EQ, delay and compression. We also run two M6000 reverbs from TC Electronics. We run just the analog I/O. We have 12 channels of I/O. We can reconfigure on the fly when we want to, but I don't think we change the routings.
You certainly have a nice balancing act on your hands.
As a Broadway FOH mixer–and this is a terrible way to think of it, and I don't really consider myself this entirely– your primary job is mixing the vocals. Your secondary job is mixing the band. Hopefully in a Broadway orchestra, your conductor is your first line of band mixing. If the reed player is blowing too hard or not loud enough, he's going to bring them out or hold them back, and you are sort of finessing the band.
