One of the hottest tickets on Broadway is Jersey Boys, which tells the mostly-unknown behind-the-scenes story of Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons; their rise from a working-class New Jersey town, where they were connected to the Mafi a, up through their staggering pop success and eventual dissolution. What's impressive are not just the dramatic performances, multiple set changes, live musicians and two-tiered stage with projections, but the quality of the lead actors' performances and their musical abilities. Audiences really buy them as the Four Seasons, and John Lloyd Young, making his Broadway debut as Frankie Valli, brings down the house every night. Julie Randolph is the veteran live engineer mixing this very busy show. Prior to working on Jersey Boys–for which she also mixed the original production in La Jolla, Calif.–she worked on Dessa Rose at Lincoln Center and national tours of Hairspray and Jesus Christ Superstar. Randolph has also been an assistant engineer on the Aida and Annie Get Your Gun national tours and first cut her teeth as a mixer for rock and cover bands in clubs in her home state of Indiana. On this show, she deftly juggles live musicians, an ensemble cast, a never-ending stream of sound and two live drummers that occasionally cross paths onstage.
How do you handle two drummers?
Julie Randolph: That was actually one of our biggest challenges, and it's two drummers who move all over the stage. One of the kits actually goes underneath the stage; it's on a lift as well as a track. So there are two drummers playing from everywhere. Steve Kennedy, our sound designer, spent a lot of time getting the right sounds. When the drummer is underground, he usually switches over to an electronic drum pad. Not if he moves during a song, but if he begins a song while he's offstage…it suddenly becomes very strange, especially if you're sitting in certain places in the house. It just sounds weird. So that was something that Steve spent a lot of time on during our rehearsal period, getting the drums right.
Do you worry about overlapping the two drummers, especially when they're playing at the same time?
We did an awful lot of programming as we went along to make sure those mics are only open exactly when we need them. We actually had one show where something changed with our monitor blend onstage and the automation cue, and suddenly the guy went offstage and was right under a monitor, and there was screaming feedback. We had to change some programming to fi x that. The second drummer is an actor. He plays drums and guitar. We have four actors in this show who play instruments. Three of them play a lot. It's primarily guitar, but Donnie Kehr plays drums as well as guitar. Christian Hoff, who plays Tommy DeVito, plays guitar. Bobby Spencer, who plays Nick Massi, plays bass a little bit. And Steve Gouveia, who plays a lot of parts, plays a lot of guitar in this show.
How do you mic them?
They're wireless like the other musicians. We have two guys backstage, Mike Terpstra and Dave Shepard, who are taking care of all the mic changes and taking care of the band members and the actors. They don't have an easy show. They have a lot to keep an eye on back there.
How many inputs total do you have?
We're running about 92 inputs and 30 outputs to speakers at FOH. There is two of every instrument because every musician does make an appearance onstage at some point, plus there are the two drum kits. There is a wireless version of every instrument.
Are there any ambient mics onstage picking up things?
There are no ambient mics, but the guitar player and bass player come out periodically, and we just put them on a wireless transmitter. There is a special adaptor that Masque built for us for the Sennheiser SK50, and it just plugs right into their guitars. Then we're using an Audix mic on a trumpet and two reeds that come out for a couple of numbers in Act 2, so we clip those mics right onto their instruments. We have an ambient mic on the balcony rail that's only for the conductor to hear audience response, because when the band is not onstage, they're down underneath the stage wearing headphones. It's weird for our conductor, Ron Melrose, to gauge the audience response when he is basically in a hole in the basement, so we give him a mic and a video feed and a camera that he can zoom out.
Do you use the same wireless mics on everybody?
On the actors, everybody is wearing an MKE2. We have Sennheiser SK50 transmitters on everybody except for these three girls, who are on 5012s because they wear their transmitters under their wigs. It's a much smaller transmitter.
Are all the leads double-miked?
No, only Frankie is double-miked, and I'm actually not positive about why that decision was made.
Have there any been problems with mics going out?
We have lost mics a couple of times. It does happen–it's live theatre, just like we've had to stop the show a couple of times for scenery mishaps or whatever. I don't know if it's anything that would have been fixed had they been double-miked. Mics go out for various reasons. If a mic just breaks, then yes, having him double-miked would fi x it, but if the actor is completely drenched in sweat and you're not prepared for that, then both mics are just going to be out. I think there is a lot of value to double-miking people, but this show is a really physical show for the guys. They have a lot of costume changes, and honestly, these days the SK50s are pretty large, so it is asking a lot for an actor to wear a double rig of an SK50. Not that they wouldn't do it, but for whatever reason we didn't start off like that.
What console are you running?
It's a Cadac J-Type.
That seems to be the desk of Broadway, doesn't it?
You know, a lot of people are moving away from it to go with things like the DiGiCos and digital desks. I'm a big fan of Cadac. I think it's a really good-sounding desk for all of its quirks. I guess I'm also pretty comfortable with them because I've been mixing on Cadacs for awhile now. I guess everybody has their favorite. It's a matter of personal preference for the designers.
What kinds of amps are you using?
For amplifiers, we're using Crest 7001s and 8001s, plus some Lab.gruppens for surrounds and effects speakers. Here are a few other details about the system, for what it's worth: It's an A/B system. We're using the Cadac M-16 remote preamps for most of the band inputs. Steve and associate sound designer Andrew Keister went with those in part because of all the extra cable involved in the drum turtles and other moving band platforms. We use the Aviom system for the band monitors, fed off a Yamaha DM2000. And out front at the Cadac J-type, we're also using the Cadac D16 digital rack-mount mixer.
Do you have any amps in the audience to spread the sound around?
We have a row of underbalcs. The August Wilson Theatre has a really low, long overhang from the balcony. In fact, at my mix position, I don't see anything above the bridge, so I don't see any of the projections. We have a row of JF80s back there to cover the parts where the 695s don't reach, and we also have a row of them upstairs. They really just cover the last two and a half rows for intelligibility. We have the dV-DOSC for the cluster, which gets really good coverage up there in the balcony.
What kind of processing and effects are you using?
The XTAs. Mostly 226s, and I think a couple of 200s. We've got a Lexicon 480 for band and vocal reverb.
What have been the biggest challenges for you on this show?
The audience definitely comes in with an expectation. We're not playing to a typical theatre audience. This is a different audience. This is the Four Seasons audience.
When one of them says, "we put Jersey on the map," people cheered.
When they do the line about the Rahway Correctional Facility, that always gets a cheer, too. It's funny. We have an obligation to meet the expectation of that show. They come in and really scrutinize what these guys sound like. Do they believe that these are the Four Seasons? So I would say that the prime challenge on a daily basis is to recreate what we all made in the rehearsal process; what the director wanted and what Steve Kennedy wanted. Bob Gaudio was also very involved in the rehearsal process. He was the Season who was the main songwriter.
It's really just being a vehicle for what they're doing onstage. Let's face it–if they sucked, we wouldn't be here. They're really doing something pretty incredible up there. In a large sense sound-wise, we have to be able to let them do what they're doing. Let them hear each other. It always amazes me the response that we get. They just really love them.
As far as other challenges, the transitions in this show are tricky. Des McAnuff, the director, is very focused on the sound. A lot of directors don't care about the sound, but Des really cares about the sound, which means you're under a microscope while he's there. Every transition has music. There's always something that starts in one scene and takes you into this other scene. What that means for the mixer is listening to multiple things at once and having to make two contrary things happen in the transition. It's unlike most shows in that respect. You can't just leave the underscoring there. You have to make it move and go away.
