While musicals and revivals continue to dominate Broadway, a number of high-profile personalities have bravely decided to stage intimate one-man shows. Leading the pack is Billy Crystal, whose autobiographical 700 Sundays has proven to be a sold-out sensation on the Great White Way. Deceptively simple in terms of sound and lighting design, Crystal's show is an emotional, moving piece about coming to terms with the death of his father during his teen years and his subsequent rise to fame. One of the sound designers for the show is John Shivers, who has worked as associate sound designer on many large-scale productions including Aida, The Producers, Hairspray and Titanic. Like many young men, Shivers originally wanted to be a rock star, and spent his youth playing guitars in band, learning about amplification and eventually recording. His first professional gig was as a recording engineer in Philadelphia, and he also worked for a while at the famed Electric Lady Studios. He later went on tour with Dionne Warwick. Here he talks about the transition from over-the-top musicals to a sonically understated monologue.
700 Sundays is different than the big musicals you've worked on. What was it like going from large ensemble shows to a one-man show with minimal sound design?
It was definitely a departure. In some ways, it was much more relaxing. In terms of the system design, it was quite a bit less sophisticated. But the more challenging part of it was that everything seemed so exposed in that there was so little going on–one guy onstage telling a story. You don't have the dancing girls or the big set pieces moving, the sinking ship or whatever it might be. Everybody was really focused on the details, perhaps more than a big musical would be.
Both you and Steve Canyon Kennedy are listed as sound designers.
I joked about it, because there were basically five guys there. There was an associate, Chris Luessman, who really put most of the show together because he had done it out in La Jolla, so the bulk of the sound effects were pretty much laid in. And we had an assistant, Walter Trarbach, and a production engineer, Phil Lojo, then Steve and I.
Chris basically put the show together, then Walter came in because Steve and I were finishing up The Producers in London. Walter came in and ran all the rehearsals with Billy, so the details that needed to be tweaked and changed from the La Jolla production were taking place there. When we came into the theater, it was a lot of
polishing, setting the sound levels and EQ-ing Billy's microphone. He was very particular about the mic rig over his ear being as unobtrusive as possible and comfortable for him, so we definitely spent time tweaking that.
Where did you place his microphone?
Over his right ear. It was a Sennheiser MKE2 Platinum with a Countryman B6 as a back-up. The B6 is so unobtrusive and not a bad sounding mic. Although we prefer the MKE2 Golds for sound, the Platinum gives you quite a bit thinner cable, so that becomes more unobtrusive than the Golds. The B6 was mounted just behind the MKE2 in a single rig.
Which speakers did you use?
The proscenium speakers are Meyer UPA-1Ps, and then we have 11 JBL C1s across the downstage hedge and for front fills. We have six EAW JF80s for under-balcony delays and eight JF80s for surrounds. There are a couple of UPM-1Ps for box fills, just to get the extreme sides of the theater up above, and then the seven L-Acoustics dV-DOSCs in the center cluster.
We used the SFX playback system for the first time. Typically we use an Akai sampler for all the sound effects and even click tracks, but this show has a lot of long pieces of music, so it really would have exceeded the RAM capacity of the Akais. You would need to get into using virtual RAM from the Akai, which draws from the hard drive in real time.
And there would be a chance for some errors, correct?
Exactly; under those conditions, we had heard of some stability issues with this technique. I have to say with the Akai samplers I've never ever had any sort of glitch when loading into RAM. We've used them on a ton of shows–Lion King, The Producers, Hairspray–and multiple productions of them. The SFX was a little bit glitchy in the beginning.
You have some select sound effects cued during the show. Both in terms of the effects and his voice, what did you find to be an acceptable level that everyone could hear but was not too loud?
It's really getting to comfortable levels so that everybody can hear every word in every seat of the house. We tried to set up the system so it's smooth across the entire audience. If you sit right in front of a speaker, you're obviously going to be getting a bit more level than when you're sitting in the back of the house, but the delays help to combat that a bit. You can put more energy underneath the balcony. We used the dV-DOSCs, a line array system, for the cluster balcony, which when set up properly works reasonably well to focus energy towards the back of the house.
It was reasonably smooth throughout the house. For the overall level, you make it as loud as it has to be. I don't think either Steve or I are really into driving the point home, especially with an intimate show like this. It doesn't serve it well to clobber people over the head.
You and Steve have worked on a lot of shows together. What is it about your chemistry that clicks?
I think we have very similar artistic ideas when it comes to sound. I think that was pretty evident right from the start when I mixed Tommy for him on a national tour back around '94. We hit it off immediately. In working together over the years, we have developed a communication where we don't always need to speak things. We hear the same things at the same time. If Steve's sitting out in the house listening to something, and I'm back at the console with the engineer, often I will be putting my hand on a fader that is either too low or too high initially, making a correction simultaneously to Steve's calling on the radio and saying, "Turn the trumpet down."
What else are you working on?
We have a couple of new productions of old shows. We're doing a production of Aida in Korea and moving the Sydney Lion King to Melbourne this summer. I also have an ongoing responsibility to our current productions, doing supervision all over. I just go in for four or five days, depending upon where I am, and take notes, maybe make a few little EQ adjustments, just to maintain the show and keep it as true to the original design as possible. Shows always have a tendency to evolve or devolve over the course of time.
Do you prefer working something like dramas and one-man shows or musicals?
Having not had a lot of experience doing plays, for me musicals are more interesting. You have more elements, and I like live music and having that mixed as opposed to doing playback and sound effects, which are probably my least favorite things to do. The challenge is presenting the music and the performances of the actors in the best way possible. That's what thrills me about it.
