The big buzzworthy show at this year’s Tony Awards, A Strange Loop, garnered 11 nominations and two wins, including Best Musical. The story of a 20-something man who is black, queer, overweight and struggling with self-esteem is the first of its kind on Broadway. Due to its universality and compelling narrative, writer/composer Michael R. Jackson’s very personal show resonated with mainstream audiences.
One of this show’s Tony nominees, sound designer Drew Levy, came aboard in 2021 at an off-Broadway production. A Strange Loop evolved over many years, so Levy learned what he needed to balance a show that combines traditional musical theater with modern rock energy. “I learned a lot about monitoring on stage and how to do that as cleanly as possible at a level that I was initially quite uncomfortable with,” he says. The show’s not rock-concert loud, yet still intense.
“This show is largely about the words and the music, and finding that place where it can be loud and present and we can feel the music yet not lose the words is the tricky part,” explains Levy. “Michael R. Jackson wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. But he also wrote all the music, and it’s equally important. There are some rich vocal harmonies. We have an actual bass singer, and making his voice present enough so it reads and you get the very bottom of the harmony that holds it all up was a challenge in previous iterations. I had to pay extra attention to that to make all that work.”
In the show, young Usher is an actual usher (for The Lion King) and an NYU musical theater student. He’s trying to write his great musical, and the show is about him going through that process as he deals with personified “Thoughts” portrayed by six cast members. These same actors also play other characters — including his parents who disapprove of his sexual orientation.
In the opening number, the Thoughts swirl around him, chipping away at his confidence and exploiting his fears. “That’s probably the hardest number,” says Levy. “They’re all moving about, they’re all finishing each other’s sentences. Nobody actually says a complete thought all the time in that song, so it’s keeping track of who’s saying what to put it all together. It certainly keeps our mixer [Jillian Marie Walker] on her toes.”
Vocal Variance
In all, there are seven cast members and six orchestra players. The actors have quite a dynamic range, from the high tenor of lead Jaquel Spivey to the low bass vocals of Antwayn Hopper and Jason Veasey. Levy put an extra microphone on the two bass singers (a Broadway rarity). They each wore a normal headmic and one on their back, Levy says, “to get that chest cavity resonance to add to the bottom-end of the voice, to get a little more gain before feedback than we would get otherwise.”
Actor mics are DPA 6061’s, with Lectrosonics SSM micro transmitters and a TiMax Tracker D4. The tracking system “tells a DS100 d&b Soundscape system to move all the actors around — another thing we’re doing to get the vocal separation right — and track their position so we can get more spatial separation of the voice and the instruments. We still use the surrounds to some effect, but it’s more about being able to locate who’s talking and where the voices are coming from when it’s loud and the lights are dark and sometimes moody. It was really important for keeping track of the Thoughts as they swirl around.”
In the pit, there are six musicians, including two keyboardists on MainStage rigs, with Key 1 being musical director/conductor Rona Siddiqui. Levy had fun experimenting with mics. The main guitarist plays electric, acoustic and banjo, while Key 2 plays electric and acoustic guitars. The acoustics and banjo are DI-ed, but the guitars also have AEA KU5A ribbon mics on them. The electric guitar runs through a Kemper effects processor/amp simulator.
“The concept has always been, ‘we don’t see the band,’” says Levy. “We’re not aware of anybody but Usher and his Thoughts. So the band’s in a room we built in the basement, but we wanted to give them the ability to rock out without getting in the way. We can’t have the electric guitar wailing through an amplifier and also hear the flute. It’s just never going to work.”
The drummer is visible in an isolation booth through a window. The electric bass is DI-ed through an A-Designs REDDI. The upright bass has a DPA 4099 on it, and also goes through a Grace DI, that lets the bassist mute/unmute the acoustic bass with one pedal. The reed player has a 4099 attached to the flute just for “a really isolated and nice pickup,” says Levy. “We have a Schoeps CMC641 on the upper part of the reeds — clarinet and the upper part of the saxophone — and a Neumann TLM 170 R to get the bell of the bass clarinet.”
On drums, there’s a KM 184 for hi-hat and, under the snare, a right-angle SM57 on snare top. The setup also includes Sennheiser E604’s on toms, beyerdynamic M 160s for overheads and a dual-capsule Audio-Technica AE2500 on the kick. “It has a condenser and a dynamic mic in one body, which is cool because they’re already phase-aligned,” says Levy, of the AE 2500. “It comes out to two channels, and we can mix and match a little to fit the style of the song.”
The Mix
A Strange Loop is mixed on an Avid S6L. “It’s not that many hard inputs, but the band is all doubled input, so we can do summing for their Avioms,” remarks Levy. “We don’t have a separate monitor mixer. We’re doing all the Aviom summing with a different set of inputs, so we can use plug-ins, do inserts and do things to the instruments without affecting the musicians. They’re listening to different channels.” The P.A. speakers are mainly d&b audiotechnik E and Y series, driven by d&b D20s and D80s.
The cast really wanted to feel the sound onstage. “We tried to give them more of a live monitoring feeling,” says Levy. “We had to do a few tricks with doubling [and] tripling inputs and using VCAs to control things going on and off, so they’re not overwhelmed by sound, but get a nice clean mix onstage. There are 20 or 22 speakers built into the deck, all pointed up. We had to work around all the automation tracks to make that work.”
One standout number in the show is a dark song dealing with Usher’s cousin, dying of AIDS, performed as a righteous Tyler Perry-style gospel number. It has cast members on two levels and a full sound. “Actually, the gospel number is one of the easier numbers,” reveals Levy. “It’s challenging in that you really want to hear the mix and get the stuff, but the bass of the gospel style is the preacher and the organ and the bass. An organ takes up a lot of sonic space, but that made it simpler in a lot of ways. We use effects and delay with his voice to make it sound like a new space, which is one of the times we put the vocals in the surrounds.”
Regarding A Strange Loop, Levy said, “stylistically, it’s a lot different than the last Broadway show I did, so there was nothing groundbreaking in what I ended up doing. But it built on a lot of things I had coming along for a few years. I learned a lot just about integrating all those different pieces and putting those together was really successful.”
