Stephen Sondheim’s Company, first staged on Broadway in 1970, was a groundbreaking musical that retains its social relevance today. The latest Broadway version is a gender-swapped revival starring Katrina Lenk as Bobbie, a woman with three boyfriends and continual pressure from various friends, family and herself to decide whether she should settle down at age 35. This latest Broadway hit is also the first musical for veteran theatrical sound designer Ian Dickinson, who first worked on it in London’s West End. Talk about baptism by fire.
Dickinson, whose credits include Angels In America and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, had worked frequently with director Marianne Elliott, beginning in the mid-1990’s at The Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, UK. Elliott had previously done the musical The Light Princess at the National Theatre, and she was confidant that Dickinson would be able to tackle the challenges posed by the Sondheim revival. Despite having designed sound for plays at The National with a live band and with radio mics, as Dickinson notes, “it’s just a different beast doing musicals.”
The first time he did the show in London, Dickinson went to see a lot of other musicals beforehand, and there was a common takeaway. “I couldn’t hear vocals,” he notes. “A lot of the time, we just didn’t know what people were saying. Obviously with this show, you’ve got to hear what everyone’s saying all the time. So providing a real clarity to the vocals was the paramount thing for me. And the [Company] scenes in the box — where they’re all singing together — are tricky. So we were quite fortunate — it just seemed to work with a combination of good luck and a good mix.”
The original Broadway production of Company, which up-ended traditional musical theater conventions (and won six Tony Awards), remains an exhilarating and challenging work of art. Iconic composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim (who managed to see this incarnation of his famed show before he passed away last November) often has vocal melodies and harmonies riding over each other, creating delightful dissonance at times, along with rapid-fire wordplay. That is especially true in the opening birthday sequence where Bobbie and the 13 other cast members are crammed into a square box that’s only about 10 feet per side in the middle of the stage, and their voices interweave and collide.
Unraveling the Box
“I was terrified, because I saw the design of it in a meeting before we got anywhere near rehearsals,” recalls Dickinson. “You don’t want to be the stick in the mud who says, ‘You know what, that’s not going to work. That’s going to be a nightmare.’” Instead, he said, “‘You have to understand that this is going to cause a few problems.’ Everyone’s like, ‘Well, what do you think it’s gonna sound like?’ And I was like, ‘Well, it’s going to sound like 14 people singing in a box probably. That’s my educated best guess.’ And I was really worried about it.”
Making sure the mix was crisp and clear was essential to opening up the show and drawing the audience in. Some musicals begin with a fluffy number to warm things up, but Company’s title song throws us right into the story’s central conflict and an aural hurricane of words. Throughout their show, the large cast often performs musical numbers of varying ensemble configurations both wide and more narrow. Characters are often “boxed in” to some rooms as part of the symbolism of the show.
Foldback to the Rescue
“Obviously, everyone’s on omnidirectional microphones and singing into each other,” says Dickinson. “It’s a really, really tricky sequence to do, and they also need foldback, so you’ve got to be judicious in what you give them. Because if you get too much in that box, the imaging would get mushy, and we’d get all the problems that we know about when you’re trying to defeat physics. We had to work our way through — not all of the mics are live all at the same time. It wouldn’t work that way. So you have to rely on your mixer to a massive degree as well. I’ve got a really good mixer (Ty Lackey) on Broadway. I’m lucky.”
Dickinson notes that, for this sequence, the actors really have to rely on and trust in each other, and he had to ascertain how little he could get away with giving them and having them still feel comfortable. He has two small foldback speakers (d&b audiotechnik E4s) in the upstage of the box and two downstage, so he could not send much level to them.
“Not everyone can hear the foldback all the time because they’re also wandering around the box,” he elaborates. “So they may start in one position, and then suddenly they’ll all do a big move. I think it’s about whoever’s in the hot seat, then we have to follow that person. I have to be guided by how they’re singing and key into what they’re doing until they all move, and then there’s a different person [in the hot seat] that everyone follows. That’s how we got through it. That was the most stressful bit, but it was quite rewarding once we got it right.”
It also turned out to be fortuitous that the box structure for Bobbie’s living room (from scenic designer Bunny Christie) was constructed with “a few nooks and crannies and slots so the sound can escape a bit. I’m not saying this is the clearest sound mix ever, but [given] the circumstances, I think we get quite close to it.”
Great Team, Great Gear, Great Show
Company’s live mixer, Ty Lackey, previously worked on Matilda. Along with kudos for Lackey’s support, Dickinson credits associate designer Maggie Burke, with whom he’s worked “a few times now.” Dickinson adds, “It’s good to have a good team behind you. You try to see the bigger picture and get your head across all the variables about what’s happening and what might happen. I relied heavily on Maggie to do certain bits and bobs. And I relied on Ty to suggest things I might not have thought about.”
The Company cast is miked up with Shure Axient Digital mics with DPA 4061 capsules (Dickinson’s default radio mic setup), and the 14-piece orchestra has a mix of mics. These include Shure SM81s for congas, toys, violin (overhead), and viola (overhead), Beta 57s for trumpet and trombone, DPA 4011Es for brass and woodwinds, and 4099s on violin, viola, cello, and double bass. The drum kit is captured with a combo of Audix D2/4/6/i5, Beyer 201, AKG 414s, and Neumann KM184s. Lackey mixes the musical on a DiGiCo SD7T.
When the orchestra was first placed on the catwalk above the stage, it moved around a bit until they made the structure more rigid. The drummer had to be placed in a remote room because they did not have enough room for the entire band, but that arrangement was a blessing in disguise.
“I think we would have struggled more if the drummer was on the platform,” says Dickinson. “I think it’s quite nice for the actors. There’s not an awful lot of foldback going onto stage, to be honest, and I’m just trickling it in where the actors particularly ask for it, because a lot of it does come down from the platform. I think they feel quite a nice connection to it that you wouldn’t normally have if the band was remote somewhere or even in a pit. If you sit in the mezzanine, you obviously get quite a lot of the acoustic band, because you’re on that same level with them. So I was often just trying to even out across the space into the orchestra and then higher up towards the rear of the mezzanine. I was trying to keep it natural sounding for everyone. It just works. It’s actually quite a good position for the band.”
Dickinson’s P.A. rig for Company includes a vast menagerie of d&b audiotechnik products including Y10-Ps and V10-Ps for the proscenium, B22s for orchestra subs, E6s for front and side fills, E4s, 5s, T10s, and 16Cs for foldback, and Y12s for vocals arrays. He has four Meyer UPJuniors for onstage foldback and 22 d&b D20 amplifiers.
As for plug-ins, Dickinson uses the Valhalla Shimmer for when the cast members swirl around Bobbie and fire out their opinions. “We call them the ‘Ghostly Bobbies’ when they first all walk into the auditorium,” he explains, of the vocal refrains that emerge at the start. “I also use Soundtoys’ EchoBoy as my go-to delay. Then we’ve just got a mixture of TC Electronic 4000 reverb units and a Lexicon PCM bundle again as a plug-in. I basically used Ableton Live as a host for all my plug-ins. There’s a bit of a mix of all of them across all the instruments.”
While Company was certainly a daunting first musical to tackle, Dickinson found the experience invigorating and inspiring. He praises Elliott’s clever direction and Lenk’s impassioned performance.
“I had a fantastic time,” he declares. “I mean, I was very scared and it was very stressful at times. But I learned such a lot. I really want to go and do another musical now. I mainly do plays. That’s what I’m known for doing, I suppose. But I really enjoyed it.”
