Transferred from its Olivier Award-winning run in London’s West End, with co-director Miranda Cromwell onboard for Broadway, this latest incarnation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman journeys into new territory. It explores the story of struggling middle-aged salesman Willy Loman and his family through an African-American lens, and it also features musical elements that were not present in the original text but which are integrated fluidly throughout the show. Tony Award-nominated sound designer Mikaal Sulaiman re-imagined the production’s original sound design by Carolyn Downing, as she was unable to travel abroad for this Broadway run.
“There were creative aspects that I did here,” Sulaiman tells FOH. “The music director, a composer named Femi [Temowo], decided on anything that resembled music, including any moments that dealt with flutes or horns or guitar. That was all Femi and the director — they wanted to bring some new life to the folklore of this story. Culturally in the black community, music is oftentimes at the cornerstone of storytelling. I think they wanted to try to not make this just a Loman family that was an all-black Loman family, but a Loman family that was told from the black perspective. I think that was part of why they chose to go that route [with music] emblematic of blues and gospel and jazz.”
In Salesman, Loman knows he is being aged out of his traveling salesman position by younger, fiercer competitors, and he laments the fact that his two sons, Biff and Happy, who are both living at home, are failing to find their footing in the world. Loman’s wife Linda tries to keep the peace as Willy and Biff often quarrel, and Willy himself seems to be slipping into dementia. He goes into solitary, trance-like states, holding conversations with people from the past, unaware that his family feels he is becoming unhinged.
The Flute Speaks…
In one key scene during Act Two, Biff calls his mother to tell her he landed a job (that he really didn’t). The conversation features her downstage while Biff, in silhouette in a boxed area upstage, “speaks” through the recording of a low-sounding flute (Xaphoon) that mimics his jovial bravado. “In the official text, Biff doesn’t say anything,” notes Sulaiman. “She’s just on a one-sided conversation. They decided to play on that fact by having a second side of the conversation via an instrument. [It is] pre-recorded in chunks, so the actor [Sharon D. Clarke] could still keep her timing, but at the end of her lines, we could play Biff’s musical response.”
Another key musical moment occurs early in Act One when Willy is at home alone and begins scatting to some blues music that is playing in the background. It also requires coordination and finesse, but of a different sort.
“That’s actually the guitarist backstage,” explains Sulaiman. “[He] is backstage watching a video monitor and listening to Wendell Pierce say those lines so that they can be in rhythm with each other. The scatting is always different every night. We use an in-ear monitor for the backstage musician, and I’m running my system through Ableton Live to give it a little bit of vibe so it has a nice reverb and such. I use the FabFilter Pro-R [reverb filter] throughout the show. It sounds like it’s recorded, but it’s live.”
Sulaiman also brought in an element of ambient drones that are used in some moments when Loman is having breaks from reality and diving into memories from his past, not realizing that he is talking to no one but the past versions of his family in his head.
“Those are the drones that I was bringing in because I wanted to lift those moments in a way that we could really demarcate them as an audience,” says Sulaiman. “Because the way the story goes, things are so slippery in regards to his memories and the present day. That was just a way for us to not only define those times more clearly as being a memory or not a memory, but even for the performance that it in some way allows us to do these quick flashes that the director was really interested in as an aesthetic. The drone helps fill out the storytelling of that.”
The Gear
The show feature eleven cast members, many of whom play multiple roles, and one musician. The actors wear Sennheiser MKE I mics and SK 5212 transmitters. With regards to instrumentation onstage and off — there is a singer and guitarist on stage for two jazz club moments — the acoustic and electric guitar are miked with an MKE I on them, while the amp has a DPA 4006 shotgun pointed on it backstage. There’s a real organ backstage that is used at the very end for the final gospel number, which features most of the cast members singing backstage. There is also a keyboard piano used as well. Both keyboards are DI-ed. Salesman is mixed on a Yamaha CL5 handled by FOH engineer Cat Mardis. The speakers are a mix of Meyer Sound and d&b audiotechnik.
Another big audio moment happens near the end of Act One, when all the people haunting Willy’s thoughts — his family, his unsympathetic boss, and the mistress he used to see on trips to Boston — start to converge around him. Their voices all begin to echo.
“That’s a lot of that vocal processing going through Ableton just to flesh it out,” says Sulaiman. “The director really wanted us to really revisit all of those people at the end [of Act One]. It also ties into her aesthetic around the clicking and the glitches, as she calls them, that those people create in his mind.”
Those “glitches” come to life when Willy recalls certain memories captured in a series of “freeze frame” moments where quick light flashes and brief actor pauses are married to the sound of the click of a reel-to-reel tape. Funnily enough, a reel-to-reel audio recorder appears in a key scene in Act Two. “I like that most people feel that the sound is so inherently [synched] with the lights that it feels like one thing.”
The play has a wide range of speaking dynamics, yet the music does not overwhelm people’s speaking voices. Sulaiman says that the West End’s co-director Marianne Elliott came in during the tech process in New York and “was very acutely attuned to the voices and their levels,” he says. “We really wanted the actors to feel transparently amplified, so you’re not really hearing miked voices, but hearing voices that are just supported with the mics. The music needed to really ride quite low. Cat Mardis does an excellent job to make sure that we are always riding around -15/-20 dB with the instruments in general. We’re mixing pretty low while also trying to make it feel full. I try to do that by feeding a little bit of it into the surrounds as well. So you’re hearing the voices in the middle, but you’re feeling a little bit of the surround acoustics of the music.”
The SPL Challenge
Another aspect to consider is the specific audience of the show, which seems to be skewing more in the middle age and older range, especially given that this is a classic mid-20th century play. Sulaiman says he does think a lot about people’s hearing, especially older audiences.
“I think it’s a challenge in regards to a director and a designer’s desires,” he elaborates. “I don’t mind the feeling of a miked voice if I know that it’s a really tech heavy show, because clarity and intelligibility are so important. I also recognize some directors don’t aesthetically like the feeling of like a booming voice coming out of speakers, so the director [Miranda] and I found a good middle ground. There was a point where the producers were interested in not miking the actors for the show. That would have been a real challenge if that show was not miked and was just about the actors having to project.”
Death Of A Salesman is only Sulaiman’s fourth Broadway show. He admits that he’s still new to the game and learning all of the aspects of putting a show together. But he clearly has a good ear, as he received a Tony nomination on his second Broadway production — Macbeth starring Daniel Craig. And while he has worked in houses of a similar size (1,000+ seats) off-Broadway, the sound designer states that Broadway requires a certain attention to detail that he keeps learning more and more about.
“It was just really great to see how this director really thinks deeply about integrating light, sound, set and acting all as being one thing,” says Sulaiman. “I just feel like I learned a lot from Miranda Cromwell. She’s really smart and generous when it comes to design. Some directors don’t want anything. They like very dry shows because they want the audience to focus on the actors and the script. I think those are great, and as a designer, of course, it’s nice to work with people who are like, ‘Hey, let’s go for broke. Let’s try something different.’ Of course, you win some, lose some. You’re not going to win every one of them, but the risk in that is a lot more rewarding than not trying.”
Death of a Salesman opened Oct. 9, 2022 for a limited engagement at Broadway’s Hudson Theatre.
