The Broadway revival of Once Upon a Mattress is a well-deserved success. The mirthful musical variation of The Princess and the Pea takes royal courtship to another level. In this variation on the Hans Christian Andersen tale, with the show recently revised and modernized by Amy Sherman-Palladino, a young prince (Michael Urie) seeks a suitable spouse, but his domineering mother (Ana Gasteyer) rejects all suitors. When a disheveled, quirky candidate named Princess Winnifred (Sutton Foster) arrives to claim her spot, she sends the controlling queen and kingdom into disarray with her unpredictable behavior, which the Prince loves.
A big part of the show’s appeal is the wild and hilarious physical comedy of Foster, who’s been compared to Carol Burnett, who made her Broadway debut as Princess Winnifred in the original 1959 production. Foster keeps the audience enthralled from the moment she arrives onstage, and she and Urie make up a charming couple-to-be, while their frantic antics keep the sound team on their toes. Sound design is by Tony Award winner Kai Harada, with A1 Ashton McWhirter deftly helming the show’s Studer Vista 5 mixing console. McWhirter acknowledged it’s a fun challenge to keep up with Foster, who often jumps, rolls around and engages in movement that can easily ruffle her double-mic situation.
Mics in Motion
“When we were in the tech and rehearsal preview process, it was fun to try to figure out what she was going to do and how that would affect the microphone,” McWhirter told FRONT of HOUSE. “You don’t want to just turn her mic off. You want to capture a little bit of the energy of what she’s doing. She’s grunting, she’s up there making some weird noises, but then she will slam her head down, and that’s going to make a noise. That caught me a couple of times. It’s just watching what she’s doing and reacting to it. Sutton wears two microphones because of the nature of that character. When she’s on, she’s on — there’s not a lot of time to get to her. Michael wears his mic pack on his thigh. Because he does so many squats and leg-bending, we actually have more trouble with that because the transmitter gets crushed occasionally by some of his movement. But due to Sutton’s comedy and her movement, she wears her packs on her back. There’s not really a lot of stuff that goes on unless she’s putting her face on the mattress.”
It’s not just the physical comedy that presents challenges. Intimate moments of dialog and close actor proximity can be tricky as well, particularly right after the scene where Winnifred eats a lot of grapes and Lady Larken comes in, mistakes her for a maid and makes her clean her room.
Close Chats
“It’s all really close, it’s really phase-y,” McWhirter explained. “There’s a lot of extra stuff they’ve added to give it a really human feel. That scene is particularly challenging because you have to really be in line with what they’re doing every night and the rhythm that they’ve decided they’re going to do that scene, which varies a little bit. But it’s just math and a lot of moving parts.”
The FOH mixer added that a similar thing happens in Act Two before the song “Happily Ever After” begins. Lady Larken and Winnifred are sitting and talking on a sofa, “just very close-faced back and forth, delicate speaking; that happens right on top of each other, like you do when you’re talking to a person,” McWhirter said. “Those are always tough scenes to mix.”
The same strategy applies to scenes where Lady Larken and Sir Harry are speaking next to each other. “They’re lovers — you should be close and face-to-face with them, but you have the phasing issue to deal with,” McWhirter noted. “The tech and rehearsal process is for us to figure out what ratio of this microphone and that microphone is going to make it sound the best. The whole thing is fast, because it’s comedy and that can be tricky, but the whole cast is very consistent. Once you’ve done it a couple times, you can muscle-memory your way through it, unless a joke goes awry.”
Another big challenge is bleed-through. There’s a 16-piece band upstage on a raised platform, and in the show’s bigger moments, there are at least a dozen cast members on stage.
“There’s a little bit of bleed-through, so when you’re prepping for those fanfares, if you have the band up too hot, you start to get the energy of that,” McWhirter explained. “Their mic’s feeding into the system, and you’re getting their monitors from them hearing the cast. So you start to get this little extra ‘reverb,’ like how you would perceive it.”
When she was training her sub, Michelle, McWhirter advised her to wait a little bit longer for some of the bigger band pushes or the whole mix could get a bit soupy. Naturally, bleed-through is an issue on every show — bleed and phasing will always exist — but for this musical, it’s more consistent because the band is always on stage and their mics are always hot.
As McWhirter elaborated, “They’re making noise. The cast is making noise. They’ve got their monitors and foldback. That’s making noise. So as soon as you start to bring that into the system, your noise floor goes up. You get into a routine with live theatrical sound — they’re doing a show every night, things happen and go wrong, and you have to roll with it.”
The Setup
The cast is miked with Sennheiser MKE 1s with Shure Axient wireless transmitters. The Studer Vista 5 console is using approximately 150 inputs. “We have a pretty straightforward QLab setup for playback, and the orchestra is on stage. There are some overhead mics for each of the strings, high and low for reeds, a mic for each of the horns, and mics on cellos. The drum kit is very straightforward. We’ve got a couple of auxiliary percussion things going on. There’s a timpani, glocks, xylos and stuff like that. Then we’ve got two Randy Cohen rigs that are about six inputs each. Randy Cohen is our main stage programmer.”
The Mattress sound team also includes associate sound designer Bella Curry, production sound engineer Jake Scudder, and the backstage A2s Catherine Mardis and Bill Gagliano. McWhirter said the music and sound teams worked together to let the on-stage dynamics flow well, and she praised Annbritt duChateau as a wonderful conductor and music director.
“I love working with her,” McWhirter declared. “We chat about something every day because when you have a different player up there, you have a different feel. So we’re always in touch about the subs who are there or if one of our actors is sick. This whole thing is a very collaborative experience, because I can’t do what I do without the actors or without the band, and they aren’t as successful without me. We all need each other to succeed and to sell the vision of the show.”
When seated in the audience, observers will notice five line arrays hanging above the stage and two large cabinets flanking either side. But there is not an excessive amount of amplification in the Hudson Theatre, and the volume levels stay reasonable and appropriate for an old-school musical. One of the things that McWhirter enjoys about working with Harada — this is their fourth show together — is that he likes to keep things sounding natural, even with a presentational comedy that will have some peaks.
“There are moments that I think you need to lean in a little bit in our show, but I don’t think that you miss anything,” McWhirter said. “Our show is at the right level for what it is, the style that it is, and Kai’s aesthetic as a designer. We’re threading that line with all of those things really nicely.”
A Fun Place to Be
McWhirter believes that a lot of the audience is coming to see Once Upon a Mattress because of a personal connection to the show from when they were younger, either seeing it or performing it. And then, of course, there’s the cast itself.
“There’s the celebrity of it all, with Ana and Sutton and Michael, and it’s so beautifully cast that you just want to come see all of these wonderfully talented people do this silly, fun show,” McWhirter said. “And they love doing it. It’s such a fun place to work and be at — the cast, the whole company, the crew, the house staff. Everybody is so lovely, and we all enjoy being around each other. When you’re backstage, you want to stay back there. We’re having so much fun.”
Once Upon a Mattress plays at New York’s Hudson Theatre until Nov. 30, after which the production moves to Los Angeles.
This month, Bryan Reesman begins his 21st year as a FRONT of HOUSE contributor.
