For theatergoers who remember The Play That Goes Wrong, the daffy murder-mystery production that (purposely) went awry on Broadway, the follow-up Peter Pan Goes Wrong delivers another hilarious take on a small theater’s attempt to stage a famed play with disastrous results. Mismatched sounds and choreography, falling set pieces, flying failures, and electric shocks abound in this mirthful crowd-pleaser that recently ended its extended Broadway engagement and has started up a five-week Los Angeles run at the Ahmanson Theatre. The show is a great exercise in controlled chaos, from the choreography of the actors to the well-executed sound design that enhances the frenetic pace and tumultuous pratfalls.
With more than 50 sound production credits to her name, Ella Wahlström has designed the show’s sound from the start. Nearly a decade ago, creator Mischief Theatre’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong began life in a small venue in London. It has since completed two UK tours and has also visited Australia and Canada. The show combines disaster onstage with encouraged heckling and crowd call-and-response during its second act, adding both to the energy level in the room as well as challenges for the live mixer.
For the New York run, John Sibley was the A1 and Michael Carrico the A2, with Dillon Cody the production sound engineer. One of Wahlström’s two associate designers in the UK, Tom Shipman, is transferring the sound design for Los Angeles. The other UK associate is Josh Liebert.
Wahlström says the initial production did not utilize microphones. In fact, the musical number at the start of Act Two originally featured prop mics and lip-synched performances. Things have changed since then — including the production on Broadway.
“There’s always been a sort of play with the aesthetics,” explains Wahlström. “If it’s been amplified, it’s been amplified totally and obviously. And if it’s not, then I try to make sure we remain as natural as possible, because one of the key things in this show — and I think comedy in general — is you have to be able to relate to the person on stage. If you don’t feel their pain and their embarrassment and their struggle to find a solution to their problem, it’s not going to work. You have to lean in to concentrate and feel the pain of the person who is there.”
She says radio mics on the cast (DPA 4061s with Sennheiser transmitters) are “absolutely crucial” to the show now, because Sibley needs to ride the levels due to the varying laughter and noise levels from the audience. He told Wahlström that to get back to the naturalistic level that she preferred, he had to ride the levels a lot.
“And I said, don’t worry about the riding. Once people are laughing, even if it sounds amplified compared to a previous scene, they will forgive it because they’re laughing at the same time,” says Wahlström. “But we need to bring the volume level down so that the audience will quiet down and hear the next gag, because these jokes are rapid fire. There’s always something visual or verbal going on onstage — a set piece falls down or someone forgets [something]. With something going on all the time, you have to concentrate. You can’t rewind every 10 seconds to go back — what did they mean by that? You’ll lose the pulse very quickly if you don’t listen to it. Our cast is very, very good at doing this — playing the audience and making sure they pipe down to hear the next gag. That’s what we’re doing with the vocal reinforcement as well.”
Peter Pan Goes Wrong has about 100 sound cues, including a car horn that illogically keeps emerging, pan pipes not synched to a cast member’s “performance,” a couple of staged electric shocks, loud backstage thuds and crashes, some music for the cast to sing to and, very notably, the sound of loud squealing coming from the headset of one inept cast member who needs to have his lines fed to him. Wahlström says that although the screeching headphone sound is unrealistic, as a gag, its sonic power is very effective and funny. “The fact that it makes a noise is much funnier than to analyze what the noise actually is,” she says.
Real Live Sound Effects
There are even some organically produced sound effects. A highly notable one comes from a crash box offstage that is miked, with the stage manager rattling it on cue. It’s a wooden box filled with metal parts used during a scene in the children’s bedroom where each of the top two levels of a three-level bunk bed drops down at separate times onto the one above it. They don’t completely drop and crush the actors below, of course. But the unexpected gag elicits howls from the audience.
Knaps props also factor into practical sound generation from an operator monitoring the action from the wings, and here they include a slapstick, a headboard, a crash box and a velcro rip. Each knap sound effect is timed to the action, comes from the right direction, and — when it comes to stage fighting — possesses a realistic quality to it for genuine impact. This way, things like sword clangs don’t sound canned.
“In slapstick, the sound effects are not meant to be realistic, but their timing and volume are a crucial part of the physical comedy,” says Wahlström. “But the real value in having them operated live is that the timing is impeccable, and the quality of the sound is live; there’s variation in the delivery and it ties the sound to the real world of the actors on stage.
“Lots of things on stage that go wrong can only exist if they’re safe in reality,” Wahlström adds. “And to make something safe, there are lots of materials that don’t sound particularly dangerous. I’ve needed to go that extra bit noisier with the crash boxes, adding those metal chains [around the crash boxes] to make sure that we’re masking the sound of brakes and [rubber] padding, or it makes it very underwhelming.”
The same goes for sound effects when people are slamming into or being hit by things, except those slapstick sound effects sound funny rather than painful. Conversely, when the maid accidentally rips out one of the wall sconces, the sound of velcro being ripped off is masked by Sibley lowering her levels briefly. (So in this instance, it’s not a knap prop. Velcro factors in elsewhere.)
As Wahlström explains about such a moment, “Do we want the story to be that the sconce was attached to the wall with velcro, or do we want to tell the story of the actor being so frustrated with the misbehaving lights that she chooses in the moment to pull one off the wall in order to continue her song? The sillier and more difficult the choice, the funnier the joke is. When designing for plays, storytelling comes always first.”
The miking on the actors is more reinforcement than strong amplification. But at one point in Act Two, Tinkerbell gets “electrocuted,” so the troupe’s power goes out. During the onstage confusion, some sonic clarity needs to be retained, so DPA 4021s used as foot mics help to give a sonic lift there.
A big source of laughter during Peter Pan Goes Wrong, and one that helps with the “backstage drama” that plays out onstage, is the inclusion of accidentally recorded sound cues that get triggered during the show. Specifically, they are conversations between various cast members ridiculing or gossiping about other Cornley rep players. During one of them, the actor who plays the crocodile reveals to a rep member that he is in love with the woman who plays Wendy (who is sleeping with the man who plays Pan). This invokes both laughs from the audience and sympathy for the lovelorn man.
Vocal Matching
Having multiple cast members and numerous understudies means that, when someone subs for another player, the “accidental” recordings need to reflect this change on a particular night or nights. Wahlström says that over the years, she ended up with numerable combinations of actors having to do these voiceovers, and they all play back on QLab.
“We now have a system where, if we have a new understudy, we can just go to the studio with the template, and they will have to speak to the same rhythm of the template recording,” explains Wahlstorm. “Just so that we can match them with any other casting combination. And in QLab, we have a very nice arming/disarming system where we can choose who is playing every night so they get their own voiceovers. That system has been evolving for years, but it’s one of the fun parts as well.” This voiceover library stems back to earlier UK productions, so if an older cast member subs for or returns to the show, their voiceover audio can be plugged in easily enough.
Similarly, the DiGiCo SD10T console at FOH has software that aids in the live mixing as well. “The software allows for multiple players to play same the characters, so you can have a different actor playing the same character and you can adapt to their settings seamlessly for our show,” says Wahlström. “Software has been crucial with that. You don’t have to run a completely new channel and new settings and a new desk layout. You can still continue your mix, you just pick which player you need that evening – choosing who’s doing your voiceovers today, choosing the right ones for the playback. It’s a very flexible system.”
The biggest sonic moment of the show occurs when the revolving turntable featuring three separate sets keeps spinning, and the action in and between each set piece gets more frenetic and out of control. To emphasize this chaos, an upstage d&b audiotechnik B2 subwoofer creates a strong rumble for this climactic moment. (The rest of the P.A. system is Meyer Sound.)
“I used to get notes on a previous run in London that the nuts on the revolve were loosening due to the rumble of the sub,” Wahlström recalls. “That made me smile, because that’s what it needs to sound like. The set needs to shake. It needs to feel like it’s coming apart at any moment. And as far as I’m concerned, tightening a couple of nuts is much easier than making a thousand people laugh.”
