Before joining the newest Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s classic gothic musical Sweeney Todd (which opened on March 26, 2023), Tony Award-winning sound designer Nevin Steinberg felt pangs of both nervousness and excitement. “If you’re going to do a revival that is going to be part of your docket, then you might as well do the one that everybody claims is their favorite show of all time,” he says. “For many people, it is the greatest musical ever written.”
Starring Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford, the tale of the butchering barber and the woman who makes and sells meat pies from his victims is a large ensemble show (25 in the cast, 27 in the pit). This could have been a logistical nightmare for Steinberg and his team. However, it didn’t thanks to expert singers, music supervisor Alex Lacamoire and a tightly packed — but well-miked — orchestra pit with acoustic treatments making good use of the space’s natural sound. The cast members are mostly miked with DPA 6061 lavaliers and a mix of Shure Axient and Sennheiser System 6000 digital transmitters.
Big Show, Big Ensemble
“This piece was built to be sung with a big orchestra and a big ensemble, and with a lot of respect in between those two groups musically baked into the charts, the arrangements and the music direction,” explains Steinberg. “I think that the microphones notwithstanding — because the theater is a pretty big room for a Broadway theater and has its own challenges — the goal is always to make sure that the source of the musicmaking has integrity and attention to detail. And in this case, it does.”
Steinberg notes that today’s Broadway audiences are generally used to hearing smaller orchestras. But Sweeney Todd is old school — the 26-piece orchestra has 27 players, with two doubling on a percussion set-up with everything from chimes to timpani to vibraphone. A 10-piece string section is in keeping with the original’s larger symphonic sound, which undoubtedly had a bigger orchestra for its original run. In the pit, Steinberg is using a mix of DPA, Shure, Schoeps and Neumann mics. The show’s console is a DiGiCo SD7T-Quantum with Audioström Live Professor Sound Software for outboard processing and EFX. Speakers are a mix of d&b Audiotechnik, Alcons Audio and Meyer Sound components.
“One of my biggest concerns in preparing for this was making sure we were projecting a sound out of the string section that felt energetic and clear, and had a real edge to it,” explains Steinberg, “yet also borrowed from that kind of symphonic sound that we’re used to hearing. We attacked that in two ways. All the strings have clip-on mics. In this case, Shure TwinPlex lavaliers, but they’re also mixed by section and by stand with Schoeps. And there’s a nice mix of our close mics and more general miking position for the strings, and the blend of those provide what I think is a very nice, contemporary string sound.”
Even though the show is in the large 1,500-seat Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, and even with the surround system, Steinberg and company are not blasting out the music every night. The levels are reasonable.
“It’s about respect for the material and respect for the history a little bit, and also recognizing that the story is not about volume,” says Steinberg. “The story and scale don’t necessarily mean loudness. We’re trying to create a sense of size, but not necessarily a sense of volume. Distinguishing between those is an important nuance in the work of a sound designer and my collaboration with the music department, the director and choreographer. Certainly, there’s a place in shows for things to be loud, and I’ve done some loud shows. But in this case, if I wanted to use one word to describe this Sweeney Todd experience, it is at ‘scale,’ which is something that we wanted to accomplish in all of our approaches to it, including the rest of the design team.”
Reverb also plays a subtle — and in one instance, more powerful — role in the show. During the “split screen” scene where the Beadle is confronting Mrs. Lovett about the strange goings-on at her establishment, and Tobias is locked downstairs in the bakehouse, “big house” reverb is added to the latter’s voice so when he calls up to them it sounds like he is in an underground chamber. The actors are located across from each other on stage at the time.
“That’s the one [scene] architecturally and location-wise, when they go to the cellar, [where] you definitely want some spookiness there,” says Steinberg. “But there are some other moments where we’re adding a little bit of reverb to things to give us place or memory or things like that. It’s very subtle. One place is when the judge is in court. We add a little reverb to his mic while he’s pronouncing the death sentence on the unseen defendant. Then there are some others that are quietly hidden… more psychological than explicit.”
On the other end of the scale, a subtle use of reverb for transition takes place each time the beggar woman comes on and offstage, in and out of the narrative.
“She appears from darkness and from mist, and then disappears back into darkness and mist,” notes Steinberg. “She does not just arrive on stage fully amplified. She arrives on stage through a veil of reverb when she comes in and slowly emerges from it, and then also exits into it. It’s an incredibly subtle effect, but it’s something we’ve worked really hard to do because we felt like if she just appeared, it was abrupt and didn’t really follow the physicality of what both the actor was doing, and the staging and the lighting. We were trying to match the storytelling there and help support that part of the story. It’s a very, very subtle, but I think, very, very cool way to help tell the beggar woman’s story as she makes her way through the narrative and we learn more and more about her.”
As Steinberg points out, some of the quieter uses of reverb are sounds that the audience feels more than hears, and choices have to be made about how obvious one wants to be in utilizing that sonic effect. Sometimes one can be more overt like when there is a change in location and the sound helps to offer information about the environment and mood. He compares it to the way a lighting designer can transition into a change of location through their discipline.
“But in this case, there are also times in the play where we’re suggesting internal thoughts and internal feelings versus external thoughts and external things,” says Steinberg. “Those emotional shifts can be much more subtle. They still exist, and they may not be something that an audience member clocks as a conscious thing, but I like to think that they add to the detail of a moment. And the contrast between that and nothing can be pretty powerful when it’s there and when it goes away. It can be a very subtle and still effective way to convey mood.”
Teamwork Does It
In the spirit of the teamwork that defines the show, Steinberg gives shoutouts to his audio team: Jason Crystal (associate sound designer), Jaechelle Johnson (assistant sound designer), Mike Wojchik and Reece Nunez (production sound), Andrew Ferry (FOH engineer) and Adrianna Brannon and Joseph Pfifferling (deck sound).
“With this group of people, this group of performers, and this creative team, there’s a tremendous amount of respect for the material,” declares Steinberg. “I think it does great honor to the book and the music. But I do think it is a new version of the show, in the same way that I would hope that taking on revivals you approach with a new point-of-view.”
