Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous has been cited as one of the greatest movies about rock ‘n’ roll ever made. Inspired by Crowe’s time as a writer for Rolling Stone in the 1970s, it follows the exploits of 15 year-old William Miller (who fakes being 18), a naive young scribe touring with the band Stillwater and trying to find his voice as a rock journalist. Crowe won the Best Screenplay Oscar for the film in 2001.
Now writer Crowe and Tony Award-winning composer Tom Kitt (Next To Normal, Jagged Little Pill) have teamed up to tell the tale as a Broadway musical. They streamlined the story, amplifying its key moments and Tony Award-winning sound designer Peter Hylenski (Moulin Rouge, Rock of Ages) sculpted the mix to bring the musical — which features both new music and a few classic rock tunes — to life at New York’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.
Almost Famous is about the love of music. “This doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a concert or has to be presentational,” says Hylenski. “You’re flipping between diegetic and non-diegetic throughout the evening, and we use the language of getting into the diegetic, especially when Stillwater is playing, to bring the level up and create that concert environment. But there’s a lot of story told in song. Composer Tom Kitt is really brilliant — you can’t tell where you’re fading in and out of ‘70s music he’s integrated into the show and his own composition. But as we move between the diegetic and non-diegetic, it connects really well together. That allowed us to dynamically move the show a lot more from the louder parts of the show to the super quiet parts. That’s what makes the journey enjoyable.”
Key sound effects factor into several scenes. There are street noises, environmental ambiences, the roar of a concert audience, the rumble of live rock music that emerges only when a stage door opens, and the plane and storm sounds for the big moment when the band’s small aircraft starts taking a nosedive and everyone inside confesses their secrets as they fear they’ll die.
“I always compose sound effects from a library or from recordings I do on my own and build them together in Pro Tools,” reveals Hylenski. “There’s usually pitch shifting involved and filtering and taking bits and pieces of different sounds in a library and putting them together into something.”
FOH engineer Ron Sinko mixes the show on a DiGiCo SD7T Quantum. The inputs are not maxed out, as the instrumentation for Tom Kitt’s score is straightforward and compact, as it would have been in a ‘70s rock band. In the covered pit are drums, bass, three guitarists (electric and acoustic), two keyboards (including the conductor) and a small string section. Part of the approach was contemplating what the ‘70s sound would be with modern technology and give it a little more oomph in the theater.
The electric guitars use tube Fender amp heads routed into a load box. AKG 414s capture the acoustic 6-string, 12-string, steel and nylon guitars and a mandolin. On drums, Hylenski uses his standard fare, like Mojave MA200s overheads and an SM57 and a condenser mic on the snare. “We change the sound of the snare from number to number for a different blend between the midrange of the 57 and the crisper top- and low-end of the condenser,” he says.
Cast members wear Sennheiser 6212 transmitters with MKE 1 mics that are traditional headworn, as opposed to headsets. Mic-wise, Hylenski wanted less isolation and more interplay between the characters who often move around each other onstage.
Getting a good sonic balance can be tough with headworn mics. “The harder the show hits, the louder the show is, even if it’s just for a couple moments of the show,” notes Hylenski. “This makes it tricky because they’re omnidirectional mics. It’s not a microscope, it’s a microphone, and you’d think I’m only going to hear that actor wearing that microphone when I turn their input up. But you hear the band and the people around them. It’s tricky to really get smooth, good results, and you have to eke every last ounce of those mics to make them sound effortless.”
Hylenski admits that the big group numbers are always challenging with headworn mics. “We don’t have as much separation, and a lot of what makes big group numbers fun is they’re interacting with each other,” he says. “If they’re in the Riot House, they’re partying, they’re having a great time, and in doing so, you’re pairing up with somebody and interacting and inevitably getting closer and farther from someone else’s mic. So you’re always trying to manage that and figure out how to get a great group balance and not get a ton of bleed from the stage foldback into the mic. It’s a delicate balance.”
Interestingly, the most challenging sequence to mix is “Who Are You With?” Hylenski calls it a small musical piece that carries a lot of story that introduces the four Band Aids (not groupies) including Penny Lane. It takes place outside the arena door when William is unsuccessfully trying to get backstage to interview Black Sabbath, but before he connects with Stillwater,” he says.
Regarding the number where the Band Aids get excited about the evening frolicking to come, Hylenski notes, “It’s not a giant production number. They get very close to each other and in each other’s faces, which translates into any others’ mics as well. It’s very dynamic. You’re shifting between dialog, four-part harmony, screams of excitement and William reacting. That ended up being really tricky for something you’d think would just take care of itself. We spent quite a bit of time trying to get that to land because the story is so important, and as important as the musicality of it.”
The System
For the P.A., Hylenski is once again using Meyer Sound, “but mostly based on point-source boxes like standard UPQ trapezoid boxes, which is a fantastic sounding speaker,” he says. “We’ve got quite a few of those in the room, and low-end is all Meyer 900 LFC. The delays are Meyer’s new ULTRA-X20s.”
There are some Meyer Leopard line arrays for the mezzanine and balcony coverage. But box seats close to the proscenium prevented using a line array or getting speaker positioning exactly where he would want it.
“Stage-wise, it’s a little smaller than we would have wanted, because it’s quite a big show,” Hylenski adds. “It’s a big little show. There’s a lot of scenery, and Derek [McLane] has done a great job of trying to fit everything in there. But backstage is very, very tight, and the way the show fits into the proscenium is very tight as well. We didn’t really have much room to bring the P.A. in at all and work around these boxes. We had to choose speakers that would fit around the architecture.”
Another Challenge
The Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre itself presents its own challenges. “The theater is not that large, yet it’s very reverberant,” notes Hylenski. “It doesn’t have many absorbing surfaces in the room — especially upstairs. It’s sort of like Grand Central, so trying to do this show in a room like that is challenging. It’s not forgiving in terms of reflections. The back wall is a hard plaster parabolic reflector. The sidewalls are hard plaster, upstairs has vaulted plaster ceilings and parallel plaster walls,” he says.
“As much as I’d like to walk in and put up any P.A. I want and the room will be pretty sounding, this is tough because the harder you push, a lot of midrange comes back off the walls. That was a battle, trying to keep the show sounding smooth while pushing enough level into the room to make it exciting. What you put in is always affected by the acoustics.”
Yet Hylenski’s sound design succeeds on all levels. “It’s amazing. His sound design is wonderful,” says composer/co-lyricist Tom Kitt. “It’s clear, it rocks, it serves the tone and the music. You always hear the lyrics. I think he’s done an extraordinary job.”
