Fueled by the Americana music of the Avett Brothers, the recent Broadway production of Swept Away cast off as a tale of a young man (Little Brother) who seeks adventure with whalers on the high seas, with his disapproving older sibling (Big Brother) unintentionally trapped on the journey with him. But a calamitous storm leads to a ship disaster, with the brothers, the captain and his mate adrift in a lifeboat hoping for rescue. It’s a show with an upbeat spirit that turns quite dark, a refreshing twist in the modern musical theater landscape.
Despite the large spectacle that takes place during a pivotal moment and the overall scale of the narrative, as well as the striking ship set piece designed by Rachel Hauck, the production’s Tony Award-winning sound designer, John Shivers, wanted to maintain a sense of realism in terms of the audio. He also sought to find a smooth balance within the musical elements.
Banjo Takes Center Stage
The banjo provides a prominent presence in the string-dominated eight-piece band, and Shivers has worked with that instrument on shows like Shucked and 9 to 5. Furthermore, the band for Swept Away features numerous multi-instrumentalists, resulting in a rich sound coming from a smaller pit. Pianist Will Van Dyke is also the musical director and plays the accordion and harmonica, for instance.
“Brian Usifer is an amazing orchestrator, and he loves to use many colors in his orchestrations,” Shivers tells FRONT of HOUSE. “He gets a lot of variety and color out of those players, partially because they’re playing multiple instruments and largely due to the way he cleverly orchestrates. He’s very innovative. Brian and I seem to work very well together; I think we have a very similar aesthetic in terms of what things should sound like.”
Regarding the banjo, Shivers notes, “It speaks quite loudly. It barks, you might even say. It’s just a matter of getting it blended in at the right level. That’s what it’s all about — finding the right placement to position the instruments within the mix. I rely heavily on good orchestrations and skilled playing. When people tell me, ‘The show sounds great,’ I respond, ‘Thank you, I appreciate it. However, I really need to give much of the credit to the people who are producing the sound and structuring it — in this case, the performers and the orchestrator’.”
Throughout the production, Shivers enhances the sound design in distinct and subtle ways. At the start of the show, three ghosts haunt the surviving members of the lifeboat, and their voices have reverb on them, but not so much that it’s distracting. “I want to maintain a bit of realism while trying to work these elements in almost subliminally,” Shivers explains. “But I have to find a fine line, as I think I am more sensitive to reverberation, where maybe the layperson wouldn’t pick up on it immediately.”
When the ship is leaving port, Shivers injects “a little bit of bow wash and creaking sounds. I try to be super subtle with these things — almost subliminal — because you don’t really want to call attention to it. It’s supporting the story and not distracting from what the focus should be at that moment.”
Challenges Aplenty
One audio challenge for Swept Away, especially given how little atmospheric sound emerges, was keeping ambient noise from the theater from intruding into a production set in the 1800s. Shivers says they were fortunate that lighting designer Kevin Adams chose mostly silent moving lights, and that the technical staff was “very helpful in reducing any ambient sound coming from the fog machines, etc. We really isolated any sort of ambient noise, and fortunately, the house HVAC is pretty quiet too. I think that’s really important for a show like this, where there are moments of complete silence. The technical team was great; they put some baffling around the several fog machines, which were a little bit noisy.”
Conversely, there’s an incredible moment in the show where a massive storm tosses the ship about, throwing men across the bow and overboard. The music performed at that time melds into a tumultuous soundscape that intensifies the onstage drama. It begins during the song “Murder In The City,” performed by the brothers and the ensemble. The music starts becoming dissonant, foreshadowing the calamity to come, as the sounds of waves and wind glide in.
After thunder and lightning effects kick in, the action on the bow goes into slow motion. Shivers offers big compliments to David Neumann for choreographing the movements of the cast as the ship gets buffeted about. It’s an illusion, as the ship’s set doesn’t move in that moment, but the actors do, throwing the audience into the action as a result.
“I think David’s slow-motion sequence, is particularly brilliant in how he has the actors moving,” says Shivers enthusiastically. “In some cases, he has them hook their foot around a piece of scenery so they can slowly lean way back to give the illusion of slow motion. It’s really good. That moment is quite dramatic; by contrast it basically goes silent there. The thunder strikes, and then we hear the ensemble singing a reprise of ‘Lord, Lay Your Hand On My Shoulder.’ It’s quite wet, and we put it into the surrounds to enveloping the audience. There’s also the sound of a bell and a piano slowly striking notes. Then all hell breaks loose again when we really hit the storm, with wind, thunder, waves crashing, timber breaking, and men screaming. The screaming is somewhat indistinct. You hear a human voice screaming — a deathly scream — and even if it doesn’t register exactly, it gives you an uneasy feeling. I have them coming from different locations in the surrounds to add to the confusion.”
Neumann’s choreography was a boon to Shivers’ sound design. “It enabled me to use sound effects that, on their own, wouldn’t have made much sense or certainly wouldn’t have been as effective,” notes Shivers. “But when the boat doesn’t actually lurch— it appears to, as the cast rolls from one side to the other—I added waves, bottles crashing, and barrels rolling in sync with those movements. It all works really well together to create the illusion of movement.”
During this storm sequence, characters disappear from the ship as the set piece is lifted into a vertical position, and a lifeboat for the survivors (Little Brother, Big Brother, the ship’s mate, and the captain) is brought out. The lifeboat actually moves around the stage and swivels into different positions for various scenes during this latter part of the story.
The System
For Swept Away, the veteran sound designer chose KV2 Audio speakers. He has been using this Czech company’s product line on his shows for close to a decade while moving away from line arrays.
“They’re point-source speakers,” explains Shivers of the KV2 line. “There’s a low, mid, and high-frequency driver in a single cabinet with wider dispersion than what you get from a single line array element. They offer a transparency that I just don’t find in line arrays in general.” He adds, “Line arrays can be pretty real estate-hungry as well. Some arrays are quite large, but with the [KV2] boxes, we’re able to squeeze in a little better. I think it makes the lighting and set designers happier.”
The Swept Away audio team is running a DiGiCo SD 7T console, with the cast miked up with DPA 6061s, 4066s and Sennheiser MKE-1s and SK 6212 transmitters. Shivers’ sound mates include associate sound designers Kevin Kennedy and Kevin Sweetser, associate / A1 Brian Rau, A2 Sean Luckey, and Nick Borisjuk for production audio. His approach to miking the actors for the show was a little different than usual.
“The theater is intimate — I probably had the mics pulled back further than I would have on a show in a larger theater,” reveals Shivers. “I paid closer attention to the visual impact of seeing a mic. We were lucky with the ensemble, which was helped by the fact that pretty much everybody has a beard. As a result, we were able to essentially use boom mics and keep them completely hidden. I couldn’t do that with everyone. Neither Little Brother nor Big Brother has a beard, and with John Gallagher, the mate, who does have a beard, I decided to use a forehead mic position regardless. There’s a different quality to the sound from the two different positions. For me, the forehead mic sounds more natural; it’s more open-sounding. While you can’t get as much gain before feedback, I find there’s just a little bit more clarity in that position.”
One concern Shivers had going into the show was the presence of the fans used during the storm, not just for ambient sound reasons. The “wind” could have potentially blown into the mics on the cast. “As it turned out, there wasn’t that much wind reaching the stage,” he says. Of the fans, he adds, “At first, I thought, ‘Oh no, this is going to be so noisy.’ But it didn’t end up being a problem because they were only turned on during moments of big sound effects and big music.”
Of the show in general, he states, “I was so happy to be working with this entire creative team. They are all at the top of their game, resulting in an extremely well-crafted show.”
