It’s been nearly 30 years since The Who’s Tommy graced a Broadway stage, but the famed rock opera-turned-musical is back, with its original director, Des McAnuff leading the charge with the blessing of Who guitarist and album/show composer Pete Townshend. From the inspired cast performances to Peter Nigrini’s dazzling video work to Gareth Owen’s intricately layered sound design, this top-notch production has drawn both critical acclaim and strong box office grosses. Opening March 28 at the Nederlander Theatre, the show chronicles the journey of the titular character who is transformed from traumatized, non-communicative and abused child to beloved pinball wizard and national British hero.
Running Less Than “11”
As one might expect, the show cranks things up, but not quite at rock concert volume. “The most challenging thing about Tommy was delivering a rock ‘n’ roll level that kept the Who fans happy without alienating every musical theater person in the building,” Owen says. “We went backwards and forwards for weeks about how loud the show should be. Everyone had an opinion — some people wanted it loud, some wanted it quiet. After lots of soul searching, I am happy that we hit the right balance. Almost all the reviews said it was loud but appropriate. It was, by far, the hardest solution we dug into.”
Owen added “In my experience when people talk about things being loud, they don’t necessarily mean it’s too loud. They mean that certain frequencies are aggressive and painful. In my experience, you can actually make things very, very loud if you keep control of the sound, if it rises in volume in a relatively uniform, relatively linear manner. If all the frequencies rise together, it doesn’t become screechy or aggressive or punchy.”
A lot of factors come into play here — the limitations of speaker and microphone placement, the types of mics used, foldback bleeding into mics and the resonances of the room. As Owen observes, one must start with a reasonable volume and gradually increase it rather than bludgeon people from the start.
“Certainly that was an issue with Tommy,” the Tony Award-winning sound designer concedes. “A really key part in all of this is that my associate sound designer Matt Peploe was heavily involved in the creation of the show. He and I had long discussions about the problem with the fact that the overture of Tommy is musically loud. The way it’s staged with video and with sound effects of World War II, it is loud out of the box.”
Accenting the Dance
There is a plethora of dance accents in this production. As Owen said, a lot of orchestrations and dance arrangements were tied into onstage movements. Somebody might throw up an arm or jump backwards, and there is an accompanying sound. Peploe worked long and hard to create these different combinations. Then he, Owen, the music team, and the choreographer debated the appropriate volumes for these dance arrangements.
“Musically, you don’t want that random orchestration sticking out of the mix,” Owen says. “So when you’ve got your head in the mixing desk, and you’re not looking at stage, it feels wrong. But when you look up at the stage and see what’s going on, it feels right.” He adds that the audio team struggled to get it right in the out-of-town run in Chicago, but in New York things came together.
“We actually changed the methodology somewhat in that we created a set of dedicated keyboard outputs for these dance accents,” Owen explains. “These were deliberately higher than all of the other outputs at the keyboards, so they could put the dance orchestration bits onto the keyboards. This is a trick we stole from the MJ musical in that we had a similar thing with dance accents and the drums on MJ where there’s a dedicated drum pad gained higher than all the other drums. It’s only used when they want something to stick out of the otherwise cohesive drum [pattern]. So if you want something that’s disproportionately loud, you hit this particular drum. Likewise, we did the same with keyboards.”
Owen says Tommy’s integration of sound effects and music is endless. Everyone in the cast has sound effects associated with them, and the line between music and sounds effects became so blurred that sometimes when he would ask Peploe which was which, he was often convinced that one was the other. “The lines got so blurred you couldn’t keep track of what was what,” Owen notes. There was also a lot of video content from Nigrini, so they used to time code and MIDI Show Control to sync it all up.
The Gear
Owen’s team is using a fully loaded Avid S6L-32D control surface with all 192 channels accounted for. Tommy’s main P.A. consists of 32 d&b audiotechnik V8 80° speakers in an LCR hang with J-Sub and SL subwoofers; along with 18 E6 delays; 30 E6 surrounds; Y7P, E8 and E6 outfills; and more. Eight Meyer Sound UP Juniors provide foldback, while eight E-V S40 cover the wings. The nine-piece orchestra is captured via a mixture of Shure, Audix, DPA, Sennheiser and Neumann mics and Radial DI boxes.
As with most of Owen’s Broadway shows, the cast mic of choice is the Shure Axient. “It’s reliable, it works, it integrates well, it’s nice to get four receivers in one unit box,” he says. “The RF and audio quality is just spot-on. Shure isn’t necessarily the go-to mic of musical theater, but let’s be honest: Avid isn’t the go-to console for musical theater either. They’re not the de facto choice for theater in New York, but they’re the tools that we find that do the job the best. Likewise, d&b audiotechnik these days is becoming almost ubiquitous. Back when I first started working on Broadway, it was mainly Meyer systems. If I wanted a d&b system, I had to buy it.”
On nearly every production, Owen likes to try something new, trying some new gear to push technological boundaries. He views it as a constant sonic evolution. He notes there are two significant types of system design he uses. There are Soundscape shows with full tracking and object-based mixing, and there are the traditional prosceniums shows. In terms of his Broadway work, MJ and Hell’s Kitchen are Soundscape shows, while Back to the Future, & Juliet, and Tommy are traditional proscenium shows.
Owen recently worked on Tommy and the Alicia Keys Hell’s Kitchen musical simultaneously, so he got to tackle both types of shows at once.
“From a sonic point-of-view, they’re very different shows,” Owen states. “Tommy is one of those shows with so much to do sound-wise, that it’s an opportunity to show off sound, with all this cool stuff. Hell’s Kitchen is a bit more traditional in that respect. But it’s a very different ethos. Tommy is a hugely exaggerated sonic spectacle, whereas Hell’s Kitchen is much more traditional music theater. It’s got real scenes with real people having real conversations. It’s not massively stylized in the way that Tommy is. That’s not to say that we’re still not doing lots of funky reverbs, and a lot of the sound effects are much more realistic. They are New York street things — dogs barking, people in Gramercy Park. The reverbs are less exaggerated because we’re trying to keep things more in the real world.”
The sound designer stresses the importance of his associate Matt Peploe on Tommy as he was integral in making it work. And while he always likes to use new and exciting things, apart from a few new plug-ins, Tommy is “a relatively traditional sound system,” Owen says. “It’s a proscenium rack d&b system. Blocks of subwoofers. PRG supplied it and did a great job. But we’re not breaking any molds. It is just the tools we’ve developed over the years allowed us to get the best and achieve what we need to do.”
In other words, he has the tech he needs, so when Alicia Keys or Pete Townshend asks if something can be done, or Alan Silvestri or Max Martin wants something specific, all the right tools are there. “My setup is the most flexible, versatile setup I can come up with,” Owen stresses. “We constantly evolve it to try and make it better. I know Avid desks are an oddity on Broadway compared to DiGiCo. And don’t get me wrong. DiGiCo is absolutely amazing. The quality of their hardware is unbelievable.” But he knows what he likes and what sounds right to him.
“Lots of people say my sound aesthetic is very different to the rest of Broadway,” Owen acknowledges. “But to be honest with you, I haven’t seen a single one of the new shows this season because I haven’t had time. I tend to go to see things like King Kong and Moulin Rouge, and the kind of shows that Peter Hylenski does that are my kind of shows. I’m interested in knowing what the people who are doing the same type of shows as me are doing.”
