ALAN D. THOMPSON

The Alchemy of Theatre
The Divine Science
Essays on Theatre and the Art of Collaboration
By Lyn Ahrens et al.
Edited by Robert Viagas
2006, Playbill NY

Chapter 22

Tony Meola
Sound Designer

Tony Meola’s Broadway show include
Wicked;
Man of La Mancha;
Sweet Smell of Success;
The Wild Party;
Copenhagen;
Kiss Me, Kate;
Footloose;
High Society;
The Lion King (Drama Desk Award);
The Sound of Music;
The Last Night of Ballyhoo;
Juan Darien;
A Christmas Carol (Madison Square Garden);
Steel Pier;
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum;
The King and I;
Company;
Chronicle of a Death Foretold;
Moon Over Buffalo;
Smokey Joe’s Café;
Face Value;
Guys and Dolls;
A Month in the Country;
Picnic;
Five Guys Named Moe;
She Loves Me;
The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public;
The Red Shoes;
Anything Goes;
A Grand Night for Singing.

London’s West End:
Kiss Me, Kate;
The Lion King;
Smokey Joe’s Café;
Anything Goes.

International work includes
Driving Miss Daisy;
Les Miserables;
Mozart!
Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Off-Broadway includes
Love, Janis;
A New Brain;
Violet;
Durang, Durang;
One Man Band.

Meola is a graduate of Ithaca College’s Department of Theatre Arts.

FINDING PIANISSIMO

Most people are completely unaware of what a sound designer does, unless he does it wrong. Then, everybody knows. The music is tinny, the singing is flat, the orchestra is loud, and the audience can’t hear the words. But if he does it right, you don’t notice. It sounds great. It sounds right.

BECOMING A SOUND DESIGNER

When I was in high school in Middletown, New York, I played the clarinet and really wanted to do it professionally, despite my family’s misgivings.

I was also into theatre. Thanks to my high school auditorium, which doubled as the local stop for bus-and-truck tours, I spent m teenage years working stage crew for tours of Pippin; Godspell; Kiss Me, Kate; 1776; the Dance Theatre of Harlem; and other shows. My official title was stage manager, but I was most interested in lighting. When it came time to choose a college, my hours spent on my clarinet and in theatre – as opposed to the classroom – left me with limited choices, and I entered Orange County Community College in my hometown as a music major. My college grades were good enough for me to transfer to Ithaca College, again as a music major. But Ithaca College’s prestigious theatre department was a major reason why I wanted to go there. In fact, I hadn’t been there a week when I changed majors, eventually graduating with a degree in technical production in theatre, and an Associate Degree in Music.

Between my sophomore and junior years, I got a summer job as an electrician at the New York Shakespeare Festival in New York City. They were rehearsing a little show called A Chorus Line, and the production manager warned me that if A Chorus Line was not a hit, they might have to lay me off in August.

I didn’t care. It was an exciting time to be down there, let me tell you. A Chorus Line completely changed my life. It told me, number one, that it was OK to work in theatre. And, number two, it was OK to be gay. That was a lot to learn the summer I turned 21.

In case you didn’t hear, A Chorus Line was a huge hit, so I kept my job. And when the Shakespeare Festival needed someone to do sound on its mobile theatre, which used to take live theatre into all the poor communities of New York (sadly, it no longer exists), I was volunteered. That was my first time doing sound – and under the worst possible acoustical conditions – but it was a wonderful, wonderful thing. I liked it, and it stuck.

My first musical was a show called On the Lock In, a kind of Chorus Line show about prison inmates. The composer liked the fact that I had a musical background and could talk bars and tempos instead of just amplifiers and speakers. I started to get work.

ACOUSTICS

In the traditional hierarchy of designers, sound designers were the most recently accepted into the business, and therefore the fourth in status after sets, costumes, and lighting. A lot of my work is a struggle to get the other collaborators to understand what I do and to make allowances for the equipment I need to do it.

A sound designer starts by speaking to the director and the rest of the creative team to find out what the show is about and what the concept of the sound might be. Will it be a natural sound? Will there be a lot of music? Will there be special sound effects?

The next job, however, is going into theatre where the show will play. Every theatre has unique acoustics. Some are easier than others. Some have wonderful architectural detail that translates into wonderful aural detail like the New Amsterdam, for instance – and, unlike the Gershwin. When you go into an older theatre and see all that ornate carving and relief on the walls and boxes, you may think they’re just there for decoration. They’re really there to spread high frequencies around so the sibilance of voices gets to every corner of the theatre, for clarity.

Once you know the strengths and weaknesses of the theatre, and you know the sound concept of the show you’re working on, you can start to make equipment lists and you make drawings and you speak to the other designers and find what everybody’s needs are.

In a typical show, my idea is to have the voices sound as natural as they can. But, honestly, audiences today don’t really know or want to hear a truly natural sound. They’re so used to hearing amplified sound, especially from popular music and movies, that they’d be very disappointed to hear what a pit orchestra sounds like completely unamplified. What they really want is something a little bit raised above what an original Rodgers and Hammerstein show would have been performed at – for a traditional musical, that is. Musicals with more contemporary music need to have a more contemporary sound, but not so loud that one notices the volume.

THE AUDIENCE IS NEVER AFRAID

The audience is always foremost in my planning. I spend technical rehearsals and preview sitting all around the theatre to make sure that I’ve covered it. The first place I go is the critic’s seats and adjust the balance, if necessary. Then I move from corner to corner until I get the best balance of sound I can from every seat.

Contrary to what you probably think, the balcony is the easiest place to adjust the sound. The hardest places are the most expensive sears. They’re right down the front, and you can’t put a speaker between the performer and the audience. I try to put speakers all around the proscenium and balance them so it sounds like its coming from the stage. But you get up the balcony and there’s plenty of places to put them: on the ceiling, on the balcony rail, on the sides. It’s much easier.

In many theatres the sound engineers are sitting at a big console in the back of the theatre. We are very visible. The audience is never afraid to tell us exactly what they think, especially if they can’t hear the words. And I listen to them. Sometimes they think we control the lighting and say the lighting was great. Sometimes we smile and say thanks.

MICROPHONES

Abe Jacobs and Otts Munderloh are two of the great pioneers of Broadway sound design. I learned most of what I know from Otts. I watched him for years to get actors to speak up and not rely so much on microphones.

Microphones can be wonderful things but they can also be horrible things. I abhor going to a Broadway show with an orchestra and hearing the downbeat come from the speaker on the proscenium. I work very hard not to do that because live theatre has to compete with movies and TV and even the Internet. The one thing we have over all those competing media is the fact that we’re live. We have real people in the orchestra pit and we have real people on the stage. There is a visceral reaction to hearing a real voice and a real instrument. It goes to somewhere deep within us. And that’s the only thing the theatre has left when no one can touch us.

Special effects have improved. There are great special effects in Wicked. But we still can’t do what they can do in the movies. We can’t sketch out on a computer a body double that falls into a burning pit, or show car crashes or all those fantastic things they can do on the screen. So we have to keep real in the theatre. The more stuff we put between an actor’s voice and the audience’s ear, the more we take away from the last thing we have going for us.

I love to find creative ways to hide microphones. I don’t think the audience should see microphones unless they are part of the story, or the ambience of the show. They usually aren’t.

There was one time I used visible mikes intentionally: Smokey Joe’s Café. I put the cast in headset mikes because director Jerry Zaks wanted a close mike sound without their having to hold microphones.

I have a microphone that’s so small that if you put it under a regular hairnet you can’t see it under stage lighting. It’s great. But on Wicked, costume designer Susan Hilferty wanted to use film-grade hairnets, which are much finer than theatrical-grade and you can see the mikes underneath. That’s one place where we collided a little bit. For people like Kristin Chenoweth you could see the microphone. Idina Menzel was a challenge because she has the pointed black witch hat.

But on Kiss Me, Kate we were able most of the time to hide the microphones. The material is great – Cole Porter – so I wanted the audience to get every word. Luckily, I was part of a great team on that show, and we were at my favourite Broadway theatre, the Martin Beck, now the Al Hirschfield. It’s got the best orchestra pit I’ve ever used. The Don Sebesky orchestrations were marvelous, and he won a well-deserved Tony Award for them. The musical director was Paul Gemignani who understands better than anyone in the business the important of pianissimo and fortissimo and the importance of hearing lyrics. He’s brilliant and a pleasure to work with because he understands the nuances of sound like few others.

PROJECTING

Sound design can help actors only to a degree. You have to have performers who face downstage and project. You have to have performers who haven’t just danced for thirty-two bars and are out of breath. You have to have a musical director who is keeping the orchestra volume below a certain level so that you don’t have to make the vocals so loud. You have to explain this to everyone to achieve a good sound balance and not everyone understands it.

Television actors often create the biggest problems. They’re used to speaking into microphones and don’t know how to project. I did a revival of Picnic in 1994 at the Roundabout Theatre Company. We had Debra monk, Ann Pitoniak, and Larry Bryggman from the old school. You could hear those three in every corner of that 499-seat theatre. But then you had Ashley Judd and Tate Donovan and the other young people in the show were not properly trained to speak on stage. Every time Scott Ellis, the director, would ask them to be louder, they’d say, “But I feel like I’m shouting!”. They never learned the technique.

All the same, it’s my job to help the audience hear all the actors. If you have one person on stage who’s projecting and another person who’s not projecting, the one not projecting will be louder in the speakers and therefore more disembodied. I depend on the trained actor for “source” – original sound – so you hear them first, and then you fill in the quieter parts with speakers. But you have to do it carefully, otherwise it sounds like some lines are coming from the actors and some lines are coming from the wall or wherever the speakers are. Part of the sound designer’s collaboration is encouraging everyone on stage to speak up.

COMPRESSION

I try very hard not to use a process called compression. You might not recognize the term, but if you’ve listened to recorded rock music or popular music, you’ve heard it. Compression takes the highest of the highs and compresses them down so there’s not much difference between the very quiet parts and the very loud parts. Tghey do that so you hear everything all the time at a specific volume setting. If you are dancing you don’t want to hear quiet stuff, you want to hear “boom, boom, boom” coming at you the same way all the time. Radio stations compress so you don’t have to keep adjusting your volume. But that’s not the way you were meant to…
…

Blakemore, whom I worked with on Kiss Me, Kate, and the lighting design team of Jules Fisher and Peggy Eisenhauer, with whom I collaborated on Love, Janus.

Everyone should learn from Blakemore how to get people to do what you want. He is brilliant at it and you don’t ever feel that you are taken advantage of.

As for Peggy, she was the first one who taught me you can turn off the colour scrollers on stage lights. They have to be on during technical rehearsals and, of course, when they are rolling. But they don’t have to be on throughout every scene. We did Love, Janis in a tiny Off-Broadway space where I had to fight for real estate on the stage for loudspeakers amid the lighting instruments and scenery. By working together we were able to fit everything in and be quite successful, all thing considered.

Wicked was in many ways an ideal situation. All members of the design team consulted one another and put together the show in a way that served everyone – which meant it served the audience. In addition to Ken Posner and Susan Hilferty, there was set designer Eugene Lee and his associate Eddie Pierce. If I told them I needed to put a speaker somewhere they’d say, “We actually wouldn’t mind seeing a loudspeaker there because it fits in with the nature of the scene.” The whole collaboration was like that. Most of the time the designer is asked last, but on Wicked, it was all part of the same job.

Joe Mantello was also instrumental in keeping the team together. Joe knows what he wants and expresses it. It isn’t necessary (or helpful) at time for a director to know technically what I am doing. I can interpret the director’s ideas and Joe’s are very clear.

NOISE AND LIGHT

Another great collaborative lighting designer is Ken Posner, with whom I did Wicked. There’s a great example of a collaborator thinking outside his own particular area. Varilite, a company that makes lights with little motors so you can turn and point and pivot them remotely, came and demonstrated its latest model for Ken. At the end of their presentation he said, “This lamp does every single thing I want it to do. Congratulations on your design. But I cannot use it for Wicked.”

They were flabbergasted and asked why. He said because its cooling fan was too loud. This is something I’ve been fighting since moving lights moved into the theatre. People don’t realize that theatres are generally quiet. Sometimes the ventilation systems are a little noisy. But when you put on hundred moving lights and colour scrollers on nearly every other light in the theatre, it creates a significant amount of ambient noise. That’s one of the reasons you can’t get a pianissimo.

On the Patrick Stewart revival of The Tempest which debuted in Central Park and then moved to Broadway, Stewart walked on stage for the first technical rehearsal and said, “What’s all that noise?”. When they told him it was the lighting, he said, “I’ll leave until you get rid of that noise.” If it wasn’t my show, I would be thrilled to hear an actor say that.

On Wicked, acoustician Sam Berkow took the cover off one of the Varilites, wrapped a scarf around it, put it back on, and that simple step reduced the noise coming out of that light by at least thirty percent. He also discovered that the fan was cooling the whole fixture when it only needed to cool the one part that got warm. It’s a small thing, but anything we can do to decrease noise pollution inside theatres, I’m all for.

PIANO IN A BOX

On the other hand, it’s been my unfortunate experience to be part of collaborative teams that had no unified idea of what kind of sound they wanted for the show, and no idea of what sound design requires. This can create chaos.

For example, I was asked o do a show called Here Lies Jenny: The Songs of Kurt Weill, with Bebe Neuwirth. At the first meeting I was told that Bebe didn’t want to be miked, and I was told b the musical director/pianist that she wanted a monitor of herself and Bebe. How can you give her a monitor if Bebe doesn’t have a microphone? And shouldn’t you involve the sound designer in the formulation of these decisions in the first place?

And then there was the piano itself. None of the old pianos that they tried sounded good, so they decided to get a piano they really liked and build a box around it to make it look like an old piano. I told them that a piano in a box sounds like a piano in a box and when you don’t have a full orchestra, you just have have the piano, it’s not a good idea to have bad-sounding piano. You might as well use one of those old pianos because a good piano sitting in a box is not going to sound very good.

The problem initially was that decisions were made about the sound design before the sound designer was hired. Fortunately, we were able to communicate and collaborate and in the end, I am very proud of the sound design of Here lies Jenny and the experience was wonderful.

I’ve had the great good fortune to work with wonderful directors who can sit at a table and talk out their issues rather than bark orders from above. I’m a good enough communicator that I can sit down with almost any director and resolve any differences that may arise.

I only once remember getting frustrate d with a director’s wishes. It was Stanley Donon on Jule Styne’s last musical, The Red Shoes. Nearing opening night at a full dress rehearsal, he kept telling me to make it louder and louder. I tried to explain that the show had gotten too loud, to the point where people were starting to get concerned about their hearing. As soon as that happens you’ve stopped telling the story. The sound has gotten in the way of the story. But he kept saying, “Make it louder!” Finally I said, “Stanley I will make it louder, but I won’t make it louder with my name on it!”

In any collaboration you sometimes have to do things you don’t believe in. But only to a point. Nevertheless, I later apologized and we came to agree on levels. Sometimes that’s part of a collaboration, too.

ORCHESTRA PITS

The Hirschfeld Theatre’s orchestra pit is great because it’s all wood, shaped like a band shell, and has a beautiful wooden balustrade in front of it. The musician s love it, too, because there’s plenty of room and it’s open, not pushed under the stage like in most houses. During the run of the 2002 Man of La Mancha revival there I used to love and go sit in the pit and listen to how great the orchestra sounded there, especially under Bob Billig’s musical direction.

Economics have pushed the orchestra pits further and further under the stage. If you go to the opera house, you see a great big open pit. You can see all the musicians. On Broadway they want to sell as many top-price tickets as possible, so they cover over the front of the pit, and add rows AA and BB and such. The orchestra has no place to go but under the stage. In some theatre, there’s barely enough room for the conductor to squeeze between the front row and the stage. As soon as you move something under the stage, of course, you have to mike the orchestra more, which kills the natural sound. You are virtually putting it in another room. You no longer have the visceral sound you get form an open orchestra pit.

Sometimes it’s a good thing to have a drummer underneath because that can be too loud. A good orchestrator can help by balancing the orchestra acoustically. For instance, on Sweet Smell of Success, which I did with Bill Brohn orchestrating, the orchestra was in balance in the rehearsal studio. Another recent show that I did had five percussionists and four string players. Guess who won that volume battle? To begin the process with an out of balance orchestra makes it very difficult to maintain a truly live sound. You must isolate too many instruments, creating a more electronic sound and this takes away from the visceral reaction that I wrote of earlier. The orchestra is not unlike the chorus. In a live situation: it is always better to have them in balance before you add microphones so that you are merely lifting the natural sound, not creating a sound like on does in a recording studio. A studio sound can be wonderful, but it’s certainly not organic.

SPECIAL EFFECTS

There are a lot of cool things you can do with sound. I love effects and special effects. You can pitch somebody up or down a half step. You can put reverb on it, you can put echo on it, you can make it tinny, you can make it bassy, you can throw it around the room. You can do whatever you want with it. But doing it just because its cool isn’t necessarily a reason to do it. Everything has to have a reason, and has to enhance or forward the story.

I have a lot of special effects in Wicked. The Wizard in the play has his voice overamplified and dropped in pitch to make him sound scarier. There’s a part where the Wicked Witch hears her sister’s voice in the wind. It comes from the speakers in the rear of the house, so it sounds very distant.

There are atmospheric effects: rain and wind. I love wind. And there are birds. Birds usually tell you its morning. A barking dog indicated night and loneliness. There’s a lot of little things I can add to set the scene and help it along.

I also like reverb. I used it on “He Lives in You in The Lion King to create an ethereal sound. If you put reverb on someone’s voice it’s a way of telling the audience that the character is inside their own head. The character I thinking or resolving a conflict within themselves.

I did sound for A Christmas Carol, which ran at the Theatre at Madison Square garden for ten holiday seasons. That was the hardest show I have ever done. The first year we had fifty-five microphones and we were putting sound out to more than six thousand seats spread very wide. The people on the left side wanted the sound to be coming from there, and the people on the right side wanted the sound to be coming from there.

Composer Alan Mencken, lyricist Lynn Ahrens, director Mike Ockrent, and choreographer Susan Stroman were very good collaborators on that production because they had a vision of the show and they knew what they wanted. When the creators are very clear about what they want, it makes all our jobs very easy.

ADVICE

When a young person tells me they want to be a sound designer, I tell them to study theatre, not only sound design. It’s great to know a lot about the technology of sound. In pop music venues, the sound guy is the number one tech person. Everybody has to do things to your specs.

Unfortunately, it’s the last thing in the theatre. A lot of people who come to work for me from the rock’n’roll world have too much attitude. They don’t understand why the set designer doesn’t want a speaker there or the costumed designer doesn’t want a microphone in somebody’s face. It’s hard to cross over and accept that, in theatre the storytelling comes first.