Marking its 40th anniversary last year, Jeff Wayne’s touring musical version of The War of the Worlds has lost none of its ability to thrill. The production is constructed around a 3-tonne 35ft-tall Martian Fighting Machine, which fires real flames, against the backdrop of a captivating 100ft-wide animation wall.
From a musical perspective, the 36-piece ULLAdubULLA strings performed alongside the nine-piece Black Smoke Band (which included many musicians from the original tour in 2006). Now on its seventh tour of duty, the production has been played out on its last three outings through Martin Audio’s MLA PA and sounded as fresh as ever.
As for the cast, Liam Neeson retained his role (in 3D holography) as The Journalist, and was joined for this tour by Jason Donovan, reprising the role of Parson Nathaniel, alongside Carrie Hope Fletcher as Beth, his wife. Adam Garcia debuted as The Artilleryman, Newton Faulkner performed The Sung Thoughts of The Journalist, Nathan James played The Voice of Humanity, with Anna-Marie Wayne back as Carrie, The Journalist’s Fiancée.
In terms of production, the inordinate amount of inventory provided by sound, lighting, video, pyro and stage/motion control suppliers will have presented a logistical nightmare for production manager Steve Nolan and his team. Fortunately, sound rental company RG Jones have wide experience of this production, and FOH engineer Simon Honywill was on his fifth tour of duty, having first piloted the mix back in 2009.
Having again selected MLA as his PA of choice, Honywill was happy to extoll its unique virtues: ‘I wouldn’t do this show with any other PA,’ he says unequivocally. ‘In fact, I couldn’t do the show. One of the crucial elements is the narration and if the intelligibility is compromised people complain, as it’s an iconic part of the production. On top of that MLA just sounds awesome.’
Some arenas seem determined to challenge this, often arced with glazed VIP boxes at the horseshoe end. Honywill acknowledges that this will generate unwanted reflections.
‘With music you can often get away with it but it would destroy the intelligibility of the narration [with a conventional PA]. Fortunately, we can mitigate it by using the Hard Avoid setting [in the Martin Audio Display software]. In Nottingham Arena, for instance, it made a massive difference, and enabled us to focus the acoustic energy very effectively and reduce unwanted reflections for a large portion of the audience. It’s an absolutely invaluable technology.’ Liverpool Echo was another venue where system engineer Steve Carr, assisted by Matt Sussex, needed to ‘Hard Avoid’ the concrete wall which runs around the arena between the lower and upper seating tiers.
The design of the Martin Audio system had been slightly modified from the 2014 production – minor changes to the front fill, a bit more ordnance in the PA dept, and the fact that the hangs were pushed further upstage to preserve sightlines meant that bespoke measurements had to be undertaken to ensure accuracy of the optimisation.
At the 20,000-plus capacity venues production fielded 20 MLA elements per side, with 16 MLA Compact providing outfills. To compensate for the slightly odd position of the main hangs, eight MLA Mini elements on each stage wing were focused at the front to keep the energy level off the stage, driven by Martin Audio iKon multichannel amplifiers, which provided an elegant solution. Martin Audio DD12s covered the extremities of stage left and right front rows to maintain coverage consistency, while beneath the stage and at the base of the thrust were 16 MLX subs in a spaced arc array. Towards the rear of the auditorium, there were two surround positions, each comprising eight W8LM Mini line arrays each side.
Honywill was piloting his mix on a DiGiCo SD7 with Fader Expansion. With three fully-loaded 56-input racks his input count is 168 channels. As well as the band and 36 piece string section, themselves occupying the majority of two SD racks, the high input count was made up from surround FX, playback and the six guest artists, each wearing a main and spare RF pack. The playback machines also generated time-code, which played a crucial part in enabling both Simon Honywill and monitor engineer Becky Pell to mix the complex soundscape, while Nathan Kennedy supervised RF and radio mics.
Because the PA was unusually set 2.5m upstage of the downstage edge, precision with optimisation was vital. ‘If I were to apply an existing measurement incorrectly, I could end up covering the front edge of the stage with PA. So I have arrived at each venue well ahead of the crew, and there have been a lot of benefits to that.
‘The vital thing is that the whole stage is pre-rigged on the arena floor and once the lighting rig goes up and the whole monitor riser wheels into position. I’ll generate my optimisation file for EQ and angles, load it into VU-Net [Martin Audio’s control software], and tune and time align each array.’
But even then he needs to remain alert: ‘There have been times when I’ve done optimisations in the morning and then production have said ‘we need to trim the PA 50cm higher’ and I’ve needed to reoptimise it.’ The speed that this can be accomplished in a time-critical environment is a measure of Martin Audio’s advanced technology and ability to adapt on the fly. Finally, new tour packaging implemented by RG Jones has made trucking and load-ins more space and time efficient.
‘It was the first time I had done NEC in a long time and I’d forgotten how good it could be,’ says Honywill, who has worked the arena circuit regularly over several decades. ‘MLA sounded amazing – every little nuance, pan and grace note were there, everywhere.’
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