Looking for a ‘dazzling audio experience’ for their production of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Sound Designer Darron L West and Associate Sound Designer Charles Coes sought out theatrical specialist Masque Sound to provide a custom audio equipment package.
‘We took a modern spin on the idea of a traditional Shakespearean ensemble by updating it to include a mix engineer and console. We really wanted to bring the band out and lift the vocals up so that you could effectively and clearly hear both from within the theatre,’ Coes explains. ‘We have live musicians on stage accompanying the actors, so we used a lot of mics and effects.’
The Tempest is a co-production between The Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas and the American Repertory Theater (ART) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It premiered under a big top tent in Las Vegas and is now playing at the ART’s Loeb Drama Center.
One of the main challenges was to create a sound design for the two very different venues. ‘We encountered quite a bit of ambient noise from air conditioners, trains, helicopters and the nature of being in an unprotected acoustic space at the tent in Las Vegas,’ Coes says. ‘From there, we transitioned to the very quiet, typical theater space at the ART’
Most of the soundscape is being created by a four-piece live band and an array of eclectic percussive instruments. To give the designers the flexibility and dynamic audio that they were looking for, Masque Sound provided a custom equipment package featuring a Yamaha CL5 mixing console along with Yamaha Rio3224-D Dante digital network remote I/O racks.
For the speaker package, Masque Sound provided d&b audiotechnik Q1s for the left and right line array and a Meyer Sound M’elodie array for the centre cluster.
‘We needed speakers with a lot of horsepower for Las Vegas, but the real challenge lay in the fact that we then needed to fit that same amount of equipment into the ART, which is a shorter house,’ Coes says. ‘The crew at Masque Sound worked very hard to get us another M’elodie QuickFly frame in an extremely short amount of time, so that we could split our array from a single eight cabinet rig into two side-by-side four cabinet rigs.’
Although not in the original plans, 16 channels of Sennheiser wireless were also used…
‘Right before we left the shop, the directing team had some concerns about the background noise in the tent and area mics, and we moved very quickly to change the show over from those area mics to a full RF package with body mics for everyone,’ says Coes. ‘We went from a little bit of wireless to expanding it out to the full cast of 13, and we did it in about three days. Masque was incredibly accommodating and incredibly speedy in making it happen. They are always a great company to work with.’
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