Taking on what Sting’s 1991 album The Soul Cages began, the musical The Last Ship has arrived on the US West Coast, using a d&b Soundscape immersive sound system for its production at Los Angeles’ Ahmanson Theatre.
The show is the story of childhood sweethearts set to the backdrop of the collapse of the shipbuilding industry and features an original Tony-nominated score with music and lyrics by Sting, who will also perform for the month-long duration of the show’s LA residency.
Providing an unmatched sound experience to create the various scenes and acoustic moods for the performance is a system designed by Sebastian Frost and supplied by Stage Sound Services. It continues to use d&b En-Scene object-based mixing and En-Space room emulation software running on the DS100 system processor and a comprehensive d&b A-Series loudspeaker system.
Previous productions of The Last Ship in Canada and on tour in the UK used a large number of distributed point source loudspeakers. For the Ahmanson Theatre main system, seven hangs of A-Series augmented array loudspeakers were deployed.
Frost has been associated with the production since 2017. His work with Soundscape and En Scene and En Space and harnessing it with his vision of how the musical should be experienced has delivered an emotional experience that resonates with audiences on a deeply personal level. ‘The biggest transformation for this set of shows is the use of the new A-Series. It provides us with lots of power, and it took far less time to configure the room to give us a greater level of coverage,’ Frost explains. ‘The audience doesn’t necessarily know what happened, but everyone comes out saying the voices are fantastic. It has changed the possibilities of sound design throughout the genre.’
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