Ian Talbot's production starring Jason Donovan as Frank Butler and the effervescent Emma Williams as Annie Oakley has so far enjoyed a raft of positive reviews. Award-winning British sound designer, Gregory Clarke, specified EM Acoustics systems throughout including a new Halo Compact system as the main PA. All of the PA equipment for the tour has been supplied by Stage Sound Services.
Clarke, who received the New York Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Sound Design for Journey's End in 2007 and who won the Tony Award for his sound design on Equus in 2009, was delighted to be able to use Halo-C on a project where the system "really gets to stretch its legs."
He recalled the original Halo as an "astonishing" product, "not only because it had the usual voicing, definition and sheer class to be expected of an EM product but also because it was the first line array I had ever heard that didn't make me want to weep in despair. I've hung, driven and specified a lot of line array," continued Clarke, "and it was clear that Halo constituted a very, very fast run away from the pack. What came from the front of these things was just light years away from everything else."
Annie Get your Gun was the first occasion for Clarke to use Halo-C again on a production that really puts the system through its paces and he relished the opportunity to use Halo-C to its best advantage. "It's a big tour of a full scale musical so headroom, coherence and scalability are key," he noted. "I've designed the audio to sit somewhere between augmentation and full out amplification, keeping the sonic colours bright but avoiding over saturation (I call it magnification).
"The results have, quite simply, exceeded my already very high expectations," he concluded. "The tour is underway and HALO-C and the rest of the system is delivering beautifully. Point it at the right places in the auditorium and the audio just gets there. And in some style."
The central vocal system specified by Clarke is built around 12 Halo-C cabinets plus eight MSE-159s on the proscenium arch, four i-12 ULF subs, eighteen EMS-61 compact passive loudspeakers as front-fills, side-fills and first-line delays, and 36 EMS-51 ultra-compact passive enclosures as distributed delays. There are also a number of EMS-81 and EMS-122 full range speakers and some more EMS-51s on stage running effects and foldback.
"I believe this is the first time that EM Acoustics has gone 'front to back' on a tour, but it certainly won't be the last," remarked Clarke in his final analysis. "The system matching and coherence between components is just phenomenal."
(Jim Evans)
