This is the first foreign language production of the show, which obviously presents the sound team with its own set of unique challenges over and above the conventional issues of the venue. Associate sound designer Andrew Keister provided an insight into this production, which opened recently at the Beatrix Theatre in Utrecht:
"Jersey Boys today is in a place that we couldn't have dreamed of eight years ago when it first opened on Broadway. There have been some fairly seismic shifts in terms of the equipment available to us, and we have undergone a slow evolutionary march towards this latest production, which is different in virtually all respects! Each step along the way has given us either a higher degree of quality to the sound or greater degree of control over the performance.
"The majority of the speaker system is a Meyer MICA array, which is an extremely precise and powerful system, which we have been using for the past four years and are very happy with the results. It provides an ideal combination of power and throw for a musical like Jersey Boys without any compromise in terms of output and frequency response. Processing for the audio is all handled via the Meyer's Galileo system, which has a great set of unique filtering tools and gives us excellent control. We are using a DiGiCo SD7 Live Digital Console on front of house duties, taking in around 110 inputs and filtering them down to the Galileo.
"We have a cast of 16 on the show, together with a nine-piece band, and are using Sennheiser 5212 radiomics with 3732 receivers. Most of the band appears on stage wirelessly at some point, and we use DPA 4099 mics, the H variant, for the horns, and a custom-made adapter for the guitars and bass to get the impedance at the correct level to go into the 5212s. The venue is interesting, giving us a bit of a challenge with regard to the balcony - it was added to the theatre at a later date, sits relatively low compared to the stalls level, and then the ceiling above the balcony is quite low too. The result is there are some fairly narrow slots to push the sound through, some of which we could design around with the line array but some needed a more extensive set of delays."
The other members of the eight-person sound crew working alongside Andrew are production engineer Hennie Schwithal, Orbital's Dan Bailey and David Bartholomeusz, head of sound and show mixer Norbert Boekhout, radio mic technician Andre Kijk in de Vegte, plus Thijs Hoonakker and Joost van de Put.
(Jim Evans)
