This year, Free Shakespeare in the Park opened in May with a six week run of The Tempest, starring Sam Waterston, and continues 23 July through 23 August with Cymbeline, featuring Lily Rabe and Hamish Linklater.
Central Park's 1,800-seat outdoor Delacorte Theatre has been home to the Free Shakespeare series since 1962. The venue, while offering creative possibilities to directors, actors, and scenic designers that no other New York City theatre can match, presents challenges to technical production designers, including audio.
Matthew Bell, assistant audio supervisor at The Public Theatre, used two RF Venue products, the Spotlight antenna and Optix fibre-optic remote antenna system, to address and simplify the RF difficulties an outdoor theatre in the heart of New York City creates.
"We have to load an entire Broadway quality sound system into a natural park," says Bell. "There is no pre-existing rigging of any sort. There are raccoons, birds, and rain, and all those have to be taken into consideration."
The outdoor Shakespeare productions are technically complex. They use wireless for every speaking role. Cymbeline involves more than 40 channels of Sennheiser 3532 and Sennheiser 2000 series, along with Shure IEMs, two matrixed intercom main-stations, and three Telex BTR-800s. Audio equipment rental and frequency coordination is provided by Masque Sound.
Though wireless is of utmost importance, the intimate nature of Cymbeline's set design paired with the Delacorte's unconventional upstage area - an expanse of open water named Turtle Pond - makes minuscule wireless audio signals vanish into the trees.
"There is no bounce to the room or anything to reflect RF back onto our actors and antennas, like you would have in a traditional theatre," continues Bell. "We used two RF Spotlight's to get our antennas physically closer to our actors. Since they're low profile, we built them into our set pieces and under the deck, and our antennas are 120 feet closer than we would have otherwise been able to get them."
The Spotlight's thin 7mm disc allowed The Public Theatre to mount both transmit and receive antennas for some of their UHF equipment directly underneath the actors, maximizing signal-to-noise ratio.
Underneath the stage, the antennas are connected to two Optix RFoF systems which, in lieu of coaxial cable, send signals for mics and IEMs to and from the rack via 1310nm fibre optic cable.
"This park is so big and all our cable runs are so long that we want to get our signal loss down to as little as possible," says Bell. "We went with the Optix because 2.5 dB of loss is a whole lot better than the 10-12 dB we would get with coax.
"We have a lot of challenges in New York, and a lot of challenges that you only find in Central Park," Bell concludes. "These two solutions have allowed us to pick up only the transmitted signals on the stage, as opposed to getting all the extraneous noise around the city."
(Jim Evans)
