The Full Monty is essentially a wholly musical "book show", with Walker's sound design for the production focusing on complementing the strong rock'n'roll score. Over the past seven years, Walker has designed some 30 shows - touring particularly in Singapore and the Asia Pacific region. The Full Monty is, however, his first major musical in London since Oliver!, as he explains: "The sound design for The Full Monty reflects a conscious decision to combine various ideas that we have worked on in the Far East over the past few years. The technical rehearsals and two weeks of previews have allowed us time to refine the design further. In the Far East, you tend to only get four or five days between load in and first audience, not allowing much time to work on and improve the system. The structure of this show is very much an old-fashioned book musical, which just happens to have a 12-piece rock band in the pit. The sound has to provide the excitement of the big numbers, whilst trying to maintain some level of credibility during the dialogue. There are 21 performers on stage, using a mixture of Sennheiser SK50 transmitters and the new miniature SK5012 transmitters - useful when actors have very few clothes on! For the loudspeaker system, we are using two systems, utilising Tannoy S300s and 3836 drivers with Tannoy and Meyer sub bass. The dual system approach requires a large number of matrix outputs, so the J-Type is a perfect choice. They provide the audio quality and the variety of facilities you need for a show on this scale."
(Lee Baldock)
