"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Article 5

 

[This is the third installment in my republication of the American Theatre series on sound design from the July/August 2019 issue of TCG’s monthly magazine.  TJ Acena looks at the way theater sound techs can guard against the interference with their wireless stage (and back stage) mics from other, outside transmissions.

 

[As I noted on the last entry, the articles in this series aren’t related contextually; each report stands on its own.  They do share a general topic, however, so I strongly recommend that readers catch all eight of the AT articles presented on Rick On Theatre.  Go back to 25 and 28 March to pick up Articles 1-4 to get the full coverage of the subject.]

 

“RUNNING INTERFERENCE FOR WIRELESS MICS”

by TJ Acena

 

What is ‘white space,’ and what is the FCC doing about theatre’s ever-crowding sound systems? An explainer.

 

How do you make actors heard 50 rows back? How do you make them heard as they sing over an orchestra? How do you make them heard as they mutter conspiratorially to themselves?

 

The answer to all these: wireless microphones. Large theatres (and even many small ones) rely on this technology to make sure audiences hear every word of a performance. Unless something goes wrong with the equipment, like interference, most audience members don’t even think about what makes it possible. But many U.S. resident theatres worry that interference in their systems might increase, and it’s out of their hands. It’s in the hands of the Federal Communications Commission.

 

To understand why, you need to understand how these devices work. Wireless microphones turn audio signals into radio waves and transmit those signals through the air to receivers nearby. Radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation with frequencies between 3 kilohertz (3,000 hertz) and 300 gigahertz (300 billion hertz). Those numbers will be important later.

 

The benefits of wireless microphones were immediately obvious to theatres. If microphones followed the actors, the technology would produce better sound quality. As the devices got smaller, more reliable, and more cost-effective, their use spread. These days a Broadway production will likely have more than 50 microphones running each night. And they aren’t just used for actors; backstage crews also rely on them to stay in constant contact with each other as they call cues and move sets during the show. Assisted-listening devices that serve hearing-impaired patrons use wireless technology as well.

 

With so many microphones in the mix, a production has to coordinate their use or the audience might hear interference from other technology. That means each microphone in a production is set to a specific frequency. This also helps keep theatres in close proximity from interfering with each other.

 

But these frequencies are just a small ecosystem inside a much larger one. Radio waves are broadcast across the entire planet, by hundreds of thousands of entities and individuals, and many with far stronger equipment.

 

In 1965 the United Nations formed the International Telecommunication Union to regulate the use of the electromagnetic spectrum across the planet. Each country in the UN has a government agency that controls how the spectrum is used within its borders. In the U.S. we have the FCC, which allocates use to state and local governments plus science and business organizations.

 

For much of their existence, television stations operated between 300 (300 million hertz) and 700 megahertz in the electromagnetic spectrum, in an area called the ultra high frequency (UHF). Each TV station is licensed to operate at a specific frequency. TV viewers see this as each individual channel. If two television channels use frequencies too close to each other they might cause interference during their broadcasts, so there has to be a buffer between them—unused frequencies. These buffer zones are called “white space.”

 

In the 1970s, manufacturers of wireless microphones began to adapt their equipment to operate in this white space. Most systems operated in the top of the spectrum (700 megahertz), because it provided the best sound quality. These wireless microphones weren’t eligible to be licensed, but the FCC allowed them to operate there because they weren’t powerful enough to cause interference with television stations.

 

For decades this was the status quo. Then in 2008 the FCC opened up white space to other commercial operations. Tech companies had been developing “white space devices”—electronics that send and receive data in white space—and were eager to get them in use. The most prominent application of this technology is providing wireless internet.

 

Large rural swathes of the country still don’t have the infrastructure for high-speed internet, and service providers don’t see it as cost-effective to install it. This means that around 24 million Americans live in areas without access to fast, reliable online service. This is where these new white space devices have begun to see use: Radio waves in the white spaces are far more powerful than traditional wireless hotspots, and walls don’t interfere with them.

 

But—do you see where this is going?—this presents a problem for wireless microphone users, because white space devices create interference when they’re in close proximity. And because wireless microphones were unlicensed, they didn’t have protection from other devices encroaching on their white space.

 

This move by the FCC caught the attention of nonprofit service organization[s] Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the publisher of this magazine, and the Performing Arts Alliance (PAA), a coalition of arts service organizations that advocates for nonprofit arts organizations before Congress and federal agencies. “The coalition was founded to coordinate efforts, find consensus about our issues and positions on those issues, and represent a larger collective of members that could be moved to action together,” says Laurie Baskin, TCG’s director of Research, Policy & Collective Action. TCG recently organized the Performing Arts Wireless Microphone Working Group to advocate as a coalition of performing arts service organizations on this issue.

 

More than a decade ago TCG joined the Coalition of Wireless Microphone Users, which included professional sports leagues, commercial theatres, performing arts service organizations, a religious organization, and various news outlets. The two coalitions scheduled numerous meetings at the FCC, submitted comments and ex parte letters, and held demonstrations for FCC officials; all of these combined efforts resulted in the agency revising its decision. This development allowed unlicensed wireless microphone users to continue using white space and proposed to offer them protection from white space devices by creating geolocation databases. Users could register their needs in the database and list the time, location, and frequencies they would be using. White space devices were designed to check the database in real time to make sure they wouldn’t interfere with microphones in their area.

 

But then there was a sea change in broadcasting technology, which had unintended consequences for the future of white space. In 2009 U.S. television stations switched from analog to digital broadcasting (you might remember having to replace your television or buy an adapter). Digital broadcasting uses a lot less frequency than analog, so television stations suddenly took up a lot less space.

 

With a little rearranging this space made prime real estate, and unlicensed wireless microphone users were suddenly seen as squatters. “It became a farmers-vs.-cattleman range war,” says Dave Pawlik, a communications, media, and entertainment lawyer who works with TCG. The FCC ordered wireless microphone users to vacate the 700 megahertz band, and that frequency was sold off in an auction to telecom companies. Most wireless microphone users moved down to the 600 megahertz band.

 

Wireless microphones are designed to operate on specific frequencies, not the entire range of the radio spectrum, so this move meant a lot of equipment became obsolete all around the country. Many organizations needed to purchase entirely new systems, spending anywhere from $25,000 to $130,000. This is a capital expense for an arts organization—not easy to scrape up quickly.

 

The geolocation database for white space devices went live at the end of 2012, but earlier that year Congress had authorized the FCC to repackage the spectrum and auction off the 600 megahertz range. The white space that wireless microphones had moved into was about to disappear again.

 

Digital television stations can operate closer to each other than analog stations, so white space between stations was going to shrink too. All this compression risked increasing the possibility of wireless microphone users coming into contact with each other and white space devices.

 

In 2014 the FCC decided to restrict use of the geolocation database to only the largest users of wireless microphones. These users were made eligible to apply for a license under existing rules known as “Part 74,” which historically has been reserved for broadcast entities like TV and radio stations. But to qualify for a license, an organization had to use 50 or more wireless microphones on a regular basis. So only a few of the largest theatres in the country qualified under this ruling. All the others were not allowed to access the geolocation database that would grant them protection from interference.

 

While TCG continued to lobby the FCC, the agency began its second incentive auction, from March 29, 2016, to March 30, 2017, and T-Mobile ended up with the largest part of the spectrum. The federal government made $19.8 billion from the auction.

 

Despite the sale there were still theatres with wireless microphone systems using the 600 megahertz range after the auction, hoping to delay another capital expense. They had some breathing room, as many auction winners didn’t have plans to take immediate control of the new spectrum nationwide; they have until 2021 to claim it.

 

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival was one of those wait-and-see companies. “During the summer nights we’ll have over 50 wireless microphones in use,” says Josh Horvath, OSF’s sound department manager. “But typically we aren’t using them every day. And every year is different. This year is a big season for wireless microphones. Next year it might only be the outdoor space. It’s a challenge to prove it.”

 

All of the company’s microphones were in the 600 megahertz frequencies. “We’re in a rural area, so we didn’t worry that much,” says Horvath. “But then we got notice that T-Mobile had decided to roll out their new services in rural areas first.”

 

This included Ashland, the home of Oregon Shakes. The company had to scramble to purchase new equipment, which totaled more than $130,000. It was a huge hit financially for the theatre, especially after smoke from Southern Oregon wildfires cost the organization around $2 million that summer.

 

At long last, in response to filings by TCG and other performing arts organizations, the FCC opened a rule-making proceeding to consider expanding licensing to include theatre, music, performing arts, or similar organizations so they could qualify for a Part 74 license without meeting the threshold of 50 mics. The only objection to this expansion came from Microsoft, which has been invested in developing a rural broadband plan for more than a decade.

 

“The FCC is worried that if they open that door too wide, then anyone could get a license,” says Pawlik. “But they are looking for a way to draw the line that will satisfy the Administrative Procedure Act.” The APA governs how federal agencies set regulations to ensure they are not “arbitrary and capricious.”

 

Baskin is sure a common-sense approach would work. “An organization has to have the capacity to purchase and operate this equipment,” she notes. “It will be a self-selecting group of organizations.” She points out that under the current rules, even a major New York theatre like Manhattan Theatre Club does not qualify for a license. “Theatres will still need sound equipment. They can’t go back to wired microphones. What would that do to the quality of performances?”

 

It’s possible to rent microphone systems for productions, and these tend to come with licenses to operate them. But Baskin says that’s cost-prohibitive, and not even possible in all parts of the country.

 

Every time a government agency proposes a change to the regulations it oversees, the change must be put up for public comment. TCG began collecting support letters from arts organizations around the country. Since theatres, operas, symphonies, and dance companies represent a $7.8 billion dollar industry annually, it’s hoped the FCC will pay attention to this important sector.

 

The Performing Arts Wireless Microphone Working Group has gotten a lot of support from wireless mic manufacturers as well, such as Sennheiser and Shure. “They want to sell microphones,” says Pawlik. “If there’s no space for them to operate, then they can’t do that.” But the FCC has been pushing manufacturers to improve the technology. “The best wireless microphones are still analog. The companies haven’t been able to move to digital without latency issues.”

 

Public comment closed in 2017, but the FCC has remained silent on the future of white space. “I think they’re waiting for someone to complain about interference,” says Pawlik. “There is no timeline that they need to rule by.”

 

Meanwhile, the repackaging of the radio spectrum continues and white space continues to dry up. “It’s harder to find frequencies that work,” says Horvath. “We set all the microphones for use that day in the morning. But by the time the evening rolls around, before the shows, they have interference.”

 

TCG is trying to look ahead. While white space devices are still not in common use, partly due to the higher prices of emerging technology, everyone expects costs to go down as the technology continues to develop. And the devices might expand beyond stationary Wi-Fi spots. “Mobile white space devices are still in research and development,” says Baskin. “With the release of more spectrum, this has created new possibilities for them.” It’s impossible to predict how technology might change and impact the field.

 

Even if the FCC expands protections for wireless microphones, the future still isn’t certain. “We don’t own the frequencies,” says Horvath. “They could take them away again. We have no power at all.” 

 

[Portland, Oregon-based writer and freelance arts journalist TJ Acena is a member of the Rising Leaders of Color Program’s 2017 cohort. His work has appeared in Hello Mr., Pacifica Literary Review, and is forthcoming in Dispatches from Anarres, a collection of short fiction in tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin (October 2021). His arts journalism has appeared in the Portland Mercury, The Oregonian, and American Theatre magazine.

[Article 6 of the sound design collection will be published on Saturday, 3 April.  It will cover how sound designers determine and manipulate acoustics to create the effects they (and their directors) want.  Please return to ROT in three days to read what author Naveen Kumar dubs the sound designer’s equivalent to the director’s playing space.]

"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Articles 3 & 4

 

[Welcome to the second entry in my republication of American Theatre’s July/August 2019 series on sound design.  The two articles below will discuss the use of background music in “straight” theater the way moviemakers use it and the various ways a young sound designer can learn the practical lessons of the art.  

[The articles in this series aren’t linked contextually, but they all treat the same general subject.  Each article has advice, lore, and recommendations (including references and sources of information) that can be helpful or just edifying.  So I recommend going back to 25 March and picking up articles 1 and 2 in the series either before or after reading articles 3 and 4 posted below.

[The remaining four articles in this collection will be posted at three-day intervals through 9 April.  I hope you will read all of them.]

 

“HOW TO MAKE THEATRE SCORES MORE CINEMATIC”
by Caitlyn Halvorsen 

Composer Jeremy Douglass was inspired by video games to create underscoring that reacts in real time to the action onstage.

It’s a common experience at the movies: You’re sitting in your seat, tense with anticipation, and at a pivotal moment the camera closes in on the hero while the music swells in the background. In films, a musical score is as integral as camera angles and lighting. It emphasizes and undergirds the action, sets the tone for a scene, and even tells us how to feel in a particular moment. While it’s rarer in theatre, more and more non-musical plays are using composers for similar purposes: Imogen Heap’s score for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, for instance, has generated as much buzz as the magical effects. 

According to Florida-based composer Jeremy Douglass, when it comes to scoring straight plays: “You have to just stay out of the way.” Much like other design elements in a theatrical production, underscoring is most effective when it amplifies the action onstage without distracting from it. 

But while a film composer will score based on footage that’s already been filmed, in the theatre it’s usually the other way around. Most of the time the sound designer or composer is at work before the performers have even put the show on its feet. While a lighting shift can usually be triggered in real time by a specific line or action, a show’s score cannot operate in the same way. As unpredictability is a defining element of live performance, it is nearly impossible for a piece of recorded music to specifically reflect the shifts in mood or tone throughout a live scene, because, as Douglass says, “You’re just pressing play.” That means that composers for stage plays are often confined to creating scores that are static, cautious, even bland. “You have to distill a complicated scene down to its most basic element and hope that it works, hope that it informs the audience,” says Douglass. While there is always the option to have live musicians plays along with the action, a la the string quartet in the recent Broadway production [of King Lear, 4 April-9 June 2019 at the Cort Theatre], sitting onstage playing music by Philip Glass, that’s an expensive option with its own instrumental limitations.

Frustrated by these constraints, Douglass discovered a potential solution when he was asked to score Hedda, Lucy Kirkwood’s adaptation of Ibsen’s 19th-century drama, at Jobsite Theater in Tampa, Fla. Director Stuart Fail sent Douglass a copy of the script marked with moments to be accompanied by music. Douglass was concerned, as many of those moments occurred during scenes of tension between the characters. He remembered thinking: “How am I gonna write music for this scene with all these shifting emotions if we’re just gonna press play and not choreograph to the music?” 

Unsure how to approach the task, a source of inspiration came to Douglass from another medium entirely: video games. Specifically, the 2014 survival horror game Alien: Isolation. In the game, players must hide from the title creature, with the alien’s proximity to the player indicated by how many layers of music are playing. One layer may include screechy violins, another the rumble of brass instruments. Douglass describes the game’s underscoring as “orchestral tension music,” minus melodies or chord changes. Because it lacks traditional musical development, the layers of the score “can start and stop at any moment within their own loop and it doesn’t sound like it’s starting in the middle,” resulting in music that feels reactive to the player’s every move. Douglass says that this type of composition has been used in video games for a long time, but he was unsure if anyone had tried adapting the style for theatre. Regardless, it seemed like the perfect solution to his uncertainty about scoring Hedda.

So how does this method work? Compositionally it requires a particular style made up of multiple layers of music, with each layer containing “elliptical phrases, these loops that repeat over and over again,” says Douglass. “They don’t have a beginning, they don’t have an end. You can fade a loop up at any moment, and it sounds like the beginning, just because now is the first time you’ve heard it.” The loops must be composed so that they can be played in any combination at a time, whether it be a single loop, three loops, or every loop in the composition. The composer must also decide which combination of loops, or layers, should play during a specific moment. This layering is what creates the musical development of the underscore, replacing what is traditionally fulfilled by melodies and chord changes.

Douglass cites the music of composer Bernard Herrmann, a frequent Alfred Hitchcock collaborator and master of loop-like motifs to create tension, as a major inspiration for his music choices in Hedda. The loops heard in Douglass’s score feature the instruments of a small string orchestra, a purposefully traditional soundscape that befits the domestic drama happening onstage. “We’ve already given orchestra a space in cinematic underscore,” Douglass explains. “Everybody’s comfortable with it—it’s a character we all know.” 

Then, during the performances of Hedda, the loops were programmed into the scene using QLab, a program designed for running sound and light cues that is commonly used in theatres. Using QLab allowed Douglass and sound designer Matthew Ray to program in advance the rate at which different tracks fade in and out, whether it be an immediate change or one gradually happening over 30 seconds—so it could better match the pace of the live scene. Then during performances, an operator only needs to press a button.

Douglass notes that, while looping programs such as Ableton Live exist, using QLab for the underscoring tracks is a more efficient option, as the tracks can run alongside lights or sound effects also in the program. “No special skills are needed if the company already uses QLab,” Douglass wrote in an email. “A lighting tech can run it, because in the end it works just like lights.”

The biggest challenge Douglass and Ray encountered during the process involved volume levels. The levels, or sound intensities, of each track had to be adjusted so that when all of the tracks play together it didn’t overwhelm the dialogue. For Hedda, Douglass set these levels in Logic Pro, the program he used to compose the score. Once the files were transported to QLab, however, making the levels consistent between cues became tricky.

“Music Cue 1 maybe has 10 tracks, and all of the tracks have been exported at different volumes depending on how I want those tracks to be blended when you turn them up,” Douglass says. “So that makes it difficult to keep the levels for each music cue consistent. If Music Cue 2, when all tracks are playing, is still too quiet compared to Music Cue 1 when all tracks are playing, we have to go through and bring up the levels of each track in Music Cue 2 so they match Music Cue 1.” Douglass believes this complication can be avoided in the future by waiting to adjust the levels of the tracks until the files are in QLab.

The next production he hopes to use this approach on is Steve Martin’s Meteor Shower at Jobsite, which he plans to give a contemporary sound with more modern instruments. To help other composers and sound designers who are trying to figure out how to better underscore a play, Douglass plans to create a series of videos outlining his process, so that they feel, as he does, that “you now have infinite control over music developing into a scene.” Score! 

[Caitlyn Halvorsen is a dramaturg and writer based in the Hudson Valley. A former editorial intern for American Theatre, she is currently working as the education intern for Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in Garrison, New York. She is a recent graduate of SUNY New Paltz’s Theatre Design and Technology program.

[On 3 and 6 March 2014, I posted an article on The Shaliko Company’s Strangers, an avant-garde performance piece composed by Leonardo Shapiro, the troupe’s director, and his company.  Strangers had a live score composed by jazz percussionist Max Roach.  In performance, Roach’s composition, which was part of what Shapiro called the “instrumental track” of the production, was improvised by a musician seated within view of the spectators at the edge of the performance space.]

*  *  *  *
“AURAL LEARNING”
By Jerald Raymond Pierce

Whether you learn at school or on the job, success as a sound design doesn’t follow an easy track.

When you’re in high school, sound design can seem so simple. There’s nothing too complicated, after all, about plugging an iPod or computer into a mixing board and cranking up the volume; even if you’re using a program like QLab, it’s still mostly press and play. But that’s not really sound design, of course, any more than high school acting is really acting. The training involved to do it on a professional level involves learning about music, science, script analysis, and even social skills.

While educators at both undergraduate and graduate levels agree that going through an official sound design training program isn’t the only way to make it in the industry, training can definitely allow for a smoother entrance into an already difficult field. Those who hope to make a living as a sound designer may find themselves working on anywhere from 10 to 20 shows in a year, if they can get the gigs. Chicago-based sound designer Victoria Deiorio, who runs a sound design program she helped create at DePaul University in Chicago, offered a general disclaimer: Sound design is a tough career, and, like many creative jobs, should be something you really want to do if you’re going to pursue it. Deiorio added that the difference between going to school or learning on the job depends on where a young sound designer wants to put their “safety net.”

“In school,” said Deiorio, “you have the ability to make missteps and crumble, in a sense, without too much consequence on whether you’re going to get paid, whether [or] not you’re going to have a job, or whether or not you will have burned a bridge. It’s an environment where you can test things out without too much consequence if you fail.”

In school, the room to fail includes the chance to experiment with different levels of equipment—not always the state-of-the-art digital sound boards, necessarily, as that’s not the reality out in the world—and to branch out artistically. Since sound designers are responsible for taking audiences on an aural and emotional journey, Deiorio added that an interest in human nature is important when deciding to work in the theatre.

“You have to really understand history and anthropology and sociology and psychology and the physiology of how sound waves hit the body,” said Deiorio, who authored The Art of Theatrical Sound Design: A Practical Guide, a sound design training book. “If you like all of those things, then it’s definitely the career for you. If you like psycho-acoustics then it’s totally the career for you.”

Expecting to find young designers or students with a knowledge of all of those areas is a tall task. That’s why programs like the masters program David Budries runs at the Yale School of Drama set out to find students of varying backgrounds and interests to complement each other. With just three students chosen per class, Budries said he tries to get one student who is more oriented toward the technological and engineering side of sound design, one who leans more toward musical composition, and one who falls somewhere in between.

“I have discovered over the years that the integration of different ideas, different dramaturgical approaches, just different mindsets is hugely important to the diversity of the individual classes,” Budries said.

In the classroom, those differing voices are able to bounce ideas off each other and grow based on the strengths of their fellow students. Deiorio, who had conversations with Budries, among others, as she crafted DePaul’s undergraduate sound design curriculum, also employs this strategy, noting that varied voices are crucial as the sound design field moves toward diversifying its workforce. Porsche McGovern’s HowlRound study of design positions in League of Resident Theatre (LORT) theatres between 2012 and 2017 found that 86.4 percent of sound designers were men, and that those men took up 89 percent of all sound design jobs. (The number jumps to 96 percent if you look at Broadway employment during the 2017-18 season, according to data collected by ProductionPro.)

More variety in the background and interests of sound design students means that the training programs are able to provide a necessarily comprehensive training in all things “sound design and engineering” while also allowing students the flexibility to explore their specialties and affinities. According to sound designer Sun Hee (Sunny) Kil, assistant professor at SUNY New Paltz, computer software like Logic Pro and Garage Band makes it easier for students to craft music and soundscapes. While it’s not essential that all students come out as expert composers, it’s important that they have the tools to realize their ideas.

“Students need to get trained to express the emotions or drama in each scene,” Kil explained. “Only sound can make the emotions. We are the psychologists, we are the manipulators—we are the people who can tell the story and really tie it to the audience.”

To that end Kil has her students study music, theatre, and piano, all to help learn the connection between the aural world and human emotion. Students also have to take engineering and physics classes too to better understand the science of sound. As Kil pointed out, “There are many sound engineers who have no sound education out there; they start learning from the shop or touring companies.” Kil said those engineers are missing out on important foundational knowledge.

That’s not to say that bypassing traditional schooling, or joining the sound design game late, can’t work out in the end. Deiorio herself was a ballet dancer who pursued musical theatre as an undergraduate. She had moved to Chicago thinking she’d be an actor and director (she still occasionally does both), but the sound design world, she says, “chose her.” She considers her first three years working in the field to have been her training. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise, then, that Deiorio, in both her book and her program, emphasizes teaching young sound designers how to collaborate and express themselves.

“I remember there were times that I did things or said things that were my young, rash mind—what I thought was the right thing at the time,” Deiorio confessed. “You burn bridges. I didn’t want that to happen for the sound designers who were starting out.” She hopes to give her students the ability to clearly and diplomatically “speak to why you want something in a show or why something may not be the best fit for the delivery of that emotion to an audience.”

Effective communication of ideas becomes even more important when considering how difficult it can be for young sound designers to prove their worth to new companies. Sound engineering and soundscapes are so intrinsically tied to their productions that simply playing a director or producer a sound can’t possibly carry the same weight as that sound did in the context of a play.

Kil, who served as the associate sound designer for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympic Games in PyeongChang, recommends that young designers put together a website and portfolio of photos and documentation from previous productions. She advises students, if they didn’t compose the music, to take pictures and include diagrams so people can see the size of the production and the setup. Then, as sound designer Jeremy Lee says, comes talking about that work.

“As a sound designer,” said Lee, former head of the sound design program at the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, “you have to get really good at communicating your ideas clearly. The people who are going to be hiring you as a designer are directors and producers, so they want to know what your process is.” 

Lee notes that summer stock theatres and internships that rely on student talent pools are great opportunities to build relationships with more experienced sound designers. (Kil equates this to the restaurant industry—it’s smart to work in a restaurant and see how it’s run before trying to own your own place.) Those connections, in a world as small as the theatre world, may be conversation starters in interviews down the line. Once out of school and working in the industry, Lee explained, it’s all about who you’ve known and worked with and the relationships that have been built.

Once relationships are established, the skills learned as a sound designer can translate to jobs in many entertainment industries, not just legit theatre. Deiorio said she’s had students go on to work on cruise ships, with Cirque du Soleil, and even intern at Kirkegaard Associates, an acoustics and a/v consulting firm. Television, film, gaming, and animation are all open to theatrical sound design students because, as Deiorio noted, the students already know how to tell a story and find that story’s emotional value.

To get there, though? It comes down to meeting people and putting in the work. Deiorio said she encourages her students “to be lifelong learners. You can learn from every single person you work with.” If you’re willing to listen, of course.

[Jerald Raymond Pierce is the associate editor of American Theatre. He studied acting at Ohio University and received his M.A. in arts journalism from Syracuse University. A member of the American Theatre Critics Association, he is also a freelance reviewer for the Chicago Tribune. 

[Article 5 in this sound design series will be posted on Wednesday, 31 March.  It discusses the measures theaters can use to counter potential interference with wireless microphones on their stages. I hope ROTters will come back to read this examination.]

"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Articles 1 & 2

 

[Periodically, American Theatre magazine, published monthly by the Theatre Communications Group, runs a special section on an important theater subject, usually one with which most theatergoers aren’t familiar.  In the past, I’ve republished several of these series, such as “Light The Lights” on lighting design (October and November 2018) and “Arts Administration” (December 2020).

[In July/August 2019, AT published eight articles on the art of sound design.  (Only three articles appeared in the print edition of the monthly; the other five were posted on TCG’s website, https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/hear-spotlight-on-sound-design/. 

[As part of my ad hoc series on theater work about which most people don’t know—in the past I’ve covered stage managers, swing dancers, and wigmakers on Rick On Theatre, among others—I’ll be running these articles in six posts, starting below with the editor’s introduction and a piece on a computer app useful to singers.]

This installment of [the American Theatre] annual design issue turns up the volume on one of the most under-sung—and commonly misunderstood—branches of the design department. What exactly do sound designers do (and not do)? How do they learn to do it? And how are new innovations in technology changing the way they work? Read on to sound the depths of these and other topics.

“LEND ME YOUR EARS”
by Rob Weinert-Kendt 

Stage sound comprises more than dialogue, effects, and music, and the folks who design it are doing more than mere augmentation.

One dividing line that’s often posited about narrative art forms might be summed up as visual vs. verbal. It’s a common formulation that film is a visual medium and theatre a verbal one, or at least that each occupies a roughly opposite place on a continuum between those two poles. There are elements of truth in this popular dichotomy, but not a lot, I would argue. The main difference between recorded and live media, it seems to me, is neatly suggested by those descriptors: One is packaged and predetermined, often intimate in feeling but fixed in its outcome; the other is blessedly, unnervingly indeterminate, simultaneously distanced from a crowd’s gaze and irreducibly immediate.

But there’s another important thing the visual/verbal contrast leaves out: the aural element. The sound of plays (and films, for that matter) does not comprise simply dialogue, after all. And theatrical sound design, as we learn in a package of stories in this issue, is more than the business of crickets and phone rings. It starts with the very shape of the space where theatre happens, the people who fill it, and the air in the room, as Naveen Kumar details in an excellent overview of acoustic design and science behind it [posted on 3 April]. Indeed acoustics are related to dialogue in this way: You can’t always know what works until an audience is there to reflect or absorb it.

One thing we hope to do with this issue is clarify some of the misunderstandings that still persist around sound design. Jerald Raymond Pierce’s overview of the field highlights one common misconception: that sound designers and composers are effectively interchangeable, and/or that a person with either title automatically can do both jobs. Indeed many do—which makes sense, as designing sound for a show is roughly akin to composing a score for it [posted on 9 April]. But knowing exactly who’s expected to do what, and just as importantly who’s getting paid for it, is as crucial a distinction as knowing the difference between such overlapping but not identical job descriptions as dramaturg and director, or fight choreographer and intimacy choreographer.

And though we’re challenged in a magazine—a medium both verbal and visual, but alas not aural—to show you the work, we have Caroline Macon Fleischer’s vividly descriptive roundup of some exciting sound innovations and experiments from around the nation and the globe, from Amazon rainforest soundscapes to biorhythms [posted on 6 April]. (We are planning to include audio clips for as many of these as we can, so be sure to check out the online version of Caroline’s piece at https://www.americantheatre.org/2019/07/02/6-productions-that-push-the-sonic-envelope/.)

Since 2016 each July/August we’ve put our focus on some aspect of design: magic, theatre architecture, lighting, and this year sound. [The July 2020 issue of AT featured a focus on costume design.] If this year’s focus feels like a homecoming, or at least like it’s been a long time coming, it may be not only because sound design is an often overlooked and easily misunderstood field. It may also be because sound itself is elemental, pre-verbal. Hearing is the first sense we experience in the darkness of the womb, and many believe it’s the last sense to leave us. In the beginning was the light? Maybe in the beginning was the bang.

[Rob Weinert-Kendt is editor-in-chief of American Theatre. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Back Stage West and writes about theatre for the New York Times, Time Out NY, and the Los Angeles Times. He studied film at the University of Southern California and is a composer member of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop.

[Readers might note that ROT published a post called “Words and Pictures?” on 25 July 2014.  Inspired by the film Words and Pictures of that year, it looks at the debate set up in the movie between language and image.  Later, on 16 September 2014, I posted “Words with Pictures / Pictures with Words” which discusses some artists who used both text and visual imagery in their work.]

*  *  *  *
“HARMONY HELPER COULD BE A SINGER’S BEST FRIEND”
by Allison Considine 

The new app is designed to make vocal parts easy to learn for the rehearsal room and the stage. 

CHALLENGE
To create an innovative app to help performers learn music 

PLAN
To build an app with a library of songs that separates out vocal parts

WHAT WORKED
Building and creating an app with beta testing

WHAT NEEDS WORK
Promoting the app, building a full song library, incorporate testing

The Harmony Helper app was born of a stage disaster. Andrew Goren was just 13 years old when he booked his first professional theatre production, and his preparations for the musical—which featured an opening duet—fell apart at the open dress rehearsal. It wasn’t stage fright. Goren was equipped with a microphone and, for the first time, could hear his duet partner singing their harmony in his ear.

“I walked out onstage, opened my mouth, and I lost it all,” recalls Goren, now a sophomore at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “It was like I had forgotten how to sing, and that was devastating for me. I realized I had no idea how to harmonize.”

Goren started working on building the Harmony Helper app a few years ago with a team that has grown to include more than 40 designers and consultants, and a Chief Technology Officer. After several rounds of beta-testing, the app is slated to launch at the end of July. [The app is available now: https://harmonyhelper.com/.  A YouTube “User Guide Tutorial” is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ4M7kLdruU.]

Harmony Helper is designed for both beginners and experienced harmonizers. It claims to offer users a “24-hour rehearsal room in their back pocket,” says Goren. The app guides beginners through a five-step process that breaks down all the vocal parts, singles out a track, and gradually adds the harmonies back in after the user learns their own part.

Users don’t need to be able to read sheet music for Harmony Helper; vocal parts are displayed in varying colors and delineated lines. “We call it the great equalizer,” says Goren. “It doesn’t matter if you have a voice coach or an accompanist to teach you the music,” he says. “You can just pull out this from your back pocket, add your music, learn your song, and feel just as confident and prepared for whatever you’re rehearsing for.”

At this time, the app’s beta song library has just 7 public domain tunes, including “Happy Birthday” and “Star Spangled Banner.” Users can choose a song, select a voice part, and adjust volume controls for the parts, the metronome, and the accompaniment. Songs can be recorded and played back, and a proprietary algorithm provides users real-time feedback on harmonizing skills. When the full app launches, users will have the ability to upload PDFs or photos of sheet music or download songs through the app. Two subscription models will be available: An unlimited monthly subscription for $7.99 or an annual $75 subscription.

The concept for the Harmony Helper app was announced three years ago at BroadwayCon, an annual gathering of theatre fans, performers, and industry folks in New York City. “We came out first year just with a vision, some mockups, and wireframes, and the next year we came back with a proof of concept,” says Goren. The BroadwayCon community has been instrumental in beta-testing the app, offering feedback about the app’s usability and interface. “We really spent a lot of time making sure this process is as intuitive and familiar—just like a rehearsal process—so people don’t have to learn some new confusing technology,” says Goren.

This year Harmony Helper produced a tent-pole event at BroadwayCon, the Rising Star Singing Contest. Attendees, many clad in theatre-inspired costumes, performed 32-bar cuts of songs to accompaniment. Their performances were recorded and viewed by a group of celebrity judges, including Laura Benanti and Billy Porter. (The grand prize winner received tickets to Beetlejuice and a backstage tour from actor Rob McClure.) Aspiring stars and onlookers could interact with the app and learn about Harmony Helper at the BroadwayCon booth.

Other beta testers included students at the Paper Mill Playhouse’s conservatory programs, who learned all their music through the app last summer, and members of the American Choral Directors Association. The feedback from the development process led to the app’s ability to turn the accompaniment on or off, to more clearly delineate vocal parts, and an upgrade of the interface. Looking forward, there are plans to offer a subscription model designed for music directors, which will allow them to share music and voice parts with groups. Harmony Helper also plans to add a selection of choral music in the public domain to the app’s song library.

“Music directors have such little time to teach the music, and they are sitting there after rehearsal plunking out notes,” says Goren. “But now the cast members can learn the music on their own at home, come into rehearsal, and the music director can spend that valuable rehearsal time putting the finishing touches on the music.”

Goren’s ultimate goal is for the app to help other performers better prepare and avoid onstage mishaps—from theatre professionals to summer campers, from choir leads to shower warbling. Let the harmonizing begin.

[Allison Considine is the senior editor of American Theatre. She studied literature and cultural studies and theatre arts at Pace University.

[The next sound design articles, on taking inspiration from video games to make musical “underscoring” more like film soundtracks and training, both in class and on the job, for working in sound design, will be posted on Sunday, 28 March.  Please come back to ROT for the next installment of “Hear, Hear.”]

'Much Ado About Nothing': A "Recovered" Report

 

[On 22 December 2020, I posted “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive,” a collection of pre-Rick On Theater performance reports for plays I saw in Washington, D.C., in the ’90s and ’00s. 

[All but one, that is.  One of the three reports wasn’t actually written at the time I saw the play.  That was Othello, which I saw at the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger in the early 1990s.  I had, in fact, never written a report on that production.

[As I explained in my introduction to that section of the post, I had some scattered notes, some comments I’d made in other contexts, and a random collection of very vivid impressions of the performance I saw that night.  I decided to try to create the report I might have written back then, using a little research to help remind me of details of the production. 

[I called the result a “recovered” report, on the analogy of “recovered memory”—which is defined as “a memory of a past event that has been recalled after having been forgotten . . . for a long time,” according to Dictionary.com. 

[I think it worked out well, so I’m going to try it again.  There’s one more play, from 1985 this time, that I saw at the Folger Theatre, the forerunner of STF, that left a strong impression and I’ve wanted to try to resurrect my recollection of the performance for a long time: Much Ado About Nothing.  In fact, I was going to “recover” that report for “Some Out-Of-Town Plays,” but I realized that one of the other two plays was another production of Much Ado.

[I put that idea aside temporarily, and now I’m going to revive it.  Let’s see what I make of it this time.]

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
by William  Shakespeare
Folger Theatre (Washington,  D.C.)
13 February 1985 

I’ve probably said this a dozen times or more on Rick On Theatre—and countless times orally whenever the subject of Shakespeare’s plays comes up—but I’ll say it again here, just so there’s no doubt: Much Ado About Nothing is my favorite Shakespeare play. 

It may also be my favorite play of all time, irrespective of genre, period, or classification, but I’d have trouble sorting that out.  When I was a (young) actor wannabe, I always wanted to play Benedick, but few directors would see me in that role.  I did get to play Don John, the play’s villain, in a very nice Off-Off-Broadway production of Much Ado in 1979.

The closest I got to playing Benedick, though, was doing a scene from Much Ado in an acting class in the mid-1970s.  (I’d have been just around 30 at the time.)  It was the act IV, scene 1 declaration scene in which Benedick and Beatrice declare their love for one another and she asks him to kill Claudio. (My partner was Jennifer Sternberg, another “mature” actor in the class.)

I’ve seen a great number of productions of Much Ado About Nothing over the years, including the 1993 film adaptation (about which I have mixed feelings) with Kenneth Branagh (who also directed and adapted the script) as Benedick and Emma Thompson as Beatrice.

The closest I seem to have come to a traditionally-set production was that Branagh film, which was set in an unspecified-but-vaguely-Renaissance Italy (though filmed in Tuscany rather than Sicily, where Messina actually is—but we aren’t to know that!).  It’s truly cinematic, rather than theatrical, but otherwise faithful to Shakespeare.  (The 2012 film adaptation by Joss Whedon, besides being made in black and white, is updated to a contemporary setting.)

Arguably, the staging that was the farthest from the original that I saw was the 2017 Shakespeare REMIX adaptation (see my report on this program on ROT on 31 December 2017) created and performed by the Chelsea Career & Technical Education High School of lower Manhattan.  Also reset in contemporary times, the plays Shakespeare REMIX participants work on comment on the students’ own lives and the times in which they live as they insert their own writing into Shakespeare’s text.  (I had previously seen Chelsea CTE’s Henry 4 remix in 2016.)

Chelsea CTE’s Much Ado About Nothing took place in New York City’s Messina High School, where “gossip fills the hallways, classrooms, and bathrooms.”  Yes, the set incorporated the school johns, including stalls! 

I also saw the London troupe Cheek by Jowl’s 1998 staging of Much Ado About Nothing (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Majestic Theater, now known as the Harvey), reset in the aristocratic climes of Edwardian England (about 1901-10), when the distinctions between the genders was rigid and absolute.

I don’t remember very much about the show—which gives you an idea of my receptivity to the production. I did, however, stop seeing Cheek by Jowl shows after that, it seems.  I’d seen a couple of the company’s performances before, though, and hadn’t much cared for them.

Much Ado apparently cries out to directors for a change of setting for some reason.  I saw a production on New Year’s Eve 2002 at the Shakespeare Theatre (a successor to the Folger Theatre) in association with the Hartford Stage of Connecticut.  (This was the archival Much Ado report I posted as part of “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive,” referenced earlier.)  It was directed by Mark Lamos, who reset the play in the Roaring ’20s (that is, right after World War I).

Everyone did a nice enough job and the costumes were terrific.  The show just didn’t sparkle, however, and I wonder if the laid-back era of the setting put everyone in that mind-set.  It was Shakespeare à la Noël Coward, if you can picture that.  If this weren’t my favorite Shakespeare (and if it hadn’t been New Year’s Eve), I might have objected more. 

The transportations can get farther and farther away from Shakespeare’s turn-of-the-17th-century Sicily.  In 2011 and ’12, the Shakespeare Theatre Company (the name of the company after it left the Folger’s Elizabethan theater) hired Ethan McSweeney to direct a new production of Much Ado About Nothing.  (See my blog report on this production on 19 January 2012.)  He reset the play to mid-1930s Cuba, at a time when the 1933 Sergeants’ Revolt brought to power a short-lived, reformist-but-unstable pre-Batista government.

McSweeney’s Much Ado took place on a sugar cane plantation and the designers clearly had a great deal of fun creating a credible evocation of Cuba in the ’30s, with the women’s fashions especially flattering and sexy.  The trade-off of the choice of period was that the military uniforms of Don Pedro and his soldiers were dull khaki jodhpurs and tunics, and lots of Smokey-the-Bear hats.  With the verdant hacienda set behind them, though, it was little enough for the men to give up the colorful and elaborate uniforms of the 16th or 17th centuries.

The production was fun, I’m happy to report.  STC has almost always been superb in its acting, directing, and design—even if I’ve occasionally disagreed with elements of the interpretation.  In this instance, the new locale and time didn’t illuminate anything in Much Ado that a more straightforward presentation wouldn’t have accommodated.

McSweeney’s Cuban relocation of Much Ado About Nothing was probably one of the most unusual among the professional productions I’ve seen.  (I make special allowances for the Shakespeare REMIX high school performance, given the educational philosophy behind the project.) 

I’ve read of some other interpretations that are “out there”:

·   A 1958 mounting at Stratford, Connecticut’s now-defunct American Shakespeare Festival, directed by John Houseman and Jack Landau with Katharine Hepburn and Alfred Drake as Shakespeare’s “merry warriors,” set in Mexican Texas during the Texas Revolution (1835-36)

·   A Franco Zeffirelli-directed camp Much Ado for London’s Old Vic updated as a Sicilian carnival with peanut vendors, carabinieri, and Italian accents (1965); Maggie Smith starred as Beatrice opposite her soon-to-be-husband, Robert Stephens, as Benedick

·   A New York Shakespeare Festival staging at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park in 1972, set “[b]efore World War I [in a] small town in middle America” with Don Pedro’s men as Rough Riders and Dogberry’s watchmen as Keystone Kops; staged by A. J. Antoon, the production (which moved to Broadway and has been issued on DVD) starred Kathleen Widdoes as Beatrice and Sam Waterston as Benedick

·   A 1988 staging for the Public Theater (successor to the NYSF) by Gerald Freedman set during the early Napoleonic era (around 1800) at the Delacorte, starring Blythe Danner and Kevin Kline; part of the Public’s 10-year-long Shakespeare Marathon (1987-97; 37 Shakespeare plays)

Of all the incarnations of Much Ado About Nothing I’ve seen or with which I’ve been associated, perhaps the oddest is the one I’m going to try to describe and evaluate in retrospect, the 1985 production at the Folger Theatre directed by the troupe’s artistic director, John Neville-Andrews.

Neville-Andrews’s Much Ado About Nothing was, of course, staged in the Folger Library’s Elizabethan theater, the company’s home.  (See my afterword below for a brief history of this company and its many name-changes.)  It started previews on Tuesday, 15 January 1985, opened on Monday, 21 January, and ran until Sunday, 10 March.  I saw it on Wednesday, 13 February, with my parents. 

(Full disclosure: my father was at this time a member of the Folger’s board.  In addition, sometime in 1982—or thereabouts—I auditioned for the company in one of those omnibus audition sessions that groups of regional companies hold in New York City.  Sometime during the next year, Neville-Andrews was at dinner at my folks’ house and he offered me a part “if you’re available.”  I had to turn the offer down because I was committed to starting a graduate program at New York University that September.  I had determined by then to give up my pursuit of an acting career.)

The Much Ado production, which starred Mikel Lambert and Roderick Horn as Beatrice and Benedick, was set in the 1930s.  What’s more, the story unfolded aboard the luxury ocean liner S.S. Messina at sea.  This made it more reminiscent of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes than William Shakespeare—and raised at least one unanswerable question. 

The whole production was accompanied by music from Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart, among other recognizable period songsmiths, as the play’s circumstances required.

I assume that most readers know the plot of Much Ado, but I’m going to give a brief summary for the few who don’t—and to apprise you all of the adjustments necessitated by setting the machinations afloat.

Don Pedro (Steven Crossley), a wealthy bachelor, and his entourage board the S.S. Messina for an Atlantic crossing, looking for fun and romance.  They and their fellow voyagers climb up a ramp from the house aisle with a band playing.  With him travel his friends Claudio (Michael Tolaydo) and Benedick (Roderick Horn).  Another passenger is Father Francis (Floyd King), a Bible-thumping Southern evangelist.

Also aboard are Don John (Edward Gero), a New York gangster and his henchmen Conrade (Alessandro Cima) and Borachio (Michael Howell).  However incongruous, Don John was Don Pedro’s brother, just as he is in Shakespeare’s original.

The gangsters are cartoon characters, figures of comedy almost as low as Shakespeare’s original clowns, the constable and his watch.  In keeping with the musical-comedy atmosphere director Neville-Andrews conceived, they’re more Kiss Me, Kate hoods (speaking of Porter—think “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”) than Guys and Dolls.

Below deck are Dogberry (Jim Beard), the ship’s purser (formerly a constable in Shakespeare’s original), and his bumbling cohorts Verges (Richard Hart), George Seacole (Stephen Hayes), Hugh Oatcake (Terrence Riggins), and Harry Starboard (Reginald Metcalf), who make up the ship’s crew. 

Balthasar (a singer in the original; Rob Bowman) is the tuxedoed lounge piano player, offering such period numbers as “Where or When” (1937, Rodgers and Hart), “The Lady Is a Tramp” (1937. Rodgers and Hart),“Tea for Two” (1924, Vincent Youmans and Irving Caesar), “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” (1924, George and Ira Gershwin), “Night and Day” (1932, Cole Porter), and “The Way You Look Tonight” (1936, Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields).

Young Claudio is in love with Hero (Tara Hugo), the young daughter of Leonato (Emery Battis), who are also passengers on the Messina, while Benedick can’t stand Beatrice (Mikel Lambert), Leonato’s beautiful, witty, but sharp-tongued niece, who returns his disdain.  In Leonato’s traveling party is also Beatrice’s father and Leonato’s brother, Antonio (John Wylie).

Claudio and Hero are soon engaged; as they prepare for their wedding, they decide, with the help of Don Pedro and Ursula (Erika Bogren), Hero’s companion, to trick Benedick and Beatrice into confessing their love for each other.  The plan works without a hitch, but trouble comes in the form of Don John.  

Out of pure cussedness, Don John devises a scheme in which Borachio will make love to the gang’s platinum-blonde moll, Margaret (Hannah Weil), while calling her Hero, at the porthole of Hero’s cabin the night before the wedding.  

Don John takes Don Pedro and Claudio where they can see the encounter and are convinced Margaret is Hero.  The next day Claudio shames Hero publicly at the wedding and refuses to marry her.  She faints and Father Francis persuades Leonato to pretend that she’s dead until the situation is sorted out.

Dogberry manages to arrest Conrade and Borachio and they confess the plot.  Claudio’s crushed when he learns that he killed Hero with his false accusations.  He begs Leonato to punish him and Leonato tells him his punishment is to marry Antonio’s “other” daughter, who is “almost the copy of” Hero.  Claudio agrees but first spends a night mourning for Hero and proclaiming her innocence.

Don John escapes the Messina.  (How? you may well ask.  I have.)  The next morning, Claudio marries Leonato’s “niece,” who removes her veil to reveal that she’s Hero.  Claudio and Hero are very happy but Benedick and Beatrice almost break up when they discover they were tricked into admitting their love.  Benedick and Beatrice get married, however, and everyone dances around the deck singing.

Father Francis, in the person of a pulpit-pounding King, officiates at the ceremony from a neon pulpit equipped with a flashing cross.

(In the end of Shakespeare’s version, Don John is arrested and brought back to Messina to face punishment, but Neville-Andrews seemed just to have forgotten him.  I’ve never figured out how the scoundrel got off the ship in the middle of the Atlantic.  Drop a lifeboat over the side?  A hidden jet ski?  Riiight! 

(Having generated that conundrum, I suppose bringing Don John back to face charges would only spotlight the logical disconnect—so best not to bring it up.  So the miscreant just skated. 

(I saw this play 36 years ago—and this has always bothered me.  I wasn’t the only one, either.  David Richards, the Washington Post reviewer, asked the same question in his 1985 notice.)

There were obviously textual changes and adjustments necessitated by Neville-Andrews’s idea.  For instance, the Folger’s script added such anachronisms as, “Places please, for the Hollywood ball,” when a crew member called the passengers in to the masked party in act II, scene 1. 

Most noticeably, Don John, whom Edward Gero played as a hood from Brooklyn, interpolated dese’s, dem’s, and dose’s into the Shakespearean dialogue.  Steven Crossley, by the way, is from England, trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, though he works extensively in the U.S.  

One critic quipped, “From the sound of things, while Don John was running numbers as a young man in Brooklyn, his brother, Don Pedro, was probably studying at Oxford.”  It was sort of Damon Runyon meets Noël Coward.

The malefactor also shifted more of the Bard’s prose into Brooklynese: in act II, scene 3, Don John told his brother and Claudio: “De lady is disloyal,” and then, “. . . when ya have seen more and hoid more, proceed accordionly [sic].”

Alessandro Cima’s Conrade followed suit, of course, as one of Don John’s gang, but not Borachio.  Actor Michael W. Howell is African American and played Borachio with an black street accent.  There was a lot of laughter, some of it from the hoods’ take on movie gangsters, but some from the incongruity of hearing Shakespeare’s words in contemporary American street speech.

(Neville-Andrews’s Much Ado wasn’t the only Shakespeare I’d seen that went this route.  In 1988, the Off-Off-Broadway Independent Theatre Company Americanized its production of Romeo and Juliet by making the characters Italian-American in the Mafia vein.   

(This inspired particularly those playing the lower-class characters to affect Hollywood gangster accents.  Somehow, “What light t’rough yonda winda breaks?  It is de east, and Juliet is de sun!” just doesn’t ring right.  I kept flashing on the hoods in Kiss Me, Kate singing “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”)

The program doesn’t say who’s responsible for the emendation of the script, director John Neville-Andrews or dramaturg Genie Barton, who authored the “Notes on the Play” in the program.  Text adaptations are usually the job of a dramaturg, but in this instance, Neville-Andrews may have been at least largely in control.

There were loads of problems with this production because of Neville-Andrews’s “concept,” but one thing can’t be denied: it was a handsome and miraculous setting.  Designed by William Barclay and lit by Daniel M. Wagner, the Messina was a sleek, sparkling vessel that stretched across the Folger stage, the stern at stage right and the gleaming white starboard hull angled up to the left.

The miracle was that Barclay got a credible facsimile of the ship onto that tiny stage and still left (barely enough) room for the actors and their business.  It was cramped—but the Folger always was anyway—though serviceable.

One of the drawbacks of the Folger’s Elizabethan stage other than its tiny size was the permanent architecture around which every production and set design had to work.  (This was one reason that Michael Kahn, Neville-Andrews successor, eventually moved the company out of its longtime home at the library: it was extremely limiting.  The other principal reason was the small seating capacity of the Folger—243 seats in comparison to 451 seats in its eventual new space.)

This includes the inner stage and its overhanging “heavens” as well as the pillars downstage that blocked sightlines, made movement on stage awkward and limited, and got in the way of almost any set design with which a scenographer came up.  Remarkably, Barclay devised a plan that left the Elizabethan elements exposed while weaving the S.S. Messina in and around them.  A touch of Shakespeare peeking out from Noël Coward. 

The ship’s interior, modeled on the luxurious French liner Normandie (in service 1935-39), revealed up center by means of an inner stage on a turntable, was art deco and painted ocean blue.  The chairs in the ship’s piano bar were upholstered in zebra stripes and Bowman tinkled the ivories on a gleaming white grand reminiscent of Liberace (sans candelabrum).  The rest of the ship was all shined brass railings and fittings, with curved staircases connecting the two decks of the set.

Though Neville-Andrews’s concept turns Much Ado into a high-society comedy of manners for the screwball-comedy era, David Richards of WaPo asserted that it was “easily the handsomest Shakespearean production” the company had mounted so far in its history.

Needless to say, John Carver Sullivan’s costumes were equally ’30s-elegant, right out of Hollywood’s golden days.  The women’s gowns looked like clothes Ginger Rogers might have worn and the male passengers were mostly attired in dinner suits—except for Don John and his confederates, who dressed like refugees from a Jimmy Cagney flick in pinstriped suits, snap-brim fedoras, shades . . . and gats.  According to one account, director Neville-Andrews ordered 70 period costumes, including the crew uniforms and the mobsters’ pinstripes.

The masque scene, which is a party at Leonato’s house in the original, was a “Hollywood ball” aboard the Messina.  The revelers masked themselves as movie stars like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Fred Astaire (Benedick), and Rogers (Beatrice).  As Balthasar played such period numbers as “The Continental” (from the 1934 Rogers-Astaire film The Gay Divorcee) and “Hooray for Hollywood” (featured in the 1937 movie Hollywood Hotel), the partiers danced the latest Latin steps such as the samba, rhumba, and conga. 

Ursula did a Shirley Temple routine during the ball to the tune of “On the Good Ship Lollipop” (the child actress’s signature song which she first sang in the 1934 film Bright Eyes) which seemed unnecessary and unjustified.  The dances were choreographed by Virginia Freeman and the masks designed by Michael Eade.  Bowman, who played the pianist Balthasar, was also the production’s musical director.

But all this good-natured fun was problematic.  It didn’t greatly detract from the play, but neither did it add anything.  (In his review in the New York Times, Mel Gussow observed, “As a concept, a Porterized porthole version is, itself, much ado about nothing.”)  It may have been ultimately harmless, but it created some logic problems.  I’ve already raised the matter of Don John’s escape from the Messina and the omission of the scene of his arrest and return.

Before that, when Don John’s gunsels, Conrade and Borachio, were caught, Dogberry didn’t bring them to a ship’s officer to be examined, but to one of the passengers: Leonato.  Whatever for?  Leonato has no authority in this version of the play.

In Shakespeare’s version, Leonato is the Governor of Messina, so Dogberry is a minion of Leonato.  It makes sense for the constable to bring prisoners to his superior for questioning.  You might have expected Neville-Andrews to make Leonato captain of the ship here, but he didn’t; Leonato’s just a passenger.  So why would Dogberry report to him?  Aside from the fact that the plot needs it, I dunno.  Go figure.

Neville-Andrews established that the scenes between Benedick and Beatrice were played on deck at the ship’s railing.  Under Wagner’s daytime sun or evening moon, the setting created a warm and serene ambiance. 

In keeping with that convention, with the help of Wagner’s mood-setting moon- and starlight and Balthasar in the lounge playing “Poor Butterfly,” Horn in a tuxedo and Lambert in a sensuous evening gown declared their love and Lambert’s Beatrice swore Horn’s Benedick to be her agent in revenge against Claudio.

But the scene, which Shakespeare put in the church right after the aborted wedding (IV.1), Neville-Andrews moved to later that evening in order to take advantage of the moonlit setting.  The scene was lovely, both in the setting and the performances, so no harm was done to the play.  But it was a change motivated solely to accommodate the look—after the daytime wedding scene, the lovers couldn’t wear spiffy evening dress!—and the director’s whims. 

Whatever it accomplished dramatically—as written, the scene shows a mature couple, 10 to 15 years older than Claudio and Hero, forging a commitment in fraught circumstances while the unseasoned Claudio behaves rashly at the drop of an unverified allegation—the point wasn’t strengthened or emphasized.  It just looked prettier.  In fact, seen in the church where the marriage was to have taken place and where the offence was committed immediately before could make the scene more impactful than delaying it.

This kind of thinking didn’t seem to have entered into John Neville-Andrews’s consideration for conceiving this Much Ado.   For example, making Don John into a comic villain, a sort of Boris Badenov (from Rocky and His Friends and The Bullwinkle Show, the ’60s era TV cartoons) as a gangster instead of a spy, stripped him of the true evil and destructiveness he brings to the original version of the play.  (I’ve frequently spoken of the character as “Iago-lite.”)

Then, in his “Director’s Note” in the program, Neville-Andrews asserted that “the thirties was an extremely joyous, optimistic and romantic era,” but he was ignoring the Depression (1929-ca. 1939); Prohibition (1920-33); the gangster era in the U.S. (around the late ’20s to the late ’30s); European dictatorships (Mussolini – Italy, 1922-43; Stalin – Russia/Soviet Union, 1924-53; Salazar – Portugal, 1932-68; Hitler – Germany, 1933-45; Franco – Spain – 1939-75); World War II and build-up to war (1939-45; 1923-39); labor unrest, riots, and revolts (1920s and ’30s).

Unless you’re oblivious to the upheavals of the decade, it’s impossible to call it carefree—unless you belong to the privileged moneyed class.  Or you believe the silver-screen image of the time depicted in the escapist fare projected by the film studios on both sides of the Atlantic.  Aboard a luxury liner at sea, you’re insulated from that real world, of course.

(In the same note, by the way, the Much Ado director observed that in “the physical constraints of ship life, no one can flee from confrontation.”  But, as I’ve noted, that was precisely what Neville-Andrews arranged for Don John to do, first when he mysteriously escaped form the S.S. Messina and then again when he wasn’t brought back to face his deserts.)

Furthermore, one of the aspects of Much Ado About Nothing is that it’s rooted in the real world.  There are no enchanted forest or magical creatures to manipulate or protect the characters.  Neville-Andrews’s S.S. Messina is, however, a world apart from reality ashore.  In addition to all those terrible events that I catalogued as going on out in the world, there’s also the world Shakespeare invoked for Much Ado.   

The Bard doesn’t ever say when Much Ado takes place.  One era scholars suggest is the mid- and late 13th century, the reign of King Jaume (James) I of Aragon (1208-76) and his son, Piero (Peter, or Pedro; c. 1239-85), who conquered Sicily and became king of both Aragon and Sicily.  Piero was an experienced soldier from fighting in his father’s wars.

It’s these wars from which Don Pedro’s “returning” in Much Ado, according to this origin theory—actual, historical wars in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula.  But on the ship, these wars don’t exist.  The closest things, one writer suggested, in which Don Pedro and his men might have been engaged, unlikely though that would have been, would have involved “black sedans and submachine guns” in a Hollywood gangland. 

The performances were hard to judge.  The Much Ado cast included several Washington favorites, such as Edward Gero (who’s made several appearances on this blog) and Floyd King (an actor my mother always enjoyed), whose work I’d seen numerous times.  In the role of Antonio was also an actor, John Wylie, with whom I’d worked in New Jersey eight years before.

Neville-Andrews turned many of the aspects of Much Ado’s comedy that derived from wit and snappy language into buffoonery and clownishness.  Don John’s henchmen were subjected to this transformation, as I’ve already suggested, but Tolaydo’s Claudio and even Horn’s Benedick had to display a penchant for farce.

It's one thing for Claudio to be callow and immature, but Neville-Andrews made Tolaydo play him as a bumbling schlemiel.  It seemed out of place and unfitting.  Horn’s Benedick got it worse, however

In the overhearing scene (II.3), Horn started out concealed by a large menu then he squirmed under a table and crawled under the piano bench.  When a steward removed the menu, Horn hid under a tablecloth and finally ended up under a deck chair.  Pure slapstick—but more Inspector Clouseau than Benedick the Shakespearean lover. 

The actors executed Neville-Andrews’s vision well enough.  The problem wasn’t that they couldn’t handle it.  The question was, were they doing Shakespeare’s play . . . or something else.  In all those other variations of Much Ado I listed at the top of this report, no matter how far removed from Renaissance Italy their directors had moved the setting—they were still doing William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.  I just wasn’t sure about the S.S. Messina. 

I didn’t feel that the Folger cast was.  The Times’ Gussow quoted Don John portentously: “Let me be that I am, and seek not to alter me” (I.3).  Richards of WaPo asserted, “About 50 percent of the time, the Folger Theatre seems to be on to a good thing—indeed, a snazzy thing—with its production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’” 

Richards continued his half-and-half appraisal through his notice.  “I’m not sure the approach makes sense down the line,” he caviled, “in fact, it makes no sense at all in some places.”  Later, he referred to “those recurring moments when Shakespeare’s Messina and the Folger’s SS Messina just don’t jibe.”

Another reviewer, Michael J. Collins, Emeritus Professor of English at Georgetown University, wrote: “Although it is sometimes thoughtful and illuminating, the Folger’s version of Much Ado About Nothing is finally not Shakespeare’s.”  I think I have to agree.

In a way, this was paradigmatic of the whole production.  It was silly, even funny—but it wasn’t Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing.  Not only had the physical comedy replaced the verbal wit for which Much Ado is justifiably famous (and, I daresay, beloved), but Neville-Andrews undercut Shakespeare’s commentary on human vulnerability to gossip, inuendo, and malicious deception.

John Neville-Andrews’s interpretation of the play was truly “much ado”—that is, a great fuss—over “nothing”—that is, something of no consequence.  While an accusation of infidelity would have caused immense consternation in Elizabethan times—Elizabeth’s own mother lost her head over such an accusation, after all—in the swinging, sophisticated 1930s (especially in Neville-Andrews’s sunny rendering), would it even raise more than an eyebrow?

Furthermore, in Shakespeare’s day, nothing sounded much like noting, which at that time meant ‘gossip,’ ‘rumor,’ ‘overhearing.’  So “much ado about noting” would have meant ‘a big deal over gossip and rumor.’  There are two important elements of the play that come out of overhearing and rumor: Benedick and Beatrice are tricked into declaring their love for one another, and Claudio rejects Hero because of a false rumor. 

That suggests to me that Shakespeare intended the play to say something about our responses to false reports and things we hear other people saying.  (Much Ado isn’t the only play in which the Bard treats this issue.  It’s an important plot element in The Winter’s Tale, too.  If the playwright put this in two plays, don’t you think it’s significant?)

Reconceiving plays can have profound, and not always felicitous, results.  In 1997, Washington’s Arena Stage presented Ibsen’s Ghosts, directed and designed by Romanian avant-gardist Liviu Ciulei.  The director turned one of Ibsen’s prototypical realist plays into a symbolist production to disastrous consequences: nothing fit and all of Ciulei’s adaptations reeked of imposition.  

Arena later produced a revival of Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire staged by Hungarian director János Szász which appeared to have been updated to the time of the presentation (2001) and performed in tune with Artaud’s theater-of-cruelty theories rather than Williams’s lyric realism.  Again, the style and the text fought against one another.  

Making a play different isn’t the same as making it better, and if that’s what Neville-Andrews thought he was doing with Much Ado—improving the original—then I have to object.  (This kind of discussion always reminds me of something my father told me.  Dad studied German in high school and he was amused when he was assigned to read German translations of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as other works of literature, to find the title page of the texts inscribed with the phrase: übersetzt und verbessert.  In English, that means “translated and improved”!)

It may be my own prejudice speaking, but I just don’t think Much Ado needs help to get across.  That 1979 Off-Off-Broadway showcase I did was set in Renaissance Italy like Shakespeare’s original, and a number of people told me then and later it had been one of the clearest and funniest productions of the classic comedy that they’d ever seen.  No help, in other words, had been needed aside from good acting and directing.   

[The discussion of this production of Much Ado About Nothing and several of the others I mentioned may have gotten a little confusing because they were all presented by the same theater company—though in different incarnations depending on when in the company’s history the production occurred.  I’m speaking, of course, of the current Shakespeare Theatre Company and its progenitors.

[If you haven’t spent a lot of time in Washington, D.C., STC’s hometown, you’re probably not familiar with the troupe’s long history and the changes in name and venue that have occurred over that time.  I’ll try to straighten out the confusion by recounting a brief synopsis of STC’s evolution.

[The Folger Shakespeare Memorial Library, an independent research library on Capitol Hill in Washington administered by the Trustees of Amherst College, opened in 1932.  It has the world’s largest collection of the printed works of William Shakespeare and is a primary repository for rare materials on the Bard.  The library is also the site of the Elizabethan Theatre, a two-thirds-scale replica of a London Shakespearean-era theater (a composite design of multiple 17th-century playhouses). 

[Folger’s tiny Elizabethan Theatre was not originally intended for theatrical performances; it was used for concert performances and academic lectures.  In 1970, the space (later called simply the Folger Theatre) was converted into a functioning playhouse, and the Folger Theatre Group was formed.  In 1982, the name was changed to the Folger Theatre.

[In 1986, as the consequence of a financial shake-up, the FT became the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger.  FT artistic director John Neville-Andrews, who had assumed the post in 1980, was succeeded by Michael Kahn, former Acting Company artistic director and director of the acting division of Juilliard.  The newly established company presented its first production, Romeo and Juliet November 1986.

[In March 1992, the troupe moved into the newly-built, 451-seat Lansburgh Theatre (renamed the Michael R. Klein Theatre at the Lansburgh in November 2019) in the Penn Quarter, the revitalized shopping area in the city’s downtown.  (The highrise building which houses the new space, the first new theater in Washington to be built from the ground up after the Kennedy Center in 1971, was the former Landsburgh’s Department Store, a household name in the District.)

[The new theater was a couple of blocks north of the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor occupied by the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution’s museums.  The company changed its name again, to the Shakespeare Theatre.  (In 1991, a new and independent troupe, the Folger Theatre, was organized to perform in the library’s Elizabethan theater.)

[In 2005, the troupe took its current name, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and built the 774-seat, flexible-stage Sidney Harman Hall near the Landsburgh.  Harman Hall opened in October 2007 with repertory productions of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Edward II (see “Three Plays from the Shakespeare Theatre from the Archives: Edward II,” 26 April 2020).  Together, the two performances spaces are known as the Harman Center for the Arts.

[In June 2012, the American Theatre Wing awarded STC the Regional Theatre Tony Award.  Michael Kahn left the company following the 2018-2019 season after 33 years. and in September 2018, Simon Godwin, associate director of London’s National Theatre, was named the incoming artistic director.

[After taking up his position as artistic director in September 2019, Godwin made his directorial debut at STC in February 2020 with a production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens with a female actor in the title role.  On 8 April 2020, Godwin announced the closing of all of STC’s facilities in response the coronavirus pandemic, pursuant to the recommendations of the Center for Disease Control and the D.C. Health Department.  A few months later, the company announced that some planned productions would be offered online.  To date, plans for reopening its theaters for live, in-person performances have not been finalized.]