Stephen Sondheim On Writing Lyrics

 by Kirk Woodward

[First, let me say that I really enjoyed reading "Stephen Sondheim On Writing Lyrics."  Kirk’s done his customary bang-up job on a topic about which I could never be competent, and he does so with clarity and perspicacity.  I even learned some things about Sondheim and his music/shows from Kirk’s article. 

[An instance in point: his comparison of Sondheim and Tennessee Williams as fellow experimental dramatists, which is a very interesting idea.  Williams thought of himself as an experimentalist; he wrote a letter of which I went in search some years ago (and eventually found; see my Rick On Theatre article “A Tennessee Williams Treasure Hunt,” 11 April 2009) in which he blamed critics for not letting him do anything different from what he’d succeeded at before. 

[As for Sondheim, I taught a theater appreciation class at a college in Connecticut and one of the attendees (who was a faculty member) asked one evening if I thought Sondheim was an experimental playwright.  I told him I didn’t because he was too well established and his plays were too well accepted by the mainstream audiences and press. 

[Based on Kirk’s examination, however, I’m prepared to say that perhaps in his heart (if you will), Sondheim was more experimental than he allowed himself to show in his public work.  In that respect, he may be more like Williams than I realized.

[See what you find in “Sondheim On Lyrics.”]

Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930), the acclaimed Broadway composer and lyricist, has written two books that contain most of the lyrics he has written, with comments, stories, opinions, descriptions, principles, guidelines, and verdicts that he delivers as he goes along.

The two books are Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (2010) and Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany (2011).  Both are published by Knopf. (“Finishing the Hat” is title of a song from Sondheim’s musical Sunday in the Park with George.)

To review, in the early part of his career Sondheim wrote lyrics to other people’s music for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959). Then he wrote both music and lyrics for, among other musicals, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), The Frogs (1974), Pacific Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sunday In the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1987), Assassins (1990), Passion (1994), and Road Show (2008) – an extraordinary body of work.

It is an extraordinary body of work, for which he has won eight Tony Awards (including a Special Tony Award in 2008 for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre), eight Grammy Awards, an Academy Award (Best Original Song for “Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)” from 1990’s Dick Tracy), and the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Sunday in the Park with George (shared with librettist James Lapine). 

Sondheim was also nominated for or won many more, including Drama Desk Awards, Off-Broadway’s OBIE and Lucille Lortel Awards, and London’s Laurence Olivier Award (special award in 2011 for his contribution to London theater). In 1993, he became a Kennedy Center Honoree. The composer-lyricist was elected to the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2014 and in November 2015, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. 

As the books’ expansive subtitles make clear, Sondheim, with a lifetime of experience to write about, doesn’t skimp. He includes lyrics that didn’t make it into shows, as well as those that did, or, occasionally, were written for other purposes, and he talks about why they belonged in their shows or not. He tells stories; he provides contexts; he discusses other lyricists; he exhorts, complains, clarifies, laughs and rages.

Sondheim is revered in today’s theater, and he won his position through hard work, focused on one activity, musical theater songwriting. I have several friends who have spent time talking with him, and they have found him cordial and helpful. (I myself have spoken with him exactly once, after the opening performance of Sweeney Todd in 1979. I said “Congratulations,” and he said, “Thank you.”)

On the other hand he can also come across as prickly, for example in his response to the Sound of Music medley performed by Lady Gaga (b. 1986) at the 2015 Oscar Awards. "She was a travesty," he said. "It was ridiculous, as it would be from any singer who treats that music in semi-operatic style. She had no relationship to what she was singing. What people liked was her versatility."

He appears to be one of the few people who would feel that “travesty” was an appropriate word for that (to me) thrilling performance. All the more reason, then, that he comes across in these two books as  charming. Sondheim’s books are inspirational, stimulating, and often funny and often warm-hearted, with a great deal of the humor directed at himself. Not known for sentiment, he criticizes the work of others (the dead, however, almost never the living) but criticizes himself at least as much.

He comes across as intelligent, restless, focused, critical (as much about his own lyrics as about anyone else’s), and demanding. His enthusiasm for his line of work is irresistible. Writing a lyric is much like devising and then solving a puzzle, and he notoriously loves puzzles.

As befits a lyricist, he is precise with language. He makes a distinction I endorse between a reviewer and a critic: a reviewer gives an immediate response to a show, while a critic takes a longer view in a broader context. And he distinguishes between a “song” and a “number:”

I use the word “number” as opposed to “song” carefully. It may seem to be a trivial matter, but it’s an important distinction. A song concentrates on one idea, one story, one emotion – it is a distillation. A number is an extension of ideas and/or stories and/or points of view; it involves development.

Sondheim, of course, is a master at writing “numbers,” for example, the fifteen minute long opening of Into the Woods, the “crowd” number “The Best Pies in London” from Sweeney Todd, and many more.

His work ethic is formidable. “There are not many [pleasures] to be found in lyric writing,” he writes. It’s work, and we see the evidence that he does the work – one brilliant lyric after another. I can’t imagine how anyone can read these books and not finish them with a determination to do better at whatever they do in life.

Sondheim provides a deep dive into a writer’s process. He has, of course, an advantage over writers in other genres in telling his story. How does one know, for example, if a novel is a “success?” Reviews? They take a while to come out, and are hardly conclusive. Book sales? Except in spectacular cases, who knows?

But for a writer in the theater, like Sondheim, each show is an adventure with a clear climax, when the show either opens and succeeds, or it doesn’t. His story, in other words, is dramatic. Of course it is! But the drama of drama intensifies the excitement of the narrative, making his books very nearly “page turners.” The saga of The Frogs, for example, is a masterpiece of suspense.

Sondheim provides numerous insights into the creative life. For example, there’s the difference between “bad” songs, which just fail, and “wrong” songs, which may be well written but don’t belong in a particular show:

I have a pretty good internal censor which prevents bad songs from either being finished or escaping from my study, but wrong songs are another matter. Wrong songs take just as much time to write as right songs, and are frequently good ones, but they are often impossible to spot as wrong until you see them in performance. And what a disappointment they are, especially when they’re good.

Sometimes an excellent song fails for a fundamental reason, as with the number “The Plan” in Into the Woods:”

Stopping to sing a song, no matter how relevant, impeded the pace of the story. The situation was better presented in dialogue which was briefer and more immediate. The song was cut.

Similarly he distinguishes between “bettering” a moment in a show and “fixing” it, so that in Merrily We Roll Along

we fell victim to the age-old illusion that blinds all rewriters: by the time opening night arrived, we thought we’d fixed the show. What we had done was bettered it, not fixed it, and the critics and theatrical “community” . . . were merciless.

One fascinating aspect of these books is that they demonstrate what many writers have claimed: that people’s ideas of why writers wrote particular things are generally wrong, or at least wide of the mark.

An example is the song “The Little Things You Do Together” from Company, which I have always felt illustrated Sondheim’s attitude toward marriage, and in particular straight marriages.

In fact, Sondheim tells us that, having no experience with marriage himself, he had no idea how to write the song, so he asked his friend Mary Rodgers (1931-2014), the daughter of the composer Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), what she knew about marriage, and used her ideas for the song.

Sondheim makes no secret of how difficult it is to write song lyrics. It has to be remembered that any aspect of writing a musical is a truly difficult thing to do. Sondheim frequently writes about the need for concision in musical lyrics; one of his three guiding principles is “Less Is More.” (The other two are “Content Dictates Form” and “God Is in the Details.”) Sondheim writes that concision

is unavoidable, if for no other reason than that the presence of music can not only supply what’s written but resonate beyond it. Still, it’s a precept hard to follow, since it takes so much of the fun out of writing by putting the brakes on flamboyant cleverness, ostentatious imagery, decorative elaboration, overly insistent emphasis and rhythmically repetitive lists like this one.

Any musical is a carefully balanced combination of components, any one of which can upset the balance and send the whole thing crashing. It’s by no means as simple a matter as taking a story, adding songs, and there you are. Sondheim makes this clear, and illustrates it repeatedly.

An example of the difficulty is the matter of how a chorus in a musical is presented:

One of the most unconvincing things about [a chorus] is that as a crowd, whether of peasants, soldiers, convicts, reporters, cocktail party attendees or any other general congregations, they all sing the same lyric; that is to say, they apparently all have exactly the same thought at the same time. Most people in most audiences accept this convention . . . but . . . this one irritates me.

Writing for a chorus becomes more difficult with the conviction that it ought to represent different points of view. Sondheim frequently takes on this task, for example in “God, That’s Good!” from Sweeney Todd.

Another problem a lyricist faces is how much or how little information to give the audience:

[There is] a subtle trap in the show, and indeed in any show based on fact: the lure of authentic, interesting and irrelevant information . . . the tendency to utilize incidents simply because they really occurred and characters simply because they really existed.

Sondheim’s two books are full of insights of this sort. So why do I have reservations about Sondheim’s brilliant work at all? He summarizes the answer better than I could, in describing the attitude toward his shows of the reviewer John Lahr (b. 1941):

The most egregious example of critical resentment was probably that of John Lahr, who panned [Sweeney Todd] in Harper’s Magazine.  It was part of an essay propounding the thesis that I represented the death of the American musical, having taken all the joy and spontaneity out of this beloved, exuberant American art form and infused it with an impotent sourness.

I am afraid that I sometimes feel that Lahr’s view is correct, for reasons which naturally may represent my own background and limitations. On the one hand, although Sondheim was doing celebrated work before I reached my formative years, the musicals I grew up with were not his.

I began by listening to the albums (on 78 rpm records) of Kiss Me, Kate (1948) and Oklahoma! (1943). Then I fell deeply in love with My Fair Lady (1956), and subsequently discovered Guys and Dolls (1950). These are musicals, one might say, on the “up” side – although Oklahoma! certainly begins to peer at the darker elements of life.

On the other hand, Sondheim doesn’t attempt to disprove Lahr’s thesis. I can’t help thinking there’s something to it. (“I seem to have a penchant for nervous breakdowns” by characters, Sondheim notes.)

A friend felt I was too severe in a monolog I wrote that demonstrated my ambivalence toward Sondheim. I agree with him; however, I can affirm that the sketch does show how some of Sondheim’s music strikes me in my worse moments:

My name is Stephen Sondheim, and today I’m going to show you how I go about writing a musical. Now here I have a story I’m thinking about. It’s the story of a small Iowa town, and into it comes a traveling salesman. I’m thinking of turning this story into a musical. How this salesman left a woman degraded and pregnant, that one corrupted some babe with a bribe, this one was the favorite of twenty hearts and left them all broken. The rhythm will be a train rhythm –

 

            (Plays a jagged, angular rhythm)

 

Like a train rolling over broken glass. And the chorus will be something about marriage, about why marry when you can have a lot of women, one in every town. Then the most corrupt, cynical one turns his suitcase around and we see that he’s the main character of the story – we’ll call him – Harold Hell! What an opening!

 

Now we move to, let’s say, the town square, where we see the citizens of the town. They’re doing what all small-town Americans do – bribing each other, stealing when no one’s looking, and poaching deer. Typical Americana. Ruling over the town – maybe we’ll put him on a tower, with a bullhorn and a searchlight – is the Mayor. Let’s see – his name is – Mayor Sin! And he’s got a wife, of course, they all do, a horrible, overbearing woman who’s the social dictator of the town – it’s a marriage of convenience, like all marriages. And there’ll be an urban rhythm under it, like the sound of glass breaking when a rock is thrown through a window – like this –

 

(Plays another jagged, angular rhythm)

 

Into the town comes the salesman, Harold Hell – tricky, manipulative, devious. He sizes up the crowd and cynically speculates on what they all want, something he can pretend to get for them by crooked means. Since this is a musical we’ll say he decides what they need is music. And the musical instrument he supplies will be – let’s see, a trumpet? No, that could be a reference to the last trumpet, too much encouragement for religion. A drum! Martial, stirring, and perfect for the rhythm of the town!

 

            (He beats out a jagged, angular rhythm)

 

No, that’s not it, not a drum, either. We need something that offers melody and harmony. I know – the devil’s own instrument – the trombone! We’ll have a number called “Six Trombones”, played by an onstage sextet, and it’ll have a mocking, angry sound, like –

 

(He plays, no surprise, another jagged angular rhythm. Sings on one note:)

 

“Six trombones in the market place…”

 

The marketplace, you know, where people are bought and sold in marriage. Oh, I’m starting to love this. I’ll call it . . . “The Music Demon.” See you later . . . I may write this one faster than I usually do . . . This material is a natural . . .

So I admit to a sometimes hands-off attitude toward Stephen Sondheim’s work. Not by any means always - I have directed both Company and Into the Woods with pleasure – but what seems to me his constant pessimism is not generally my cup of tea. I always wished that he and Woody Allen, another entertaining but basically gloomy mind, would write a musical together. That would be something to see.

When Sondheim tries to overcome his pessimism, the result, to my mind, is irritating. In the musical Into the Woods the capstone song is “No One Is Alone.” The sentiment of this song is broad enough to appeal to anyone from atheists to fundamentalists, but what exactly does it say? Why is no one alone? Are we talking about God here, or about social interactions, or about the plot of the play? Fundamentally the song, it seems to me, is a cheat.

I have always felt that Sondheim in particular attacks heterosexual marriage, epitomized in his song “Every Day a Little Death” from A Little Night Music, where the title says it all. His mother, in particular, was apparently one of the most difficult people who ever lived, especially for him. This would not brighten one’s idea of straight marriage. (Of course none of his musicals are specifically about his mother.)

So my first reservation concerns the tone of Sondheim’s work. My second has to do with his complaints about other songwriters, which are both general and specific. On the general side, he writes:

Prior to the late 1930s lyrics tended [italics mine] to be generalized and gooey (“You Are Love” – Hammerstein), arch and gooey (“I’ll Follow My Secret Heart” – Coward), strenuously effortful . . . or at best unadorned and repetitive . . . all of them perfectly satisfactory for theater songs of the time . . . . [Songwriters of earlier eras] were too comfortable with traditional musical comedy to think in terms of creating songs to fit characters because there were no characters in musical comedy, only personalities . . . .

Sondheim acknowledges that we may be disappointed with what followed:

Even today, a lot of people (including critics) deplore the loss of what they see as the lighthearted silliness of the old musicals. For songwriters and playwrights, however, involving an audience in a story with singing characters who are more than skin deep is much more interesting work. . . . Most of the lyrics [he has written] belong to the mouths of particular characters in particular situations, characters who are only partly knowable without the context of the dialogue and actions in their stories.

“Lighthearted silliness” is a bit of a special pleading. It hardly summarizes the qualities of a score such as, for example, The Boys From Syracuse (1938, book by George Abbott, music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Lorenz Hart), or for that matter Pal Joey (1940, by Rodgers and Hart, with a book by John O’Hara, with one suspects a substantial assist from George Abbott). I imagine Sondheim would object if I referred to his songs as “music about people with furrowed brows” – another broad generalization.

In any case, Sondheim’s use of the word “tended” gives away a good bit of his case. He is overgeneralizing to beat the band (so to speak). Songwriting is, and has always been, much more complex than one would gather from his summary.

For example, in 1897 George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), in a weekly theater review, wrote of a production that “the music shews [sic] the modern tendency to integrate into a continuous score, and avoid set numbers,” and Shaw points out that Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and Charles-François Gounod (1818-1893) had both worked on the same thing. The “modern” tendency!

It is certainly true that up to the middle of the Twentieth Century, individual characterization in songs was not as much a matter of the speaker of the song as it was of the personality of the songwriter. This is not to say, for example, that Cole Porter’s “Ten Cents a Dance” doesn’t personalize a “dancehall girl;” but it could characterize any dancehall girl. Songs closely linked to a character – for example, Frank Loesser’s “Adelaide’s Lament” (from Guys and Dolls, 1950), could be sung by any character wanting to get married.

However, I would claim that even in pre-Rodgers and Hammerstein days, even the most self-contained, plot-independent song from a “silly” musical was likely to be stronger in structure than its non-musical theater counterpart.

The fact that in theater everything progresses from a beginning to an end must have influenced the most egregious hack composer to at least subconsciously think in terms of structure, and I claim it frequently did.

Moving from the general to the specific, Sondheim has particular scorn for aspects of the work of Noël Coward (1899-1973), Lorenz Hart (1895-1943), and Ira Gershwin (1896-1983).

Coward:

Most of Coward’s lyrics come in two flavors: brittle and sentimental. The brittle ones are condescending, either implicitly or explicitly . . . . The sentimental ones are florid, sometimes extending into unintentional camp. . . . Most of his list songs . . . state the same idea over and over.

Hart:

The laziest of the preeminent lyricists, and one of the most disconcerting . . . . Hart’s pervasive laziness manifests itself in three areas: mis-stressed syllables, convoluted syntax and the sacrifice of meaning for rhyme.    

Gershwin:

He makes you feel the sweat. . . . He is often undone by his passion for rhyming, for which he sacrifices both ease and syntax . . . . You can almost always feel the straining for lapidary brilliance, especially when he crams the rhymes together . . . .

As I mentioned, he makes no unfavorable comments about writers who were living when he wrote his books, which means there is only a passing reference to Jerry Herman (1931-2019), who was often thought of as the anti-Sondheim during the period they were both writing. By the way, he also doesn’t like Gilbert and Sullivan much either.

I am not saying he sees no merit in the writers he criticizes, but he feels strongly about their flaws. Of course he is writing as a craftsperson in a specific field, and, as the saying goes, “To a hammer everything is a nail.” He sees the pitfalls he himself intends to avoid as a lyric writer. But where does that leave those of us who love these lyricists?

I would say that he oversimplifies, and of course my objections may be simply a matter of emphasis. Sondheim acknowledges numerous flaws (as he thinks of them) in his own lyrics. As he knows and points out, these can arise from many causes, among them the pressure to write a new song right now because it has to be tried out in the next rehearsal.

But suppose that haste is not a primary reason for the flaws (as he calls them) in the songs of the writers he criticizes. What would have been the result if all the songwriters he criticizes had listened to him, corrected themselves, and written the way he wanted them to? Would their work have been “better?” My guess is no, because in that case they wouldn’t have been themselves.

Do we want all writers of musical scores to sound like Stephen Sondheim? I don’t see why they should. To take one writer Mr. Sondheim severely criticizes, when I listen to Noël Coward’s songs, what attracts me to them is that they’re vigorously and unmistakably Noël Coward’s songs.

Sondheim speaks of “the sense of exhausted repetitiousness that marks so many of [Coward’s] patter songs.” This has not been my experience. I remember seeing a friend in an extremely uninspired Music Hall kind of program, when all of a sudden a song came along that had me sitting up in my seat. It had brains, it had structure, it had a point. When I was able to find a program, I learned that it was a Noël Coward song.

I like the songs of the writers Sondheim criticizes because they sound like themselves – that is, they have their own styles. Sondheim has his too – someone recently played for me a few bars of a recording of a Sondheim song I had never heard before, and I immediately knew without being told that he had written it.

Sondheim is aware that he has his own style. He frets about this, particularly now that he is older:

I find myself using the same chords and the same tropes over and over, and I fight against it; but when I lose the battle, I rationalize it as being a matter of style, my style, a style I’ve developed over the years, an identity as unchanging as my signature. And to a certain extent it is – but not as much as I tell myself.

I suspect that more than one artist has run into limitations, found that they could not avoid them, and declared that their limitations were a style, perhaps one that should become a rule for others.

Sondheim’s style evolved in part from the music that interested him most in his childhood, which was, of all things, background music in movies. Sondheim tells how he put the idea of movie scoring to use in composing Sweeney Todd, but it seems to me that film music also must have helped shape the idea of show songs as related to character – because I contend background music in movies must be related to character.

At the same time, movie music has its own characteristics. Listened to out of the context of specific films, it is frequently musically more aggressive, more radical, than conventional song – good examples are the scores for films like Alexander Nevsky (1938) composed by Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), or, closer to Sondheim’s interests, the scores of Bernard Hermann (1911-1975), particularly for a film called Hangover Square (1945) which Sondheim greatly admired.

A stylistic question, then, is how much Sondheim’s love of film music influenced the way he wrote his scores, including lyrics, for musicals. The answer seems to be “a great deal,” and certainly there are other stylistic influences on his work as well. My point is that the same is true for other lyricists – different influences, different styles.

One might object that Sondheim doesn’t write the books of his shows but composes songs to fit the books of others, but in fact he has suggested many of the ideas for musicals that others then helped carry out (for example, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, and Road Show). And he became involved practically at the beginning of a number of other musicals, for example Follies and Passion.

Looking at those shows, one has to notice that many are, at a minimum, novel ideas for musicals. Why not? Why shouldn’t the range of the musical be expanded? Sondheim was unwilling to leave the form the way he found it. But there are risks, beyond the obvious one that audiences might not find the results entertaining.

Specifically, how clear are the intentions of the shows, and how dramatically strong are the plots? These questions dominate the story of Road Show, which took over a decade to take a shape its creators considered “final.” Similarly the book of Follies is famously weak in comparison to its score.

More than once Sondheim mentions what we might call “an idea behind the idea.” For example, he wanted Pacific Overtures to sound like “historical narrative as written by a Japanese who’s seen a lot of American musicals.” He wanted the characters of Merrily We Roll Along to be “expressing themselves through stultified song forms.” He wanted Road Show, initially, to be staged like a vaudeville.

The results are mixed, and the question should be asked: are such ideas dramatic, or are they not, rather, concepts, images, pictures, “bright ideas?” They are supposed to support the story – but suppose they don’t? Sondheim is aware of the dangers of “imagination and cleverness which too often, instead of enriching each other, draw attention themselves.”

[Kirk has discussed and defined the concept of the “Bright Idea” in past posts on Rick On Theatre. It was in the context of directing, rather than play- or song-writing, but the sense is the same: “an idea utterly unsupported by the script, and an idea that offers no worthwhile results.” Kirk mentions the Bright Idea in “A Note About Hamilton,” posted on 6 December 2016, and again briefly in “Falsettos,” 5 January 2017.

[His fullest discussion of the concept, which Kirk attributes to drama critic Eric Bentley, is in “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With,” (25 June 2019; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2019/06/directors-youd-rather-not-work-with.html). I, myself, discussed the notion and quoted the Bentley passage in the afterword to my report on a production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (8 April 2017; https://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-glass-menagerie.html).  ~Rick]

Surely Aristotle (384-322 BC) is correct – plot is the soul of tragedy, and in fact of all drama. If the story isn’t solid, everything else will be problematic. Far too many musicals are based on weak ideas or clever notions, and few of those succeed. Writers must be certain they, so to speak, have their stories straight.

Sondheim claims that “under ordinary circumstances, articulating [what a show is about] isn’t necessary. In fact, if you do, you run the risk of becoming preachy . . . .” Point taken, but if the authors of a musical aren’t clear what a show is about, disaster looms. In his great book about Broadway The Season, William Goldman quotes the noted choreographer and director Bob Fosse (1927-1987):

I was doing a show once; we had opened out of town, and the reviews were terrible – terrible – and we were sitting around, and I was talking and the book writer was talking and the composer was talking, and it turned out we all saw three different shows. In our heads. We were all working on three completely different musical comedies. Now why didn’t we find that out sooner? We just didn’t – don’t ask me why.

Similarly, according to Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins, a biography (2006) by Amanda Vallie about another outstanding choreographer and director, Robbins said that there were “only two things you need to know about a show: what is it about, and what’s the story?”

Sondheim acknowledges that he ran smack into this problem with Road Show, which went through four major versions over about eleven years while its creators tried to figure out what it was about and exactly what its story was. Art isn’t easy.

One of the principles that Sondheim frequently cites is “Less is more.” He also notes that “unless you can avoid the traps of banality and vagueness, Less Is Less.” But he also cites the principle that “Content Determines Form,” and if it doesn’t, well,

Thematic “relevance,” a favorite word of producers, directors, actors and especially publicists, in describing a show, is an outgrowth of character or it is nothing.

This may be a trap into which sometimes Sondheim has fallen.

Am I saying then that Sondheim should not have written the shows he did, or in the way he did? Hardly! The fact may be that in many ways, although he tells us he thinks of himself as a Broadway guy, he is really an off-Broadway composer in spirit – and, in fact, off-Broadway, regional theaters, and workshops have played an increasing role in the history of his plays as the years have gone on.

There are resemblances perhaps in the career of the playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), whose early Broadway successes convinced him that Broadway was his natural environment. He became frustrated as his plays became less and less successful on the Great White Way; but today it seems clear that he was basically an avant-garde playwright from the start. Perhaps Sondheim is one as well.

Or perhaps that thought tells us nothing about Sondheim. Styles change and so do popular enthusiasms. When Sondheim wrote his two books, he was aware that Hamilton (2015) was on the way, although no one then knew what a success it would be, and to his great credit Sondheim found its prospects exciting. Hamilton has expanded the possibilities of the musical. So, enormously, has Sondheim.

[I don’t have the ambivalence about Sondheim’s work that Kirk does—probably because I’m not as knowledgeable about music and musicology as he is.  When it comes to music, including musical theater, I just like something or I don’t and I probably could never tell you why.  Besides, I still just love musicals, a heritage from my childhood (see “A Broadway Baby,” posted on Rick On Theatre on 22 September 2010), and I find it hard to criticize them cogently.

[After I saw Evita, I decided I just didn’t like Andrew Lloyd Webber and wouldn’t pay money to see any more of his shows.  (I broke my vow to see Sunset Boulevard four years ago, much to my regret; see my report on 8 May 2017.)  Sondheim was the opposite—I loved everything of his I’d seen, from Funny Thing on.  (Pacific Overtures knocked me out—as my review, posted on ROT on 15 May 2014, clearly shows.)

[When I took singing lessons for a while, I worked on some of Sondheim’s pieces—particularly “Pretty Women” from Sweeney Todd.  One of the things I discovered, which made me appreciate him even more, is that both the lyrics and music are always surprising.  I expected Sondheim to go one way, and he went another.  It made learning the songs harder, but it made the compositions better—less ordinary.

[Incidentally, Kirk makes a statement above that raised a question for me.  He said that Sondheim was aware that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was in the offing when Sondheim was writing his books.  Since the books were published four and five years before Hamilton hit the boards, I wondered how this might have occurred.  Kirk told me that Sondheim never explains in the books.

[It turns out to be pretty straightforward.  Miranda was hired to do the Spanish translations for the 2009 Broadway revival if West Side Story that Arthur Laurents (the original book-writer) was directing.  Sondheim consulted with Miranda at that time and they remained in contact.  When Miranda started working on Hamilton, he consulted Sondheim on some of the songs as he was composing them.]

"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Article 8

 

[Below is the final installment in my republication of the American Theatre special section on sound design from the July/August 2019 issue.  Jerald Raymond Pierce makes a return to the series to write about the many jobs to which a contemporary theatrical sound designer must see.

[As I’ve done on the previous entries in “Hear, Hear,” I recommend that ROTters who haven’t been reading the entire collection of eight articles go back and pick up the earlier ones (posted on 25, 28, and 31 March, and 3 and 6 April).  The articles all address separate topics and each stands on its own, but reading all of them provides an excellent overall view of the art of sound design for the stage.]

“HEARING THE DIFFERENCE”

by Jerald Raymond Pierce

 

Sound design isn’t one-size-fits-all, and distinctions within the discipline are crucial.

There’s an old saying, invoked by Abe Jacob [b. 1944], one of the forefathers of modern theatrical sound design, that everyone in theatre knows two jobs, their own and sound design. While that statement may be a comic exaggeration, it gets at the frequent confusion surrounding sound designers and what it takes to do what they do.

The confusion may be understandable, as the field remains among the newest distinct design disciplines in theatre. The job title “sound designer” didn’t even appear on Broadway until more than midway through the 20th century. Jacob is one of the first two men to receive the credit, for his work on Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971. (Jack Mann [c. 1924-2013] received the title in 1961 for Show Girl.) For context, lighting design, also a relatively new designation, only became a Tony category in 1970.

Over the last 50 years or so, technology has increased what sound designers are able to do, making their work more integral than ever to telling stories onstage. The job description can range from using microphones as reinforcement in a straight play to balancing singers with an orchestra in a musical. It can mean finding existing music and effects that fit the script. There’s a technical side that takes into account venue specifications, house sizes, and acoustics so that speakers are placed in a way that ensures every audience member has a similar aural experience (see “Acoustics Are the Canvas[” – posted on 3 April]). Then, of course, there are the designers who create their own soundscapes from scratch, using either music samples or completely original compositions.

Theatrical sound design has come a long way from the old days of having a stage manager or electrician backstage poised to drop a needle on a record player or hit play on a tape deck. The science and art of it have become more precise and complex, opening the doors for producers and directors to call for any number of ideas—and for designers to come up with creative and artful solutions.

The proliferation of possibilities means, as sound designer and engineer Charles Coes puts it, that there can be a perception that a sound designer is a “one-person band.”

“Being a sound designer is quite different depending on the context in which you’re doing it,” Coes explains. In film, he notes, the sound designer is the person who adds sound effects; in the music world, that’s the person who creates “a very particular sound that you hear when you press a key on a synthesizer.” But in the theatre, the phrase “becomes this catch-all.”

So while some designers are especially adept at the engineering side, at manipulating acoustics and speakers, others are particularly skilled at using microphones to reinforce actors’ voices in large venues. Where the line gets especially blurry, though, is when original music gets inserted into a non-musical play. All of a sudden the sound design job includes “composer.” [See “How to Make Theatre Scores More Cinematic,” Article 3 on 28 March.]

Elisheba Ittoop is a sound designer and composer who defines her responsibility, in its most basic terms, as “anything that makes noise in a theatre production.” The difference between her two jobs, she says, is that composing is only the creation of original music, while sound design encompasses everything on the technical side of things (speaker setup, microphones, etc.) as well as prerecorded music, sound effects, and soundscapes, and then structuring all of those aspects—including the music—in time and space.

“I feel like I’ve met a lot of people who are very pleasantly surprised, happy, excited, to find out when they interview me as a sound designer that I’m also a composer,” Ittoop says.

But a tricky conversation often follows. Indeed Ittoop had just this conversation in preparation for a rolling word-premiere production of Native Gardens that ran this year at Syracuse Stage [February and March 2019], Geva Theatre Center [Rochester, New York; March and April], and Portland [Oregon] Center Stage [May and June]. At a design conference about the production, director Melissa Crespo realized that Ittoop also composed music. It was a felicitous moment, but it led to a larger discussion.

“I initially signed on to be just the sound designer,” Ittoop recalls. “It took another week or two for us to have conversations with the powers that be. Then they were like, yeah, this makes the most sense for you to make original music for this show. So we’ll also hire you on to be the composer.”

While in this case the conversation resulted in a second contract for Ittoop, this doesn’t always happen. Some theatres go ahead and hire two separate artists, one to compose and the other to integrate the music into the larger sound design; others just see a way to save money with a two-in-one hire. But the jobs are distinct, and, as Coes explains, skimping on that separate composer contract can force the sound designer to go outside the normal scope of their job.

Of course, whether a production uses original music doesn’t always come down to a question of whether the play would benefit from it, but to whether the production can afford it. But there are no shortcuts, as Coes, a lecturer at Yale School of Drama who has designed across the country, points out: A sound designer who is mostly compositional might require the concurrent hiring of a sound supervisor or associate designer who can focus on the technical aspects. Conversely, a designer who specializes in engineering sound systems may require a composer who is more skilled at creating content.

Coes himself often works as the sound designer and engineer for Nathan A. Roberts’s music. Coes brings with him the strength on the technical side, while Roberts brings the musical know-how. That’s not to say that both artists can’t design shows alone (they have and most likely will again), but their individual strengths complement each other in a way that can maximally benefit productions.

“It’s a hard thing to convey, because you can be an extraordinary artist in one of those things and not great at another,” Coes says. “One of the things that’s very tricky is that producers and directors and collaborators don’t always know what kind of sound designers they’re looking for or how big the scope of what they’re working on is.”

One group leading the charge in these conversations around sound designers, especially those concerning proper compensation for compositional duties, is the Theatrical Sound Designers and Composers Association (TSDCA). The organization was born in 2014, when the Tony Awards suddenly eliminated the Best Sound Design category. David Budries, a co-vice chair on TSDCA’s executive board, describes that time in 2014 as a collective “WTF” moment.

“We realized that, collectively speaking, sound designers did not have a voice in this country,” Budries says. “We’re really about the intention of sound design and how to create some kind of voice for ourselves, some kind of common language, and some manner in which to both define and describe ourselves.”

TSDCA began with 17 sound designers and composers gathering informally, and has grown to include sound designers for Broadway, Off-Broadway, regional, and international productions. While United Scenic Artists Local 829 represents sound designers as a union and handles their contracts, TSDCA aims to create context for the work of sound designers, Budries says, and to find a common language to discuss their art.

“In some cases, a sound designer might be asked to come in as a sound designer, composer, musical director, arranger, all of these things, which are really four different jobs,” Budries says. “What’s that worth? If somebody’s asking you to do that, it’s probably a small company and they don’t have a lot of money. All of a sudden, you’re doing four tasks for less money than any one of those tasks might be worth in a larger professional context.”

To bridge the gap between expectation and reality for sound designers, there’s no substitute for learning the process and having honest conversations. Designer Cricket Myers notes that many young directors still view sound design as something as simple as putting together a playlist of their favorite songs.

Myers, who received a Drama Desk Award and a Tony nomination for her design of Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, says that while there are some directors who love and understand sound, others shy away from the topic. She’s had to learn the best way to talk to directors who don’t know much about sound and may even be hesitant or intimidated by their lack of knowledge.

“I don’t need you to understand anything about music or sound,” Myers says. “Just talk to me about story. Talk to me about texture. Talk to me about tone. I know how to translate that into sound.”

Finding a shorthand with the director is part of what excites Myers about each new project she works on. One director she works with, for instance, likes to put together a playlist of different kinds of music for her sound designers, creating a glossary of tones and moods.

Ittoop, who received an MFA from the North Carolina School of the Arts, wrote her thesis on the very topic of communication with directors. She warns young sound designers to steer clear of technical jargon or talk of frequencies and decibels, urging them instead to find a discipline the director knows well and use that language.

“We have to be mindful of where the director is coming from and what they’re comfortable with,” Ittoop says. “Maybe this director is more rooted in the vocabulary of lighting or costumes. That’s why I love talking with other designers. They might have a really good in to the story, and I want to follow along to see how to flesh it out with audio.”

Ittoop recalls working on a show with a director she’d never worked with before. The set designer, who knew the director very well, asked Ittoop to hop on a call, and the two of them spent close to an hour talking about the show. Though it was a simple conversation focusing on transitions and set changes, it gave Ittoop insight into the director’s process and impulses from a designer who had worked with the director many times.

This kind of collaboration can be crucial in helping sound designers create what designer Mark Bennett refers to as the “sonic world” of the production. For Bennett, who received a Drama Desk Award for his work on 2007’s The Coast of Utopia, the sonic world helps to tell the story of the play. It may include prerecorded textures, pre-existing music, or original music, or any combination of the three. Finding and mapping this world, Bennett says, is a large part of his job as a sound designer. And because sound design is an art that takes place in real time, Bennett says, working with actors and being present during rehearsals is key.

“I would say that 80 percent of the productions I do have me in the rehearsal room with the actors on an almost full-time basis from at least two weeks before I go into tech,” Bennett says. “Some shows, I am there from the very beginning and I never leave.”

For Myers, being at the first rehearsal helps a play come alive for her. She’s able hear it spoken aloud and to experience the world of the play through her ears.

“I love hearing the cast’s voices right from the beginning,” Myers says, “getting a sense of their rhythm and their cadence. It’s really important for me, because so much of that defines what my cues are going to be. The more I can be involved in rehearsal, the better.”

This isn’t just a matter of the sound designers’ preference; directors increasingly want sound designers and composers to be in the rehearsal room as much as they can. This expectation has evolved along with technology, as designers can now create and provide more content on the spot, and edit and adjust it quickly in response to notes. Back when Bennett started in sound design in the late 1980s, notes given during tech rehearsals couldn’t be acted on immediately, and changes would have to wait until the next day.

“You had to go home,” Bennett recalls, “you had to re-record it, you had to re-edit it, you had to re-splice the tape. Now because of what the technology allows us to do, we are able to operate ‘at the speed of light’—in other words, at the speed that lighting designers can change a cue in the space in tech, we can often come as close to changing many aspects of our content.”

Sound has traveled a long way from the days when Abe Jacob got his start. After touring and doing sound for Jimi Hendrix, Peter Paul & Mary, and the Mamas and the Papas, he made the transition to Broadway and found a theatrical sound landscape far removed from both the concert world, let alone from the digital ease of today.

“Sound design in the early days was a very rough set of pieces of equipment that didn’t always sound as good as we would have liked it to,” Jacob recalls. There was a different division of labor too: “The stage manager was the one who used to go and pull whatever sound effects from the prerecorded libraries and give them to the electrician. He would make the tape, and the electrician would hit playback on the stage manager’s cues.”

That electrician, Jacob explains, would be backstage operating the sound. From his experience working in concerts, Jacob changed the setup. He knew that someone needed to be out in the house to hear exactly what the audience was hearing. It was a simple change, but it signaled a larger movement toward designing shows around how the audience experiences the sound in the space.

Jacob doesn’t make himself out to be the most important figure, the “founding father” of sound design. He credits the concert and movie worlds for improvements in equipment, and acknowledges that other designers were working while he was; they just didn’t happen to get the elusive title of “sound designer.”

“It legitimized the work that we were doing,” Jacob says of receiving the credit. “It put us in keeping with the other disciplines of design so that producers, directors, and to some extent the audience began to realize that sound design was an important and vital part of the theatre world.”

Efforts to gain respect for sound as its own design discipline got a boost in 2008 when the Tony Award Administration Committee began to give them their own award—then abruptly suffered a setback when the committee reversed its decision and eliminated the category in 2014. (They changed course yet again, reinstating the award in 2017.) Budries, who chairs the sound design program at Yale School of Drama, had been brought in to talk to the American Theatre Wing when the initial decision was made to introduce the award.

Budries recalls explaining to the Wing at that time what the possibilities were and what to listen for during productions. Members of the Wing nodded and clapped and said the presentation was wonderful, Budries says. More than a decade later, even though the award category has been reinstated, Budries isn’t sure how much of his talk stuck with them.

“There’s a big challenge there, because there are so many ways to interpret sound in our world,” Budries says. “I mean, do they like it? Okay, they give it the award. I think it’s going to be another generation or so before we get people who really understand sound design in award granting situations.”

Despite the frustration, many sound designers get why it’s difficult for some to evaluate their art. Sound design sits right on the line between supporting and enhancing what’s onstage, while managing not to be distracting. Other design disciplines are crafted to be seen, but sound design must make its impact while remaining invisible. A phenomenal sound design is hard to notice because it will blend perfectly with the cast’s work.

“If you find yourself listening to the underscoring instead of listening to the actor,” Myers continues, “then we haven’t done our job. A really good sound design doesn’t draw attention to itself.”

This is even true when there’s a lot of sound, as in a rock musical. As with any musical, you want to be able to hear the singers, she points out. But it’s a rock musical—the band should be loud. A mediocre sound design would make the vocals heard by making the band quieter, but a great sound design keeps the lyrics reasonably clear while maintaining the rock aesthetic.

“There’s a style and there’s aesthetic and there’s a design choice to the way the music sounds in a room,” Myers says. “Which I think a lot of people don’t pay attention to. They say, ‘Oh, I could hear it.’ Which is good. But there’s a lot more to it.”

Proper evaluation of the aesthetic choices made by sound designers goes back to understanding and appreciating their different capabilities. There’s an art to audio reinforcement and using microphones and speakers, allowing conversational and intimate dialogue to be heard with crystal clarity. And there’s an art to crafting transition music and underscoring that pull from the emotional context of one scene and propel the audience into the next moment.

Perhaps Budries is right—it will take another generation before there are leaders in place who can truly and effectively evaluate sound designers. But theatre is a naturally aural experience. Every sound, or even the absence of sound, is an aesthetic choice by a designer. It’s their art, and it’s an art that remains a pivotal part of any production. Over the next generation Budries referred to, producers and audiences would do well to stay attuned to the way that art can bolster a production.

“When there’s a consistency of actor, story, direction, lighting, costume, scenery projection, all of the physical elements, the tactile elements with the ephemeral elements,” Budries says, “when there’s a consistency and everybody’s telling the same story, then, all of a sudden—I feel like it’s very, very successful.”

Hear, hear. 

[FYI: TSDCA’s mailing address is P.O. Box 25653, Chicago, IL 60625-9998; its website is https://tsdca.org/.  The site doesn’t provide an e-mail address, but the Contact page (https://tsdca.org/contact/) has an app for submitting questions which will be answered via your e-mail.

[I hope readers have enjoyed this re-presentation of “Hear, Hear,” and perhaps even learned something about the art of sound design.  As I observed in my introduction to the first installment, I occasionally post articles discussing work in the theater about which most audience members (and even some pros) don’t know much.  Sound design, as it happens, is one aspect of theater with which I, myself, am unfamiliar—at least in the specific details of the art. 

[I’ve been around theater long enough that I figure that if I don’t know something . . . well, then many others are also likely to be ignorant about it as well.  If my assumption is correct, I trust some of the clouds have been lifted as a consequence of reading American Theatre’s excellent coverage.]

"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Article 7

 

[Article 7, the fifth entry in the American Theatre sound design series, is the only one whose title is different in the print edition of AT than it is online.  On the website (https://www.americantheatre.org/category/special-section/hear-spotlight-on-sound-design/), look for “6 Productions That Pushed the Sonic Envelope.”

[As I’ve been reminding readers, the eight articles in this series are not linked contextually, but they share a common topic.  To get a good overall introduction to the art of theatrical sound design, I recommend reading all the articles from TCG’s American Theatre.  The first four parts of the collection were posted on 25, 28, and 31 March, and 3 April.]

“ZOUNDS, WHAT SOUNDS!”

by Caroline Macon Fleischer

 

Live sound mixing, audience wearing headphones—today’s sound designers aren’t just on the sidelines anymore, they’re centerstage.

Crunch and Ooze

Last Halloween in Austin, Shakespeare in the Dark: Macbeth took the stage at the historic and allegedly haunted Driskill Hotel. Adding to the spookiness—and giving special power to its sound designer, Emily Duncan Wilson—the show was performed in pitch blackness, with the audience seated in the middle of moving actors and four audio speakers.

When the show, a co-production of Past is Prologue Productions and the Filigree Theatre, was in the planning stage, Wilson gave the producers a wish list of three tiers of equipment. It included “top-tier equipment, middle-tier equipment, and then a list of just the necessities,” she recalled. After the budget was reviewed, only the necessities remained. But Wilson said she found the constraint creatively freeing. “It was awesome,” Wilson said. “In the beginning, it was like doing a radio play.”

Indeed, she felt this production allowed her more of a directorial and dramaturgical stake than a sound designer—or any designer—is typically allowed. “Sometimes sound designers are brought on to navigate the crickets and doorbells,” Wilson said. “With this show, there was a lot more to figure out.”

One of her favorite challenges was figuring out how to differentiate separate locations, as well as mark the passing of time.

“We established the difference between Macbeth and Macduff’s castles with sound,” she said. “In Macbeth’s castle, there was an ominous, slow dripping. In Macduff’s, there was a crackling fireplace.” For outdoor scenes Wilson set the scene with forest sounds.

Wilson had worked with director Jennifer Sturley before this Macbeth. Because of their familiarity, Wilson said, the two were able to build an exciting “sonic iconography” to set the scenes.

When asked about her proudest moment in the show, Wilson said, “One of the stabbings had to be especially ‘stabby’ and gruesome.” The challenge in depicting such violence aurally, she said, is that you want it to be “not so gruesome that it will take away from the show, but just gruesome enough to be believable.”

She ended up finding a sound clip called something like “food squeeze with someone cutting toast,” which mixed the sound of a cringey crunch alongside the oozing sound of a bloody stabbing.

Another wrinkle: This “completely ego-free collaboration,” as Wilson called it, was conducted completely remotely, as she’s based in New Haven, Conn., where she’s pursuing her MFA at Yale School of Drama. So she Skyped in and out of rehearsals and was available via text during tech. Thank goodness sound travels.

Home Is Where the Sound Is

In a seven-room home/arts space in the Takoma neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in fall 2017, Debra Kim Sivigny’s Hello, My Name Is . . . showcased the unique but shared experiences of adoptees through an intricately immersive piece.

“It wasn’t a traditional play,” explained sound designer Roc Lee. Alongside the usual bustle of developing new work, the team of Hello, My Name Is . . ., produced by the Welders [Playwrights’ Collective], had to navigate producing a play inside the home-like environs of an alternative arts space called Rhizome.

“With 15 people in a bedroom, everyone has a different vantage point,” Lee said. “And it was difficult getting people to go where you wanted them to,” he remembered with a laugh. Sometimes music would play from a certain room, in an attempt to lure audiences there. “Most people took the hint, but some people tried to explore other places,” he said. The solution: find ways to block certain paths, or have actors gently steer audience members to certain rooms with ad libs.

“For one scene in the show, the guests went outside,” said Lee. “And while they were out, stage managers had to run around inside to move speakers and change what was plugged in.” In this way, the limitations of performing inside a house added both an extra challenge and extra charm.

The design was a mix of real and theatrical. Lee recounted a magical moment when audience members put on headsets to take a sound journey with their eyes closed—a trip across years and cities, evoking the experience of someone adopted from Seoul.

All the design elements of the show, from an outdoor wedding to a character writing a letter while accompanied by an Imagine Dragons song, evoked a certain nostalgia. In another moment, a song moved from playing out of a CD player’s speakers to emanating all around the environment. The technical effort of achieving this effect was tedious, Lee admitted, but when it worked it was worth the effort.

It helped, Lee said, that Sivigny, the playwright, is “primarily a designer herself. So the play that came together was more of a design process than anything.” The result, he said, captured how adoptees live a specific but in many ways common experience.

Now, Lee said, he’s even more interested in immersive, location-specific environments. A composer and a designer, he develops sound for theatre, video games, and film—or sometimes all at once.

The Four Heartbeats

Christina Ham’s Nina Simone: Four Women uses the themes of its title subject’s powerful music to illustrate archetypes of Black womanhood. In January 2019, for Lydia Fort’s production at Alabama Shakespeare Festival, sound designer Sharath Patel tapped an even more elemental resource: He used biological rhythms from the show’s four performers as part of his design.

Some of these sounds included breath, blood pressure, and heartbeat. The result was a sonic landscape incorporating a variety of low-frequency sounds that gave new life to Simone’s heartfelt music.

“I tried to find natural themes and progressions to complement the songs,” Patel said. “I’m a bit of a research nut with my designs, and was with this show especially.” It’s not just cloistered research he relishes: He also loves to talk to people in the cities he visits in hopes of tracking down sounds that may be integrated into his work.

He noted the differences in Nina Simone’s music throughout her career, particularly pre- and post-Civil Rights Movement, and flagged another crucial set of differences integral to Ham’s show. “The big question was, how do we represent these four girls’ power and energy?” Patel mused. “And Lydia, the director, really fostered the relationships between the designers.”

In performance many of the sounds emerged from the set itself. “When I asked if speakers could be integrated with the set, the scenic designer [Sean Fanning] was down for that,” Patel said. “We got to collaborate more than many designers get to do.”

Indeed, Patel feels that the design team achieved symbiosis for the production, correlating its sound and light waves. “You can’t be prescriptive with sentimentality,” he said, but the design managed to create an integrated, all-encompassing feeling, with soundscapes of the four girls laughing and crying enhancing the way Reza Behjat’s lighting hit the stage through beautiful stained-glass windows.

Patel also worked closely with music director Darrian Stovall, who suggested bringing an African drum into the design. Another sound element Patel incorporated: rare recordings from Birmingham in 1963, when residents rioted in response to targeted bombings of Civil Rights leaders.

Amid the hostility of our current political climate, Patel felt that doing a show honoring Nina Simone’s music was especially important. He admitted to some discomfort about working in the South, where he said he “experienced a hate crime” in 2009. “But Alabama Shakes is a wonderfully supportive company that really changed my perspective of the South.”

Thinking Inside the Box

In The Object Lesson at New York Theatre Workshop in 2017, audiences arrived at an overstuffed storage space to find themselves surrounded by an overwhelming amount of boxes. That claustrophobic feeling, of being surrounded by stuff, set the stage for the experiential installation that unfolded.

“The audience was not aware that the performance had begun, or that they were a part of it,” explained sound designer Nick Kourtides. “It’s anti-theatrical, really, to explore random boxes in a space. It’s disarming.”

But the relationship between people and their stuff is exactly what writer Geoff Sobelle, installation artist Steven Dufala, and director David Neumann set out to explore. The objects in the boxes were “lovingly curated” by the entire design team, Kourtides said. That these were not mere props gave the play an authentic nostalgia. They included Sobelle’s CD collection, “packed in with a working Walkman,” Kourtides noted, as well as a wacky Star Wars keepsake, a series of French lessons, and an intricate hobby train. It was a collection of “delicious experiences,” Kourtides said, and the audience experience was best when the designers were hands-off.

Eventually a show took shape in the space, with Sobelle opening a turntable and putting a record on, and assembling a living room: a chair, a gramophone, a nightstand. He extracted things from the boxes to keep the performance going, fishing around for sound elements and voice recorders. Throughout the play, he and the audience recontextualized objects from moments before. In one scene, “The Dinner Date,” Sobelle recruited a member from the audience, handing her a ringing phone. Through a P.A. system, the audience could only hear one side of the phone conversation (Sobelle’s). He invited her to a dinner date where all these extraordinary things happened: He did a tap dance on top of a cutting board, wearing ice skates, whose blades cut a series of vegetables for the dinner.

Musical interactions accompanied by a rain of packing peanuts eventually led the audience through the montage of a relationship, after which the audience member took the box of objects off the table and walked out the door. The phone rang again; Sobelle answered, and the audience heard only her side of the phone conversation through the P.A. system. Thus was the full arc of a relationship sketched, capped by a painful breakup.

Like a lot of the show, “The Dinner Date” represented full epochs in a person’s life with only a day’s worth of material. “In the end, all that is left is a pile,” Kourtides said.

The show affected him deeply, he said. “The experience transformed my thinking about what makes a theatrical object. Now, in all my work, I advocate for authenticity. If possible, the phone should always work. The light should always go on. When artists are unburdened by theatricalities, something new unlocks.”

The DJ Next Door

From last September to December at the Peale Center in Baltimore, a group called Submersive Productions staged a series of immersive episodes called The Archives of the Deep Now. The series was inspired by an elusive, possibly fictional group, the Institute of Visionary History, that allegedly left behind records of a series of thought-provoking experiments in the archives of the Peale Center basement.

“We were finding all this stuff,” explained the company’s co-artistic director, Glenn Ricci. “We thought, wouldn’t it be neat if we found the records from a secret society?”

One episode, called “A Horse by the Tail in the Night,” was a durational (eight-hour) immersive piece, during which Ricci performed live, mostly improvised sound as accompaniment. The eight hours of continuous play was an Olympian feat, especially for a company that typically produces short, clear-cut shows. For most of the shows, they could simply program them into an app call QLab, and the show runner could just hit the spacebar for cues. But an eight-hour QLab session was infeasible; they needed to do the sound live.

Another reason the sound couldn’t be pre-programmed: “A lot of the script was improvised,” Ricci said, though he did “have an outline so I could see what was coming next.”

Ricci created the live soundtrack in a separate overflow room, where audience members could go to unwind while still seeing the show on a screen. Why the separate room? “The setting of the performance was very Renaissance,” Ricci said, and it would ruin the effect to have him and his equipment visible. But having him elsewhere added to the excitement. “When people got into the overflow room, it was like peeking behind a curtain,” Ricci said.

His slew of equipment included a DJ mixer, a voice microphone, Ableton Live, a washtub bass, and an early model of a Parker electric guitar. “I actually brought all this stuff I didn’t end up using,” Ricci said. “I realized I could pare it down more than I originally thought.”

The durational episode was performed just three times. “We made a point to try not to refine the design too much,” Ricci said. “A big part of the experiences is the edge we got from naturally responding to one another.”

Audiences who missed the last Deep Now installments will get another chance this summer, said Ricci. Apparently those lost archives are a gift that keeps on giving.

The Encounter

Petru Popescu’s book Amazon Beaming follows the true story of Loren McIntyre, a National Geographic photographer who traveled into the Amazon to take photos of the Mayoruna indigenous community—and who, when a translator contracted malaria and had to leave, learned to communicate with the Mayoruna non-verbally.

This might sound like an unlikely property for a stage adaptation, but the London-based company Complicité saw the potential, and spent years workshopping a piece inspired by the book with directors Simon McBurney and Kirsty Housley.

When building the show, McBurney, Complicité’s artistic director, accompanied sound designer Gareth Fry on a trip down the Amazon, striving to recreate Loren’s journey and have a unique interaction with the Mayorunan community.

“We wanted to get their perspective on the story and get a better sense of what it means to be in the Amazon,” Fry said. “We spent a week there, hearing stories, telling stories, recording, and getting bitten by a lot of mosquitos!”

Many of the recordings from that trip would be used in the production, in which McBurney, alone onstage, conducted what he called a “walk across your brain.” Each audience member was given their own set of headphones, resulting in a curiously intimate experience, no matter the size of the house. (The Encounter started its life at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2015 and traveled all over the world, including Broadway in 2016 and the Curran in San Francisco in 2017.)

“It allowed them to feel closer to the performer,” Fry said of the headphones. “Simon could whisper in the ear of the audience.” Apart from McBurney’s voice, the sound of the Amazon enveloped listeners so that they felt “transported away…more fully immersed in the world of the show. It let us visit the rainforest and meet the Mayoruna.”

Since, as in the original book, McIntyre didn’t share a verbal language with the indigenous folks he met, the play employed very little dialogue. “What was super important was to find a way to share Loren’s internal experience, his stream of consciousness, with the audience,” said Fry, who shared design credit with Peter Malkin.

As the show traveled to many different audiences, the play was built so that McBurney could improvise each night. “This allowed the story to develop beyond opening night,” said Fry, “to flourish rather than become staid.”

The Encounter marked Fry’s Broadway debut; his second show was the still-running blockbuster Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (he took home Tonys for both). Though the two shows could hardly be more different, Harry Potter also employs two sound operators for maximum fluidity and complexity during the show. From a rainforest to Hogwarts, theatrical sound is practical magic that hovers in the air, and the ears, for a moment, and then is gone. 

[Caroline Macon Fleischer is a multi-genre writer based in Chicago. She has worked with Lookingglass Theatre Company, Chicago Dramatists, Chicago Children’s Theatre, and more. She is a member of Chicago’s Poems While You Wait, and is currently pursuing a master’s in Writing and Publishing at DePaul University.

[On Friday, 9 April, I’ll post the last article in this series, an examination of the different jobs a sound designer does “depending on the context in which you’re doing it.”  I hope ROTters will all return to read the final installment in the series.]

"Hear, Hear: Spotlight on Sound Design," Article 6

 

[You’ve come to the fourth installment of the Rick On Theatre republication of American Theatre’s series on sound design.  Article 6 is about acoustics, the science of sounds, which writer Naveen Kumar characterizes as the canvas for the sound designer’s art.

[To reiterate what I’ve said in parts two and three of this collection, these articles aren’t connected except by their common subject.  You don’t need to have read any of the previous articles to understand the others.  I recommend, though, that readers check out all of them in order to get a good overview of the art of theatrical sound design.  The previous installments were posted on 25 (Articles 1 & 2), 28 (Articles 3 & 4), and 31 (Article 5) March.] 

“ACOUSTICS ARE THE CANVAS”

by Naveen Kumar 

Making a show sound great in a theatre space is as much an art as a science, and there’s no substitute for being there.

Acoustics are to a sound designer what playing space is to a director: both context and canvas for their artistic work on a show. Just as physical parameters constrain staging, not to mention scenic and lighting design, the acoustic properties of a room shape a sound designer’s choices, both creative and practical.

But unlike theatre floor plans or lighting rigs, the aural properties of a space are difficult to specify and accurately describe on paper. Acoustics, or how sound responds to a particular space, can be determined by science but are often best judged by subjective emotion. A designer may flag certain challenges and limitations indicated by a theatre’s layout, though the overall feeling inspired by sound moving through space can only be experienced fully in the room.

Indeed, while much of a design team’s focus will tend toward the physical properties of the playing space—mapping its sightlines, lighting its surfaces—sound design is uniquely attentive to the entirety of a space, or at least what’s considered its acoustic volume. For example, fly space above the stage means rigs and storage for a scenic designer, and likely not much for a lighting designer, since the area can’t be seen. But a sound designer must contend with any space where sound can travel, and what happens when it gets there—including the ceiling, walls, floor, and even audience members.

Acoustic concerns in theatre can be considered as a sort of nesting-doll equation. Think of the outermost layer as the theatre space itself, the fixed architecture of the walls, seating plan, stage configuration, and the materials used throughout. Then there is the inner architecture of a show, its scenic design, use of the space, and the particular needs of creating a world that sounds a certain way. How these two levels interact and function well together, to deliver the kind of intimate or reverberant soundscape that can make or break the imaginative contract between a show and its audience, is a sound designer’s primary concern.

What makes a “good” acoustic space?

For the purpose of picturing something as ineffable as acoustics, metaphors can be helpful.

“Think of dropping a stone into a pond, and you can see a set of waves moving out from there,” says Charles Coes, a sound designer and engineer with a wide range of production experience, including on Broadway. As soon as that sound hits any surface, it will bounce off of it and become what’s called a reflection. “If you’re sitting halfway between the sound source and the wall, then you’ll hear my voice arrive first directly to you. And then some period of time later, you’ll hear the bounce off of that wall,” Coes explains. The direction and quality of such reflections shape the acoustic dynamics of a space.

An optimal reflective surface sends sound in multiple directions at once, Coes explains, creating what are called diffuse reflections. “Diffuse reflections are great because our brains don’t do a good job of saying, ‘Oh, that sound is coming from over there’ when sound approaches us from a variety of angles,” Coes says. “Diffuse reflections keep the acoustic energy in a room up; we can hear a little better, we hear a little louder, but we’re still able to see and hear the sound coming from an actor.” More challenging reflections, like the cold bounce off a glass wall or the tinny echo from a hard metal, may require mitigating strategies, like soft fabrics or other materials positioned to absorb reflections before they become disruptive.

Some best practices and specifications to control reflections have become common in theatre construction, such as a slight angling of exterior side walls to avoid sound bouncing back and forth between parallel surfaces as in a game of ping-pong. Most Broadway houses have good acoustics for the human voice, Coes explains, because of diffuse reflections created by plasterwork surfaces, the theatres’ slight fan shape, and audience proximity to the stage. But every theatre is different, and of course not all of them began their lives as performance spaces.

There are multinational consulting agencies devoted to just these sorts of considerations, whether optimizing new constructions from the ground up, renovating existing houses, or creating new performance spaces inside existing structures. One such company, Charcoalblue, takes the approach of crafting spaces “by theatre people for theatre people,” says John Owens, a New York partner in the London-based firm. In operation since 2004, Charcoalblue works with theatre companies to create or adjust existing spaces to match their artistic ambitions and practical means, with attention to everything from sightlines and acoustics to seating and versatility.

Three primary considerations factor into their work on optimizing theatres for sound, according to Byron Harrison, who joined the company in 2010 and heads up its acoustics team. “First off is making sure that the seat count is appropriate for the artistic ambition,” Harrison says, a process he calls “right-sizing the room.” By this he means balancing the scale of what a theatre wants to achieve artistically with the intimacy required for audiences to hear actors directly. The second is minimizing the acoustic volume of the theatre, ensuring there’s no excess space where sound can get lost or reflect back with such delay that it creates an echo.

A recent example of both these challenges is the company’s work on Southern Rep Theatre’s new home inside the former St. Rose de Lima Church in New Orleans. By constructing a black-box space within the grand outer structure, the team was able both to create a close-knit space and to solve the acoustic problem of a lofty vaulted ceiling.

The third consideration is audience arrangement around the stage. Ensuring that actors can be heard no matter which direction they’re facing is particularly tricky for spaces set in the round or in thrust configurations. Such cases often require reflective surfaces positioned to direct sound back out to the audience regardless of which way an actor is turned. Coes also greatly credits actors for controlling the diction and direction of their own voices. “We have collaborators in every actor and every musician in terms of what they’re doing and how they can help us,” Coes says. “The human voice is directional; it is to some degree like a flashlight.” Whether cheating a few degrees or angling their heads toward the balcony, “actors have an immense amount of control over how they interact with the acoustics of the space.”

[For readers who aren’t familiar with the theatrical use of the word cheat, it means that an actor turns his or her face or body either out to the audience to be seen better without completely turning downstage (so it still looks natural, but the actor’s not completely in profile) or to face in (that is, upstage) to conceal something. ~Rick]

To mic or not to mic?

There is a sort of Platonic ideal that companies like Charcoalblue strive to create, of theatre spaces whose acoustics function naturally without the need for technological reinforcement. “There are those among us who have lived with microphones and speakers for a very long time, who know the tricks in order to move things around in an electro-acoustic fashion,” Owens says. But working to craft an acoustically ideal space through “true room form and design and volume is really quite interesting and special,” he says almost philosophically. Very few theatres with more than 1,000 seats can work well acoustically unassisted by mics, Harrison adds, citing London’s Old Vic as a rare exception.

But the needs for a production using microphones can be quite different than those that operate unassisted. “There’s a giant difference between a show which is reinforced, where you are trying to replace the acoustics of the room,” Coes says, and a show that may be “lightly reinforced” but still relies on a series of helpful reflections in the room to carry actors’ voices naturally. “What we want are adjustable acoustics, which are not necessarily easily done,” the designer says. For Charcoalblue, the balance lies in building a certain amount of versatility into the space, but not so much that it would rarely be used.

Charcoalblue seeks designers’ input on how they interact with a particular space, including the placement and integration of sound systems. “There is a different signature to sound designers’ equipment, which are their tools of the trade to paint the audio pictures that they require,” Owens says. Conversations about how sound equipment fits into the architecture is one of the most important considerations pre-design, Owens says.

The show’s the thing

The first question for any designer is how naturally a show fits into the performance space. “If you’re doing a small, intimate drama in a tiny black box, the acoustics are going to serve you very well,” Coes says. Jane Shaw, a sound designer with more than two decades of experience in theatre and dance, offers another example. “A musical in a huge warehouse—that’s a big challenge,” she says. “If it’s not an acoustically great space, the question is what kind of system can deliver the clearest sound possible without contributing to the noise in the space.” That may often include a combination of finding the right system of mics and speakers and integrating sound-absorbing materials offstage or even into the scenic design.

“Scenery typically leads the way in most productions,” Shaw says, adding that in early production meetings, sound designers may mention speaker placement and other acoustic concerns for the team to keep in mind down the line (though they won’t always be heard). Some such issues may be easy to anticipate, like footfalls on a hollow floor or echoes off parallel walls, but most others come down to troubleshooting and creative solutions during tech.

“I will always spec sound-deadening materials in every floor, for lots of reasons, but one of them is for the benefit of the sound designer,” says Rachel Hauck, a scenic designer currently represented on Broadway by Hadestown [opened 17 April 2019 at the Walter Kerr Theatre; closed when Broadway houses shuttered in March 2020] and What the Constitution Means to Me [31 March-24 August 2019 at the Hayes]. “Sound is not the driving reason to make any scenic choice, but it’s a factor in making final finishes,” she says.

Finessing the way a set sounds or behaves acoustically becomes an interdisciplinary effort. Says Coes, “Very often it’s a conversation between a scenic designer, technical director, a props artisan, and a sound designer about, these are the things that might make this door sound a little bit less hollow, a little bit beefier, or we have to make sure that this wall built of flats doesn’t move as we slam the door.” The process comes down to making sure everyone’s on the same page about what sounds are expected to occur live, and then auditioning a number of approaches.

In the case of an onstage band, the acoustic properties of a set become everyone’s concern from the get-go. “With Hadestown, there were extensive, 5-bajillion-email chains about how to contain the sound of the drummer, in particular,” Hauck says. Minimizing bleed between band mics, balancing instrument levels, and accommodating vocals are shared concerns that involve both sound technologies and physically containing sound within a space. This kind of work is common for sound designers in conventional orchestra pits, where there’s less reason for such design collaboration because the area can’t be seen by the audience.

Because the band is visible in Hadestown, though, the need to isolate the drums wound up shaping the look of the show. The drummer is situated in a booth that’s lit through perforated tiles above, whose interior the team carefully optimized for sound using various fabrics and foam. Set underneath a second-story balcony, the booth also needed to be fronted by a barrier of 24 inches to prevent sound from the drums booming directly onto the stage. That barrier then became a bar where the show’s trio of Fates hang out when they’re not out front singing. “It’s all a wonderful hybrid,” Hauck says. “Because it’s a perfect place for them—they are watching over everybody front and center.”

Some productions may proactively consult a firm like Charcoalblue about scenic acoustics, as producers did on the current Broadway revival of Oklahoma!, which is performed three-quarters in the round at Circle in the Square [7 April 2019-19 January 2020]. More often, though, the consultation comes due to a catastrophic-seeming glitch in the final hour. The Young Vic’s 2017 production of Life of Galileo, for example, featured a dome-shaped surface suspended above the stage on which stars were projected. The acoustics of the design hadn’t been considered until after it had been hoisted in the air. “They realized that they had created something that was very, very bad,” Harrison says. “The focal length of this curve and the height that it was was kind of uncannily wrong, and trapping sound within the stage area.”

The team at Charcoalblue entered the dome’s dimensions into a computer model, trying to solve a puzzle Galileo himself might enjoy. In the end the solution was simple: Reflections needed to be diffused when they hit the floor. Fortunately the production was already planning to seat audience members on bean bags gazing up, which would accomplish just that.

“Sometimes it’s just being able to say, ‘This is going to be fine on the day,’” Harrison says. “You could modify your scenic design and solve this problem—or you can roll with it,” knowing that sometimes just having an audience makes all the difference. Like any other element of live theatre, acoustics come down to an alchemy that can seem like magic to the audience, no matter how much unseen maneuvering goes on behind the curtain.

[Naveen Kumar is a New York City-based writer and editor who covers culture and entertainment for outlets including them.us, InStyle, Vice, the New York Times, the Daily Beast, and Towleroad, where he serves as theatre critic.]

[Part 5 of “Hear, Hear” will be posted on Tuesday, 6 April.  It contains Article 7, Caroline Macon Fleischer’s descriptive list of some stage productions in which sound design was . . . well, center stage.  Please come back to Rick On Theatre for the penultimate entry in the series.]