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The interior of the Gracie Theatre.
The audio reinforcement system, designed by WSDG, includes a
three-way mic split and allows them to feed live performances to
the school’s mobile truck for live broadcast to radio, TV or online
as well as for audio recording purposes.
Make It Work
The Gracie design needed to work for a variety of different
tenants and purposes. “The priorities for the theatre were
much like those of other multi-purpose spaces that are built by
economically-conscious facilities,” explains Storyk. “This is not
Lincoln Center; this is a school in Maine. Our first priority was to
get the seating right, the next priority was to get the acoustics
right so that it would work as a multi-purpose facility.”
Storyk notes the challenge, especially acoustically, of designing
such a space. “This is where the rub is, because it needs to
work in a music and concert configuration but it also has a stagehouse,
which means it has to work for theatrical performances.
It is an age-old kind of dilemma—is it a theatrical stage house
that also wants to be a music hall or is it music hall that also
wants to be a stage house? Because those are contradictory uses
acoustically. We viewed this as a theatrical space, because of its
stagehouse configuration, that we tried our best to optimize
for music performance. That means adding a little extra reverb
time and reflection control, and we tried to do that mostly in the
ceiling tiles. I think we succeeded since the feedback that I get
is that it does work reasonably well for music and it works very
well for theatre. That was really our main goal.” MacLaughlin
believes they did achieve that goal, “This theatre works. It’s got
a phenomenal system capable of handling anything from a full
musical to a corporate meeting.”
The WSDG team, including Storyk, co-project manager
While the FOH mixing position is shown in the house here, there are three separate booths in the theatre,
one for lighting, one for A/V and one for audio.
Romina Larrengina and systems integrator Judy Elliot-Brown,
began work in early 2007 and focused on determining the most
advantageous and flexible ceiling and wall treatments for the
best acoustics. These included Helmholtz acoustic resonators,
RPG FlutterFree diffusers and acoustic fabric panels, which provided
the joint benefits of high efficiency and economical unit
costs. “Additionally, we also did the acoustics in the giant arrival
lobby of the Gracie, which is also used as an event space,” says
Storyk.
“Bangor, Maine may not be the center of the world, but they
do have excellent craftsmen,” Storyk adds. “I was very impressed
with the level of craftsmanship throughout this project. The
ceiling acoustical clouds ended up being made by a local wood
vendor. We didn’t get them from our usual theatrical vendors;
they were custom made for us. We did however use a lot of diffusion
products from RPG and we used some isolation products
from Kinetics Noise Control.”
David Kotch, technology consultant for WSDG and for technology
provider/integrator Masque Sound was also part of the
acoustics team. “David MacLaughlin is a major Meyer Sound fan,
which was a happy coincidence as Masque Sound and WSDG
are equally strong Meyer proponents, particularly for live performance
venues,” explains Kotch. “We selected the Meyer Sound
Galileo 616 system processor, a total of 21 M’elodie speakers
augmented by Meyer 500-HP, M1D and UPJ-1P units.” The
M’elodie speakers are arranged as line arrays with seven each at
left, center and right. The line array also includes a pair of Meyer
500-HP flown subs.
The theatre has a variety of audio consoles including a
Digidesign VENUE D-Show with 48 mic/line inputs and a
Yamaha 48-channel PM5D, either of which can be used front of
www.stage-directions.com •October 2010 29