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Feature
By Bryan Reesman
Walking in a Wireless Wonderland
How Broadway’s slick sound is influencing
more and more high school productions.
While high-end live sound has overtaken the Great
White Way for many years, enhancing multimilliondollar
productions that want the audience to hear
every syllable, footstep and dramatic sound effect, it has also
begun seeping down to the high school level. The days of
kids modestly performing a classic musical with a couple of
foot mics, and occasionally being trounced by a full orchestra,
are disappearing. More than ever before, teenage thespians
are using the latest technology, orating and singing
their hearts out while their voices are projected throughout
auditoriums via souped-up sound systems.
Naturally such a technological upgrade comes at a price,
and it’s nice when a school system has the budget for it. “We
have a fantastic sound system,” declares Ramsey Kurdi, choral
music director and general music teacher for Hopkinton
High School in Massachusetts. “We have a nice Crown amp,
beautiful Mackie speakers and a nice Sennheiser set up with
eight wireless mics, all dedicated with one power supply.
“Every parent thinks their kid is the
next star, so it’s become kind of a
necessity to have wireless microphones.”
— Matt Harris
Sometimes we actually borrow some mics from another
system because we simply don’t have enough. We use a
couple of condenser mics on the floor, but if we’re doing a
show with a big cast, we sometimes have up to 16 mics in an
800-seat auditorium.”
Here’s another good example. Matt Harris serves as the A/V
technician for the South Huntington School District in Long
Island, N.Y., and has taken his years of experience working for
ABC-TV and translated it to high school theatre. He started
this gig 15 years ago, and in 1999, his school’s facility was
upgraded. On this, he said, “The district decided to redo their
high school auditorium and turn it into what they now call
the Performing Arts Center.” The school now regularly rents
the theatre out to dance and theatre companies, although
the concerts and three annual productions by the students
take precedent in terms of scheduling.
Obviously, the Huntington situation is not typical of
most high schools — it is more the norm in actual artsbased
schools — and people see different reasons for
the use of mics at the high school level. The relatively
large orchestra at Hopkinton High, whose drama department
recently staged My Fair Lady, Smile and The Pajama
Game, is not miked, because there can be as many as 20
musicians. Kurdi recalls performing in a Moss Hart Awardwinning
production of West Side Story at Lexington High
School in 1986 which, at best, may have used a couple of
From the Madison High School production of Joseph and the Amazing
Technicolor Dreamcoat
From the Stimson Middle School’s staging of Disney’s High School Musical
From the Madison High School production of Joseph and the Amazing
Technicolor Dreamcoat
Another scene from Madison High School’s production of Joseph and the
Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
condenser mics for general sound. He could not imagine
doing that production that way today.
It seems that amplified sound is indeed here to stay for
this younger generation growing up with advanced technology
all around them. “At this point, especially for actors
and especially for musical theatre, it’s hard to take micro-
Cate Magrane
28 September 2007 • www.stage-directions.com