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Sound Design|By Bryan ReesmanNatalieA Tale of Two SoundDesignersTwo heads worked asone on this Tale.Catherine Brunell and Kevin Greene mock the royalty.Taking a famous literary work and putting it onstage asa Broadway musical is bound to draw criticism from diehardfans and purists. A Tale Of Two Cities is certainly noexception. Mixed critical reception and the economic downturnclosed the show Nov. 9, but the producers plan on mounting thetale — an epic that tackles its tale of love, loss and sacrifice set inLondon and Paris against the backdrop of the French Revolution— in a touring production. The show is unusual for the two-levelsets that are rolled on and around stage and repositioned fordifferent indoor and outdoor scenes, which makes for strikingscenery and helps to maintain the pace of the show. A Tale OfTwo Cities is also unusual in that the sound was designed by twoindustry veterans, Carl Casella and Domonic Sack. Casella spokewith SD about tackling this massive production.Stage Directions: You have worked on large musicals before.Are there always new challenges that come up?Carl Casella: One of the things that made this show a littleunique is that the music almost never stops. There are 17 playersin the pit, and no matter how softly they play there are 17instruments playing. I used Aviom’s Pro16 system with 10 A-16RRackmount mixers to create an audio rack where each section’smonitors were mixed using a Yamaha DM2000 consoleas the main matrix to the Aviom A16I. The audio was then fedout to Genelec speakers. Percussionists each had their ownheadphones with a personal mixer since they typically like theirmonitoring levels higher than the other groups. When we talkedto the director originally, he really wanted the show to have atremendous amount of dynamics, so we were trying to keep thedialogue not sounding like you are talking into a handheld mic,which I think some of the bigger musicals are having an issuewith. They want to go so big that you can only go so small. Ifyou take a show to very loud dynamic extremes and then go toalmost no miking, people don’t understand what’s being said.Your ears don’t adjust that rapidly. So it was a little tricky tryingto keep the illusion of very little miking on the dialogue, especiallywith the orchestra still playing underscore. We sat downand actually discussed the issues on the show at length beforewe brought it into the theatre.Other than that, the only other big issue on this show thatwas different from almost any other one that I’ve ever done isthat Tony Walton’s set design has almost no masking. The prosceniumis 38 feet high, so your cluster is at 40 feet, which makesit almost useless for the orchestra because it’s just too high andtoo far away. Even for the last show in that theatre, Curtains, theproscenium was masked down 14 feet, so the speaker clusterwas 14 feet lower, which made it a possibility to use on theToro and Kevin Earley lead the cast of A Tale of Two Cities in “Until Tomorrow”orchestra. When we first set the system up, we actually put thecluster where we thought the masking was going and it was justhanging in front of the set. I said to the assistant designer oneday, “When are they putting masking in?” And she said, “Oh,Tony decided no masking.” It was like, “What? Excuse me!” OK,time to fall back and regroup.So, in a way, you had to be creative with set design as well.We had to because it’s very disconcerting if you’re watchinga live actor and you’re facing forward and the sound is comingfrom the left, right or above you, your brain works much harderto put that back together in time. It’s an unconscious thing, butit fatigues you faster. I don’t know about you, but I dislike goingto a show where I’m seeing action in one place and hearing itfrom another.You used a new Midas console on this show, correct? What isit like and what advantages does it offer?Yes, we have the very first on-Broadway Midas XL8 digitalconsole. The maximum input on the console is 128, and we’reusing 104. As far as how it differs from other consoles — if you’refamiliar with CDs, which are at a 44.1 sample rate and consideredhigh fidelity sampling, the console is at 96K. It’s more thandouble CD quality, so the transparency of the console is tremendous.It very much sounds like an analog desk, which has alwaysbeen the drawback of the newer digital consoles. They give youtremendous flexibility, but sound processed, and this board isthe closest that I’ve heard to not sounding processed at all.On a traditional digital console, either a Digidesign or aYamaha, when you sweep through equalization you actuallyhear it sweeping and hear steps. It’s annoying. It’s distractingfrom listening to where you want to put the EQ. Somehow Midashas managed to design an EQ on a digital board that doesn’t dothat. There is no step sound when you sweep through the EQ. Itsounds like you’re on a traditional analog desk.Another nice feature they did is something called “populationgroups.” The board is not small, but not huge either. It has128 inputs, but you don’t have 128 faders in front of you, so theboard is designed with layers. You can call up any 24 microphonesthat you want in front of you at any given moment. Butif you’re looking for the second viola, and it’s input 74 and you’remixing a show, where is input 74? How do you get to it? Midashas created population groups, which is a series of 12 nice, biglit buttons that you can assign groups of faders to, so if I wantto adjust my viola, I hit the population group called strings, andimmediately next to my microphone volumes, the first 16 fadersbecome all of the string inputs on the console. If I need to adjust16 December 2008 • www.stage-directions.com