As mics and backing tracks multiply, the theater world is divided
On stage at the Broadway revival of Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" are seven actors—and 23 hidden microphones. The new musical "Fela!" has 80 speakers hung around the theater, and mic transmitters embedded in a character's tap shoes. And during one song in "The Phantom of the Opera," actors choose whether to sing along—or just mouth the words—to a prerecorded vocal track.
With theater producers increasingly reliant on revenues from touring shows playing spaces with as many as 4,000 seats, more shows are being rigged with miniature mics and high-tech sound systems to project the performances to the far reaches of the theaters. Sophisticated sound mixing systems can make singers' voices sound better than they would otherwise. And, unbeknownst to most audience members, some performers in musicals are occasionally backed by prerecorded vocal tracks, allowing them to sing quietly, or sometimes not at all, during strenuous dance numbers or scenes with complex effects.
Just as Bob Dylan was booed when he "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, the theater community is divided over the growing manipulation of sound on stage. Manny Azenberg, 75 years old, whose first Broadway show as a producer was "The Lion in Winter" in 1966, agreed to allow hidden mics on stage in "Brighton Beach" but refused to put body mics on actors. "You lose quality, you lose intimacy, you lose the reality of the theater," he says.
Many theatergoers have come to expect the miking effect. Microphones on stage allow actors to speak more naturally, emulating the more realistic performance style that audiences are used to from movies and television. Audiences also expect entertainment to be louder generally, after years of surround-sound in movie theaters. Sound designers say it's necessary to turn up the volume on actors as Broadway theaters themselves get louder, with automated lighting and set-moving equipment making a continual background noise. "There's very little true quiet in the theater anymore," says Tom Clark of Acme Sound Partners, which is designing the sound for "Bye Bye Birdie" and other shows this season.
Playwright David Mamet is known for refusing to use any mics at all in his plays. It may be a losing battle. At a recent performance of "Oleanna," his play about sexual harassment now on Broadway, an audience member complained at a "talk back" for theatergoers after the show. Dennis Sandman, a 56-year-old financial planner from East Brunswick, N.J., said he couldn't hear the play from the balcony. "The actors should've worn mics," he told the group. "It's important when you have one of these talkathons to hear it clearly."
Overt amplification of shows took off in the late 1960s and '70s, as rock musicals such as "Hair" and "Jesus Christ Superstar" used handheld mics to propel actors' voices over loud music. By the 1980s, musicals got louder as entire casts in shows such as "Les Misérables" donned body mics. The holdout: Straight plays, which usually relied on area mics—devices positioned on and around the stage, not on the performers. As the stream of celebrities on Broadway has picked up, miking has helped to accommodate screen actors with less experience projecting their lines.
More recently, some sound designers have taken the more controversial step of putting body mics on actors in straight plays—outfitting them with battery packs and often hiding thin microphones in their hairlines—as improvements in sound equipment have allowed amplified sound to take on a more natural quality.
The Pulitzer-winning Broadway play "August: Osage County," which last played in a 1,000-seat Broadway theater, is now on tour around the country in theaters that have housed musicals such as "Wicked." Plays, which are less expensive to produce than musicals, have become popular choices on the touring circuit. To make the family drama work in spaces such as the 4,000-seat Fabulous Fox Theatre in St. Louis, the show's crew has hidden body mics in the cast's costumes.
Actress Shannon Cochran, who plays the oldest daughter in "August: Osage County," says she doesn't have to make big gestures to indicate whom she's talking to anymore. There is one complication: A sound mixer needs to keep tight control over cast members' levels during fight scenes, when the characters are screaming at each other. "He's definitely riding it to make sure you don't blow out a speaker," she says.
Sound designer Russell Goldsmith says miking added new depth to the storytelling in the Broadway play "Exit the King" earlier this year. He placed body mics on all the actors, including Geoffrey Rush, who won a Tony Award for his performance. Since the drama takes place in the throne room of a decrepit king, Mr. Goldsmith manipulated the mics to evoke the sound of voices in a room with a cathedral ceiling.
There is one aspect of sound design that is almost never discussed on Broadway: backing tracks, which have been used in musicals since the 1980s. In Broadway's "Chicago," for instance, the show's sound designer, Scott Lehrer, says there are about five of these tracks—recorded vocals of songs that play along intermittently with ensemble members who may not be able to sing loudly, or may stop singing, often because they're dancing too strenuously. The device, which requires prior approval from the actor's union to ensure it is used sparingly, makes it look as if performers are singing full-throttle even if they're not.
"Bye Bye Birdie" uses a background track for about 30 seconds during "A Healthy, Normal American Boy," when the cast is rushing to make costume changes while still singing, says Mr. Clark.
In "The Phantom of the Opera," the entire title song is pre-recorded. To create the illusion that the Phantom and Christine are everywhere at once during the song, body doubles pop up around the stage in quick succession along with the leads. The actors playing the Phantom and Christine either sing along or mouth the words to the track of their recorded voices, depending on which feels more comfortable for them, according to a spokesman for the show; the body doubles simply mouth the words.
Requests for the tracks— also called "sweetening" or "click tracks"—are reviewed case by case, says Maria Somma, spokeswoman for Actor's Equity Association. "We've always been very careful about making these kinds of decisions because this is live theater and audiences are expecting the full compliment of voices, dancing and musicians," she says. But she says sometimes it's warranted: "With the more complicated choreography it becomes more difficult in certain limited situations for the performer to both sing and dance," she says.
The theater establishment has recently started embracing the idea that amplification and other aspects of sound design aren't a necessary evil, but an art form. Sound designers received their first ever Tony Awards last year (it went to Mic Pool for his clever use of sound effects in the play "The 39 Steps," and in the musical category, to Mr. Lehrer, who made an orchestra located under the stage sound natural in "South Pacific."). "It's been a point of irritation with sound designers for some time that the visual design elements were considered artistic, but at least in some people's minds, sound design was not sufficiently artistic to merit a Tony Award," says Jonathan Darling, co-commissioner of sound at the United States Institute for Theatre Technology.
Over the past decade, theater sound designers have built on advances in the music and film industries, says David Budries, chair of the sound department at the Yale School of Drama. Microphones aren't just smaller and lighter, but more specialized, so one model can help a thin voice sound less reedy and another can help a deep voice sound clearer. Mr. Budries says tools like these aren't meant to cover up bad singing but can help counteract any distortion of a performer's voice caused by the position of the mic, costumes or scenery.
Mr. Lehrer is designing sound for "Finian's Rainbow," a musical revival opening Thursday. Women in the show wear triple-A battery-powered transmitters pinned to their heads under their wigs. Well-placed curls dipping onto their brows hide tiny microphones. Men wear the same transmitter attached to an arm, a thigh or even a jock strap (it can hurt to roll on a transmitter, so they put it in a protected area).
At a recent tech rehearsal, the mics were almost too powerful. In one scene, Senator Rawkins, a rotund and blustery southern politician in a white suit, played by David Schramm, fans himself while saying the lines, "Bromo-Seltzer! Where is that Bromo?" In the audience, the fanning was so loud it sounded like birds taking flight. Mr. Lehrer told the actor not to use the prop near his face and the mic was turned down between his lines.
The microphones embedded in the stage at "Brighton Beach Memoirs" represented a compromise. Many people in the 1,223-seat Nederlander Theatre—likely to include elderly audiences—wouldn't be able to hear the play without amplification, so Fitz Patton, one of the sound designers, concealed nearly two dozen microphones around the set.
Now, when Jack Jerome, the family patriarch, turns to adjust the radio dial, he speaks his lines into a microphone embedded in the radio. Audiences in the rear balcony can hear a heart-to-heart talk between brothers Stanley and Eugene on the stoop at stage right, thanks in part to a mic concealed in a chain-link fence.
Stage sound isn't always invisible. Actor Pablo Schreiber was half-naked for much of "Desire Under the Elms," a fraught drama by Eugene O'Neill on Broadway earlier this year. Audiences seated at the front of the 1,623-seat St. James Theatre could see a battery pack in his long johns with his microphone wire running down his bare back.
Mr. Schreiber says initially he was opposed to using a mic, but later realized it helped involve the audience in ways an acoustic performance might not have in a large theater. During his character's love scene with his voluptuous stepmother, played by Carla Gugino, he could whisper to her and look into her eyes instead of projecting outwards.
Occasionally, miking mishaps occur. Mr. Lehrer recalls a performance of "Damn Yankees" at New York City Center last year, when the sound mixer turned up an actor's mic, not realizing the performer was late for his entrance. Instead of hearing his line, some audience members heard the actor cursing about being stuck in a theater elevator.
Actors typically overcome any technical difficulties. In the bathroom backstage at "South Pacific" last year, says Mr. Lehrer, an actress accidentally dropped her mic pack in the toilet. She fished it out, and continued her performance.
