Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2010 - 16

stage in those days. Commercial producers
and theatre managers would have been horrified at the very idea of having unsightly technical equipment in view of the audience, and even
more horrified at the thought of losing income
from the loss of seats; although, come to think
of it, that bit has not changed!
There was a minor breakthrough in 1962
when I became involved with my first musical.
It was called Pickwick and I was only called in
because the foot-mikes in the theatre were incapable of picking up the actors' voices due to the
fact that they were often performing on two-storey wagons that moved around the stage. Wireless microphones were not yet in common use
because of their notorious unreliability (they
were also very expensive), so we rigged a number of directional mikes to drop in above the set
at strategic points in the show. This called for a
multi-channel mixer placed out front in an auditorium box where the sound operator could
see when to fade in and fade out the various microphones. Producers had yet to be convinced
that it would be helpful for the person twiddling
the knobs to actually hear what the audience
was experiencing.
Although I went on to work on many musicals, it was to be years before sound design
became generally recognized as an art and a
profession. Abe Jacob famously received a
credit for the broadway production of Jesus
Christ Superstar in 1971, but this was a rock
opera, a new form of theatre where microphones were de rigeur. In general, producers
hated the whole idea of sound systems because
(apart from paying for something that could
not actually be seen on the stage) they did not
want the audience to be aware that the actors
were miked. Sound reinforcement was seen as
a deficiency in the abilities of the performers.
When A Funny Thing Happened on the
Way to the Forum was first produced in 1962,
that great director of musicals, George Abbot,
insisted that there should be no amplification
system. both he and producer Hal Prince were
averse to seeing microphones and loudspeakers. The show opened in New Haven and, according to music and lyric writer Stephen
Sondheim, nobody could hear a word. by the
time they reached New York, the show was
miked.
When the United States Institute for Theatre Technology was being conceived, the
technology of theatre sound was in the hands

theatre

design

technology

When the United States Institute for Theatre
Technology was being conceived, the technology of
theatre sound was in the hands of a small number
of innovators who had been developing the art of
sound reinforcement on Broadway almost in secret.

of a small number of innovators who had been
developing the art of sound reinforcement on
broadway almost in secret. Richard and Peter
Fitzgerald of the New York rental shop, Sound
Associates, and Jack Shearing from the original broadway sound company, Masque Sound
were, without recognition, designing the
sound systems they supplied. Freelance pioneers such as Robert Maybaum, Jack Mitnick
and Jack Mann were responsible for creating
and operating the sound of many major broadway productions. All unseen and unknown by
the theatre-going public. As Richard Fitzgerald
told me: "There were only a few of us doing
this at the time and we were all scratching
around, experimenting with equipment and
making up the rules as we went along. Nothing
was designed specifically for the theatre. We
had to adapt what was available."
The standard sound reinforcement system for a musical that continued way into the
1970s consisted of five foot-mikes feeding into
a simple mixer placed backstage with overall
treble and bass adjustment. The microphones
were on short stands with the aim of getting
them as near the performers' mouths as possible. It was not until the late 1960s that the
"boundary" principle was discovered and microphones began to be placed at stage floor
level. The Crown company did not introduce
their Pressure Zone Microphone (PZM) until
1980. directional dynamic microphones, such
as the Shure Unidyne, were employed as footmikes until condensers became available later
in the sixties.
In the U.K. we were almost exclusively
using column loudspeakers and four or six of
these would be placed around the proscenium
pointing vaguely in the direction of the audience. broadway tended to use the more pow-

S U M M E R

2010

erful and better quality systems designed for
movie theatres. Favorite was the Altec A5 combining a 15-inch driver in a bass horn/reflex
enclosure with an 8-cell horn mounted on top.
The slightly smaller A7 "voice of the Theatre"
loudspeaker did not appear until 1966. Major
shows like My Fair Lady (1956), West Side
Story (1957), Fiddler on the Roof (1964) and
Cabaret (1966) were all handled in this way.
Of course, with this type of sound reinforcement from distant microphones, producers
only employed actors and singers with good
strong voices and clear diction (happy days!).
The major breakthrough for me did not
come until 1972 when Richard Pilbrow produced Stephen Sondheim's musical, Company,
and I first met the doyen of broadway sound,
Jack Mann. It was the first time an entire broadway musical-cast, sets, and costumes-was
to be transported across the Atlantic and our
production team flew to America to assess the
technical problems. Although I had been receiving billing on posters for some ten years, I
was surprised that despite the fact that Jack had
been responsible for the sound on Hal Prince's
musicals She Loves Me (1963), Fiddler on the
Roof (1964), and Cabaret (1966), he was
still not receiving a proper credit. It seems that
Hal Prince was still determined that the audience should not be aware of any amplification.
He could have been right, because I had never
heard such a clear uncolored sound or such
an even coverage of an auditorium.
With great generosity, considering the fact
that I was taking over his show for the london
production, Jack Mann let me into a few of his
secrets. One of the main weapons in his armory were the column loudspeakers made by
the bozak company (sadly no longer in business). They sounded so natural that, as I was

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2010