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School
& Youth Theatre
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Return to the Forbidden Planet (2)So - the biggies! What are they? Well, to begin with, if you want to do the show properly, as author Bob Carlton intended it, you have to have a band with brass and woodwind, as well as keyboards, bass and drums. Not only that, but these instruments should really be played by the actors, onstage. That's not essential, of course. I know of at least two productions by schools where the band was off-stage, and one where the band was just keyboards and drums. If that's the only way you can do the piece, then fine - do it, because the play is well worth doing. But it's much better if you can have the actors playing the instruments. In our production we had to have a bit of a compromise: the keyboards, bass and drums were played by musicians, but we had them onstage, and the rest were played by the actors. As is usual with our shows, we had a chorus. There isn't one in the original but we added one. They were crew members who busied themselves about the auditorium before the show - they actually did all the front of house work - and they appeared onstage at moments of crisis. They were always in sight of the audience, for the crew quarters were on the auditorium floor to stage right of our thrust stage. (I actually designated the stage left side of the thrust as Cookie's galley and he took me literally - his mother's kitchen was denuded of equipment, tins and packets of food during the week of the show, and he also borrowed from the Home Economics department, so the galley had more furniture and props than the main stage!) But that's by the way: having a chorus enabled us to use other musicians, apart from its usual purpose for giving younger members of the Drama Club some experience. We ended up with a considerable band:
They made a damned good sound, I can tell you! But how many kids - how many people! - can sing against such a line up without amplification? Pavarotti might manage it, but very few others, so microphones were essential, and they had to be radio mics because cable mics are just too restricting. We have two hand-held radio mics, but that was clearly not going to be enough, and, in any case, hand-held mics would be almost as restrictive. So we had to hire/borrow (a mixture of both) seven lavalier radio mics, some of which were just attached to clothing but some had to be in the actors' hair. The use of lavalier mics presents quite singificant technical problems. If you use them with the same graphic equaliser settings you normally use, then feedback is inevitable. The EQ needs to be totally re-set, and I mean totally - not a single fader remained in the same position. The other problem is one of balance: balancing the singers against the band, of course, but also against each other. In the end I decided that I would have to be the sound operator for this show, as the operators I have at the moment are very inexperienced. I never saw the show! My eyes were constantly moving from the script to the desk and back again, with glances at the stage every now and then to anticipate when someone with a live mic was getting too near to one of the shotgun mics that were set to amplify the chorus. One sound problem with the show is that, for a fair amount of tme, the actors have to speak against a musical backing. Now we do a fair amount of voice training in the Drama Club, but even with this, speaking against keyboards, bass and drums is difficult, so we had to use the mics. The problem here, of course, is that the voices mustn't sound amplified, even though they are. That means listening very carefully and making constant small adjustments to channel faders and gain controls. I have to say that, although I have done sound for many shows, this is the first time I have worked with lavaliers, and I couldn't have done it without the help I got from the guy I hired them from, Tony Atkinson of Eaglescliffe in Cleveland. Far too many hire companies are more than willing to provide an operator (at great expense), but otherwise will not give any more than a perfunctory introduction to the gear when they deliver or you collect. Tony actually rang me on a couple of occasions to ask how I was getting on and to give me a great deal of useful advice. If you're in the NE of England and you need to hire sound equipment, Tony is your man! So, the problems were solved. How about the show itself? How does it work with kids? All is revealed in the next article! >> Part 3
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