We live in a designed world. It’s often easy to take things for granted: The shape of the spoon you used to eat cereal this morning, the sound your iPhone makes when it gets a text, the color of a stop sign. But these little things were all choices, made by a person.
Sunday, June 11th was the theater industry’s biggest night: The Tony Awards. Most of the attention at the awards was directed toward the actors. Their speeches werethe ones broadcast on national television. But, in the hour before that broadcast began, there was a pre-show for the design awards.
This post is a celebration of one of theater’s many unsung design heroes: Sound designers. Because, without them, you wouldn’t hear a word those performers are saying. Taylor Swift’s voice, no matter how loudly she might sing, couldn’t reach the rafters of MetLife stadium without amplification. The ability to create complex scores intermixing singing and orchestra — like in Phantom of the Opera — would be impossible without the ability to carefully balance sounds from dozens of microphones.
Today, we take the microphone for granted, but it wasn’t until the 1980s that amplification became ubiquitous on the Broadway stage. Early 20th century amplification often involved a few mics placed at the foot of the stage, which amplified sound but often rendered it flat and inaudible. Individual mics on actors didn’t become technologically feasible until the latter half of the 20th century. These mics ushered in a new era of musical theater — such as rock musicals like Hair and megamusicals like Les Miserables — that relied on a more nuanced approach to amplification.
With sound design, as a 1981 New York Times article put it, “the audience can be at the mercy of the mixer.” This includes both the mixing board as a technology and the mixer as the person operating it. Consider, for instance, the Tony nominated sound design in this season’s revival of A Doll’s House, starring Jessica Chastain (sound design by brothers Ben and Max Ringham). The show is minimalist: no set, no props, just a few chairs. The production forces an audience to look and listen closely to every word and action made on stage.
In most plays, mics are hidden in wigs, but in A Doll’s House, they’re fully visible and taped incredibly close to an actor’s mouth. Thus, the actors don’t need to project. They can murmur and whisper their lines. They can perform intimately, as if shot up close in a movie. The audience hears the actors almost as if sitting across from them. “That privacy-in-public sensation is erotic,” wrote Helen Shaw in The New Yorker.
“We wanted the actors to be able to sigh and really hear their body move when they sit down,” explained Ben Ringham to Playbill. “That becomes part of the experience of what you’re listening to. We played with the actors, telling them to embrace things an audience doesn’t usually hear. Embrace the fact that there was a moment where he stroked his beard and you hear it on the microphone.” In A Doll’s House, the microphone enables the actors to practice their craft differently. They can be more subtle, more expressive, more intimate.
To make this possible, director Jamie Lloyd brought the Ringham brothers in at the start of rehearsal. For most shows, sound design enters the picture when the cast moves into technical rehearsals at the theater, but for A Doll’s House, the designers “spent weeks during the rehearsal period with each of the actors getting the exact perfect point for where that microphone should be,” Ben said. “If you get too close, you start getting blow off the mouth. You get it too far back, you’re not getting enough gain off of it.” Every little choice made by a sound designer affects your experience in the theater.
Even though microphones were common on Broadway in the 1980s, it wasn’t until 2008 that the American Theater Wing added a Tony Award for Best Sound Design (two actually: one for musical, one for play).
They discontinued the award in 2014, but there was such an uproar that it was reinstated in 2017. Because it’s important to recognize what’s often overlooked. Microphones are important technologies in theater, just as your sink is an important technology in your kitchen and your lamp is an important technology in your living room. Just because we take them for granted doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate them.
And “microphones aren’t just a technical thing,” Ben notes. “They’re another toy to play with on stage, in the same way that you would move a chair or have a doorway that you had to walk through, or a turntable. As soon as you stop thinking of mics as something that amplifies your voice, it becomes an instrument for you to use.”
So I’ll always be rooting for the Ringham brothers — and all sound designers.
Congratulations to this year’s sound design Tony Award winners: Nevin Steinberg (Sweeney Todd) and Carolyn Downing (Life of Pi).
Hey Jeffrey - looks like we talk about the same things, theatre, etc. Maybe we could chat some time about collaborating? Feel free to email featurepresentationvideo@gmail.com -Patrick