This is a continuation of 'Magic Carpet Ride: Part Two.' The magic in Disney's Broadway Musical Aladdin is woven by scenic designer Bob Crowley, lighting designer Natasha Katz, costume designer Gregg Barnes, sound designer Ken Travis, and illusion designer Jim Steinmeyer.
For Travis, working on the Broadway musical Aladdin was all about preparation. He had to be ready to go with effects and a system that could support this massive production as well as the artistic direction of making an old-fashioned Broadway musical. “We knew we were putting a film on stage, and our first few meetings were about the quality of the sound, whether it should sound like an old Broadway musical,” he says. “Because in a lot of aspects, it is an old Broadway musical—big band in the pit, big spectacle on stage, and a lot of winks to great Broadway moments of the past. Then the other part is that we have this Genie that we need to be able to do anything. We decided, in order to give us the most flexibility, to go with a cinematic sound design. We built hundreds of sound cues that we never put in because we either thought that we were gilding the lily, or we were getting in the way of the fact that we had amazing performers that didn’t need the support, or it just worked. ‘This is a good song; let’s not put anything in the way.’”
For the cinema surround sound aspect, Travis and his team put a lot of speakers into the New Amsterdam Theatre—nearly 200 in all. “Some of the speakers were the same things I use when I am doing rock ‘n’ roll stadium gigs, just so we could shake the room or just for an effect,” he explains. “When the spooky voice gets added when Jafar and Iago are questioning Aladdin, when he says ‘do not question,’ we had these speakers all around the audience that just shake the floor just for those few seconds. You couldn’t do it sustained because it would be really disconcerting for the audience and rather unpleasant.”
Travis also wanted the audience to connect with all of the actors. “We decided to jump in with both feet,” says Travis. “We used a system that has never been used on this scale—the [Out Board] TiMax Tracker system. Basically, every actor has a microchip on them so we can sense where they are, three dimensionally, on the stage. Then, using volume and time, we actually make the sound come from each actor. In this manner, since we have so many speakers involved, we can actually control where you’re hearing the sound, from almost three-quarters of the seats. With extreme seats, it’s very hard to pull it off. When Aladdin goes up on the carpet, his voice rises up as he’s going up. We always wanted to make the audience connect to them and not feel that this was a really loud, big song. Having done some spectacle-type shows before, I always felt like I lost the actors and the characters.”
The sound team had a lot of support implementing the TiMax system and dealing with all of the data that was involved in the audio tracking system. “Obviously, we learned so much in Toronto,” says Travis. “We had guys in from London, from Vancouver. Every programmer that worked on this system came in and sat down with us for weeks because we were pushing it so hard. Plus the math involved— the spreadsheet had 15,000 data measurements. We got to New York and knew that we would need half that, but we needed to know that we had the math right in Toronto. In the end, it’s your ears that tell you if it’s right or wrong. We wanted to make sure that the math was right. It took us a week to enter all the data.” The team mapped the show for the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York when they were prepping for the Toronto load-in. “We kind of cheated in Toronto,” continues Travis. “When we got to New York, it worked right from the get-go. We just started laughing and said, ‘This was our big worry? Now we can just design the show.’”
The system has a lot of flexibility designed in, and the team prepared a lot of effects for certain aspects of the show, especially for the magical moments. “The Genie was the biggest thing for us,” Travis says. “What does it mean when the Genie enters the world? We had James Iglehart as the Genie; he’s an amazing actor. So we had every trick in the book ready for him, and he didn’t need one of them. It was mostly about being prepared. I hadn’t seen the movie since it came out in the ‘90s. I remember sitting down one day when we were having a problem with a cue. I said, ‘What did they do in the movie?’ They said that James does all that; so we just cut it all.”
Surround Sound Design
Travis describes some of the effects to help underscore the magic, especially early on in the show. “The Genie appears at the end of the overture and pulls out the lamp to show to the audience,” explains Travis. “When he pulls the lamp out, it is like our first gesture. Here’s something magic, so we have the music from the orchestra go around the entire audience in about four seconds. It’s not like you ‘kind of’ hear it. It actually moves around the audience. The first few times we wanted the magic to be magical, and there’s a bunch of cues that help, but I don’t like shows where sound calls itself out and says ‘Here’s the sound design.’ When the cave collapses, we wanted it to sound just like when an entire cave collapses. The room shakes. There are 200 speakers around your head, so you can hear individual rocks falling around you and sand falling. We never wanted to go bigger than that, but we wanted it to be so real.”
To provide the flexibility and dynamic sound he was after, Travis chose a Studer Vista 5 digital mixing console. Masque Sound provided the entire audio package, including an extensive PA comprising of d&b audiotechnik speakers: the new V-Series for the mains, with a combination of E6s and E5s for surrounds. “They are just great speakers,” says Travis. In order to immerse the audience and have control, Travis created rings of speakers that wrapped around the audience. On the mezzanine and orchestra levels, there are inner rings of surround speakers. This allows the sound levels to remain consistent and evenly distributed, keeping the audience from hearing the audio from a specific direction or speaker location. In addition, delayed rings provide audience members with an ambient feel, so that they are comfortably enveloped and immersed in the sound.
“We’re using J-Infra subs, which are normally used for stadium hip-hop shows. That’s what gives the house the shake,” comments Travis. In addition to the J-Infra subs in the box seats, the audio design includes d&b B2s for the orchestra and mezzanine levels. “We have rings of B2 subs around the audience for some of the effects like when the Tiger God speaks, when the voices are moving around the house. When you are hearing spooky voices, there are really low rumbles that come from different sides.” The band system is made up of a series of V-subs, with six located on a truss over the audience.
The 40 channels of wireless included in the equipment package are from Sennheiser, along with DPA 4061 microphones. “My favorite thing, which is so stupid, is the microphone we built for the Genie into a prosthetic on his chin,” Travis says. “It’s built right into his beard. I never want to see a microphone on an actor. There are times where you have no choice. Someone came up with the idea for a fake chin. It worked so well. Adam [Jacobs, Aladdin] has to change clothes on stage; he’s becoming Aladdin, becoming the Prince. Every time that happens, we don’t want to lose a mic, so some actors wear three mics. It took everybody working together—costumes who worked with us to put the mic in the jewel of his turban. Sometimes you don’t get that collaboration.”
Travis’ sound design peers who have come to see the show all ask how he accomplished the sound imaging. “Afterwards we’re at a bar, and they turn to me and ask, ‘All right, how are you doing it? I know that when Aladdin got on that carpet, and I closed my eyes, and I open them up it’s coming straight from him.’ I tell them how we did it and explain the math. We’d do the trig in front of them and show it to them. They were still asking, ‘But how are you doing it?’ The best was one of the guys who worked on the film and had done some of the sound for the film. He said, ‘Look, I did this in the studio, and I know how I would do it in the studio. How the hell do you do this live?’”
Travis explains that Aladdin really is like an old-school musical. “We’re miking it like a big band, and it’s really on the orchestrator to conduct it. Pretty much let the orchestra do all of the work. We just worked together with the orchestrator, Danny [Troob] and Michael [Kosarin], our music director. We would sit down every night together and say, ‘Here’s what I heard. What did you hear in the pit? Do you think you need to make an adjustment?’ We were all very honest about it, and we spent a couple of weeks really just feeling it out.”
Travis believes that it comes down to having good people around you, and he is the first to credit his team. “Gabe Wood, who is mixing the show, is as good as they come. Tom Schumacher calls him ‘the sound gnome.’ Then my associate Alexander Hawthorn and my production audio head, Lucas Indelicato, both of whom are my eyes, ears, hands, and brain. We started on the paperwork for it nine months ahead of time. We knew that we were pushing technology and there were some things that we would need to ensure that if it would work.”
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