British sound designer Adam Fisher has been nominated for two Tony Awards; in 2025, for Sunset Blvd, and this year, for The Lost Boys. His work has been heard from Broadway to the Barbican, including the crowd-stopping moment in the West End last year when Eva Peron stepped onto the balcony of the London Palladium to deliver “Don’t Cry For Me” to the pedestrians below. This summer, he returned to the Palladium to design the sound for another Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber production, Jesus Christ Superstar. The production has some similarities with The Lost Boys – the stage incorporates scaffolding on which the cast climb, and it is set in a time period with a very definite aesthetic vibe.
Fisher talked to Live Design about evoking a 70s vibe while giving the audience the clarity only modern technology can provide, using blinged up handhelds, and dealing with nightly onslaughts of glitter and blood.
The production has been evolving for several years, but this summer landed in the West End with English artist and former Eurovision singer, Sam Ryder, in the title role. Adam Fisher explains how he signed on as sound designer.
“The original version was in Regent's Park, London, and then toured, but it needed a refresh when the spot opened at the Palladium. For the last couple of years I've been doing quite a lot of Andrew (Lloyd Webber) shows including Sunset Blvd. and Evita, but I came on board when quite a lot of the visual language with the handheld mics had already been introduced. The main discussion with the music team was about how we were going to approach the show based on the 'Brown' album, the original 70s concept album. Andrew and Michael Harrison, the producer, very much wanted the clarity and punch of Evita and Sunset that we'd done previously while also having the vibe of the 70s original. It was a balance."
The show features handheld mics that fulfill several roles – they evoke the period before lavaliers, they give the show the feeling of a rock ‘n’ roll gig rather than musical theatre, and as a prop which is passed around and, on occasion, taken away from performers, they illustrate how Jesus and his disciples get into trouble for speaking out. Several times a performer has his or her mic taken away, effectively silencing them. The mics themselves are regularly mistreated, and Fisher’s approach was to use replaceable Sennheiser radio mics and DPA mics. [See below for a gear list.] He says, “They do go through some rough and tumble, and certainly there's been a lot of wear and tear and swapping out stuff that wouldn't normally happen as much on a show. But even though the audience sees the handheld mics being passed around everyone does have their own radio mic and we play around with that quite a lot. It may looks as though they are using a handheld visually, but sometimes we're using a head mic. For example, Judas's final song, he's pulling his mic cable around and it gets pulled taught at one point and so for consistency it is just a lot easier to use the radio mic. The priests’ mics on stands are all fake, just for staging, but the stands as props look really good. A real one would be too heavy for the choreography and pretty bad if the mic came flying off when they are being swung around.
Sam [Ryder, playing Jesus], moves his head around a lot during 'Gethsemene (All I Want To Say)' which is an emotional moment in the show and Laurie Kirkby, who's the mixer for the show, basically has both mics available to him at any point. He can switch from one to the other. Laurie mixed Sunset and Evita and he's probably the best operator in the West End. When we were teching the show there was a lot of discussion about which sounded consistently better, but we were always going to keep the handheld as a visual. We did have to have a lot of conversations about mic technique. There are a huge number of musical theater performers who are not really familiar with how to behave with a handheld, and then Sam comes from a rock ‘n’ roll background and will back up the mic when he hits some notes. Very different techniques.”
Part of the 'rough and tumble' that the handhelds go through is an actual mic drop, not a sound effect. “Pilot is using a cabled microphone that's just a standard Shure SM58, not anything custom, and actually drops it before sending Jesus to Herod. The mic drop that you hear is really the sound of the mic drop,” says Fisher. Fortunately for this very glitter-forward production, the glitter doesn’t seem to be a sound problem, although Fisher says it can be a problem for the performers if it makes the stage too slippery. Blood, on the other hand, is also plentiful, particularly as at one point when Jesus is covered in blood and rolling around onstage with his head mic and handheld. Fisher has previous experience with this. He says, “Nicole Scherzinger on Sunset also had blood down her face every night, and there is always a moment where you cross your fingers and hope it won’t get all over the mic. It is hard when the actors are in the moment, you don't want to get in the way of that.” The handhelds are also color coded and look like an expensive piece of gear from a 70s TV show. Fisher explains, “Jesus has a gold mic, Judas’s is silver, and we have black mics in addition to those so we need spares for all of them. We are using Sennheiser bodies but the capsule is a DPA. They sound very similar to their boom/head mics, so when we switch between them, we don't have to do a huge amount of work to make them sound the same, thankfully. The metallic mics have a special cladding from Propworks, which provided our props. We looked into getting bespoke paint for them but it was really expensive and wouldn’t have lasted as long. It turns out Propworks do this a lot for other shows, including Mamma Mia where they blinged them up with diamonds, so lots of people are doing crazy things like that.”
Since moving to the London Palladium, the sound design has evolved to include a larger orchestra, strings, brass and woodwind, drums, bass, two guitars and two keyboards including an original Wurlitzer EP200 electric piano. Much of the orchestra is on different parts of the stage, but, Fisher says, “As much as possible, everything is of the 70s era, so the guitarists don't have digital modeling, it's all through pedals into an amp that we mic. We've tried to stay true to what they did in the '70s as much as possible, but with the advantages of the modern era. The guitarists are rocking away but it all goes through the same signal chain that it would have when they made the original album. It was a real process! You get used to modern equipment and how clean and clear it sounds and then you go back to the previous era of mics and amps but have to keep the quality of what modern audiences expect.”
Another choice the team made was not to use in-ear monitors. “That was a big question," Fisher says. “There was an expectation that there would be an in-ear for Sam, because he would have one on a gig, so there were some conversations about that. But we didn’t want the performers to be even slightly disconnected from the house. We decided early on that we wouldn’t have in-ears and instead give them as much fallback onstage as we could. I think Sam loves the fact that he can feel a lot more of what is going on with the audience.”
The emphasis is very much on live performance, but according to the designer there is just one sound effect. This is for a priest on the scaffolding who uses a clapper to mark the strokes each time Jesus is whipped. He says, “It was difficult for the priest to hold the clapper next to his mic, but not too close, consistently every night. If he moves to one side you can’t hear it properly, and if he is too close there is a ‘whooshing’ wind noise. It has to be a reliable cue, even if there is an understudy on, so we made it a sound effect. But as much as possible everything else is done live by an instrument or person, there's no soundtrack.” Fisher;s design also has to incorporate about 80 audience members on stage, beneath and sometimes in front of the musicians, and a cast that climbs on scaffold and to the extreme sides of the stage while performing. How did he accommodate this? “We put in a whole other speaker system underneath the platforms so the onstage audience can hear the show properly no matter where they are. There is a center section standing right in front of the percussion and we do what we can to mitigate that but there's only so much you can do, it's all part of the experience, more than anything else. We were initially worried about feedback with performers on the scaffold but the director, Tim Sheader, wanted to try putting Judas up there. We didn't have to do a huge amount to make it work, just took part of the microphone out of the speaker that was directly in front of him and the handheld he has rejects everything else around it. We also have the whole ensemble singing Hosanna in the auditorium at one point and it’s a great experience for the people in the stalls because the cast is right there, but up in the circle and the balcony, they have no idea what's going on. We put in a full surround system so they can feel the singing is in the auditorium below even if they can’t see them. It was good fun to play with that a little bit.”
Next month, the production moves from the London Palladium to Drury Lane, a theatre Fisher is familiar with. “There will be almost a completely different setup when we move, however, the show that's in there currently, Hercules, is my show. We can leave a lot of the stuff in front of house from Hercules and use it for Superstar. All the delay speakers, all the surround sound can, can stay in. And we have a bigger PA for Drury Lane which doesn’t have the same weight limitations for hanging gear, so that’s good."
Catch the production at Drury Lane Theatre or on tour in 2027.
Crew List
MAIN MIXING CONSOLES
- 1 DiGiCo Quantum7 Digital Mixing Console
- Fourier Transform Engine – Liquid Sonics, TC Electronic, Sound Toys among other plugins!
- Qlab FX Playback
LOUDSPEAKERS
Pros Arrays
- 24 Meyer Sound LEOPARD
- 2 Meyer Sound ULTRA-X80
Pros Cluster
- 4 Meyer Sound ULTRA-X40
- 2 Meyer Sound ULTRA-X22
Subs
- 10 Meyer Sound 900-LFC
- 8 Meyer Sound MM-10
Front Fills
- 8 Meyer Sound UP4-XP
Pros and Side Fills
- 2 Meyer Sound ULTRA-X22
- 8 Meyer Sound UPM-1P
Delays
- 42 Meyer Sound UPM-1P
Delay Truss
- 6Meyer Sound ULTRA-X42
Surround
- 76 EM Acoustics EMS-51X
Stage FX and Foldback
- 15 Meyer Sound UPJunior
- 8 Meyer Sound UPM-1P
- 8 Meyer Sound MM-4XP
- 12 EM Acoustics EMS-51X
Onstage Audience
- 6 EM Acoustics R4
Stage Imaging
- 4 Meyer Sound UPJ-1P Loudspeaker
Loudspeaker Processing
- 8 Meyer Galileo Galaxy 816 Digital Loudspeaker Management Processor
RADIO MICROPHONE SYSTEMS
Sennheiser 6000 System
- 24 Sennheiser EM 6000 Receiver Module
- 46 Sennheiser SK6212 Transmitter with DPA 4066 heads
- 8 Sennheiser SKM6000 Transmitter with DPA 4018V heads
Onstage Band IEM
- 2 Shure ADTQ Quad Channel Wireless Transmitter
- 9 Shure ASXR Wireless Bodypack Receiver
BAND MICROPHONES AND DIs
- 1 Solomon LoFreq Low-Frequency Transducer
- 1 Audix D6 Dynamic Microphone
- 1 DPA 4055 Kick Microphone
- 19 DPA 4011ER Compact Cardioid Microphone
- 5 DPA 4099 CORE Microphone
- 13 DPA 2012 Microphone
- 4 DPA 2015 Microphone
- 8 Radial J48 DI Unit
- 1 A-Designs REDDI
- 1 Earthworks PM40 PianoMic System
Roland RSS Personal Mixing System