Beauty & the Beast & Alcons

Beauty & the Beast, the latest musical by Duth theatre giant Joop van den Ende productions, is amplified by an Alcons ribbon sound system.

The show needs 14 trailers to be moved and is the largest traveling show of Van Den Ende productions and will visit the 13 largest Dutch theatres until June 2006. It is also the first time that Joop van den Ende Theater productions has made a traveling show of a Disney musical.

The sound design is by Jeroen ten Brinke, who already has created many sound designs for successful musicals, such as De Jantjes, Anatevka, Fame De Musical, 42nd Street, Rent, Saturday Night Fever, Titanic De Musical and was also involved in Cabaret, Les Misérables, The Phantom Of The Opera, and Miss Saigon.

For Beauty & the Beast, a co-production of Joop van den Ende Theater productions and Disney Theatrical Productions, ten Brinke used an Alcons ribbon sound system for the first time. The system consists of 28 Alcons LR14 ultra-compact ribbon line-array, four LR14B compact line-array bass, four BF302 bass system, and 11 ALC4 controller-amplifiers, complete with SDP processing modules.

The configuration is as follows: 6x LR14 flown arrays left and right, with 1x LR14B above; 3x LR14 stacked array left and right with 1x LR14B under, 10x LR14 as center-cluster and 2x BF302 subwoofer stacked left and right.

“I had never heard of Alcons before until I had a gig in the Pepsi Stage in Amsterdam," ten Brinke says. "There I was surprised by the guts of the person who had prepared such small cabinets for a producer who likes 'a FAT sound.' When I started, I simply shut my mouth. So much coming from so little I had never experienced before! After having spoken to a number of people and Alcons users, like Andrew Bruce of Autograph UK, we were convinced about our choice."