It took 12 years, but it seemed inevitable that a film grossing more than $131 million worldwide would become source material for a Broadway musical. Such is the case for School Of Rock, the popular 2003 movie directed by Richard Linklater, in which Dewey Finn, a slacker musician played by Jack Black, impersonates a friend by taking a substitute teaching job and then creates a rock band with the fifth-grade students. The eponymous Broadway version opened in December 2015 at the 1,500-seat Winter Garden Theatre, where it has been doing very well at the box office, with a score by Andrew Lloyd Webber, book by Julian Fellowes (writer of Downton Abbey), and directed by Laurence Connor. The design team comprises Anna Louizos, sets and costumes; Natasha Katz, lighting; and Mick Potter, sound. Read about Louizos' set and costume design and Katz's lighting.
Conventional Broadway musical or rock concert? It’s both, in fact, as Potter has designed three distinct styles of sound that resonate throughout The Winter Garden. “The sound dynamic changes throughout the show,” he says. “Mainly, it is a conventional musical, with a strong book and score. As the kids and their relationship with Dewey grow, it moves at times into more of a rock musical, and then the show finishes as a full-blown concert. It should feel as if you are at a concert venue for the final 15 minutes, with full-out rock sound.” The dB levels ebb and flow throughout the show, and as Potter puts it, “It’s more about it being big than loud, a lot of punch from the system with a lot of subs and surround to make it feel big.”
To achieve all this, Potter designed a system that is larger and more robust than one might expect for a Broadway musical, including a main proscenium line array of 12 Meyer Sound Lyon loudspeakers per side. “This is a bigger system than you might ordinarily use for a musical in a theatre that size,” he admits, but he can modulate the sound to various levels as desired.
With just a seven-piece band on stage—drums, bass, three guitars, two keyboards—the score is “very cleverly orchestrated by Andrew Lloyd Webber,” notes Potter, who has designed sound for Lloyd Webber’s productions for more than 15 years. “There are a lot of purely synth sounds used within the keyboard parts. The keyboards and guitars can be almost orchestral in style and, sometimes, pure rock, but they never try to imitate conventional orchestral sounds, such as strings or brass. It’s always using original synth sounds. A lot of the sound design is informed by the score.”
A workshop at the much smaller Gramercy Theatre helped Potter. “It was a huge help in the design process, even though we were in a small club, to put on the whole show with the full cast and band,” he says, adding that the workshop also allowed him to play around with different styles of microphones, from head mics to boom mics. “That helped us when we got to The Winter Garden, where the cast is wearing small boom mics, which were the best option during experimentation at the workshop. There are more than 40 radio mics worn by the cast, and some of the kids on stage also wear in-ear monitor mics so they can hear each other properly,” explains Potter.
Lloyd Webber Rocks
“The director, Laurence Connor, wanted it to feel filmic,” the sound designer adds. “He didn’t want the kids to battle the music, and with the boom mics, they can perform more naturally over a rock score, so we decided to have everybody wearing them, so that it became the look of the show. Ideally, you don’t want to see mics, but in doing a rock show with kids, you don’t want them to strain their voices.”
Potter also faced some challenges with the loudspeaker system. “It is complex, as it’s a very wide theatre, and we had to keep the low-mid energy up on the extreme sides of the auditorium,” he says, pointing out that he added Meyer DS4P loudspeakers, a legacy product, to augment the proscenium line arrays off-axis coverage.
The center cluster is also unusual in that there was not enough space vertically between the set and the top of the theatre to rig a line array vertically. To solve this conundrum, Potter turned the proscenium cluster on its side, with 13 Meyer Sound MINA speakers horizontally. “I figured out how to splay them to make it work, and it gives us a nice wide cluster where there was no room,” he says. “It worked out pretty well, so I might use it again on other shows.”
Another challenge involves the sheer amount of musical equipment on stage, with three different musical setups for the actors in addition to the pit setup. “So there are four sets of amps,” Potter explains. “All of the guitar and bass amps on stage are props, with our speakers in them that we control remotely with wireless packs that feed back to the speakers on stage.” The sound comes from the amps on stage, different kinds of sound controlled via MIDI from the DiGiCo SD7 digital console. Sound Associates provided the audio gear.
Everything in the show is played live. Each electric guitar has five inputs into the console, a stereo Fractal effects processor, plus a remote guitar cabinet amp with three mics on it. “It is unusual to do both, but this allows us to pick and choose the guitar sound we wanted for each number in the show,” says Potter. “The whole band setup is more complicated than you’d imagine. There is a lot of technology involved, although it looks pretty straightforward.” Adam Fisher is the production’s associate sound designer, with Colle Bustin as production sound engineer and George Huckins as head mixer.
Check out the audio gear list on the next page.
Audio Gear List
Check out the list of audio gear, provided by Sound Associates, for School Of Rock.
MAIN MIXING CONSOLES
- 1 DiGiCo SD7 Digital Mixing Console
- 1 Fader Expansion Unit
- 1 SD-Rack (RF/System)
- 1 SD-Rack (Pit Band/System)
- 1 SD-Mini Rack (Stage Band
- 1 SD-Mini Rack (Stage Band Platform MADI
- 1 Optocore DD4MR-FX MADI I/O Interface
- TC Electronic Reverb 6000 MKII System
- 1 TC ICON MkII and Remote CPU 6000 MKII
- 2 Mainframe 6000 with DSP Card / Digital I/O
LOUDSPEAKERS
LINE DRIVERS, POWER AMPLIFIERS, PROCESSORS
Pros Arrays
- 24 Meyer Sound Lyon-W Loudspeaker
- 4 Meyer Sound DS-4P Mid-Bass Loudspeaker
Pros Side Fills
- 8 Meyer Sound MINA Loudspeaker
Pros Cluster
- 13 Meyer Sound MINA Loudspeaker
- 2 Meyer Sound UPJ-1Ps Loudspeaker
Subs
- 8 Meyer Sound 900-LFC Loudspeaker
- 2 Meyer Sound 1100-LFC Loudspeaker
Front Fills
- 8 Meyer Sound UPM-1P Loudspeaker
Side Fills and Box Fills
- 8 Meyer Sound UP-4XP Loudspeaker
- 1 Meyer Sound MPS-488HP Power Supply
Delays
- 28 Meyer Sound UP-4XP Loudspeaker
- 4 Meyer Sound MM-10XP Loudspeaker
- 4 Meyer Sound MPS-488HP Power Supply
Delay Truss
- 10 Meyer Sound UPJ-1Ps Loudspeaker
Surround
- 50 L-Acoustics 8XT Loudspeaker
- 18 L-Acoustics 5XT Loudspeaker
- 8 d&b E4 Loudspeaker
- 12 d&b D6 Amplifier Controller
Stage FX and Foldback
- 6 Meyer Sound UPJ-1P Loudspeaker
- 8 d&b E8 Loudspeaker
- 2 d&b D6 Amplifier Controller
Deck Foldback
- 16 d&b E5 Loudspeaker
- 2 d&b D6 Amplifier Controller
Stage Imaging
- 6 Meyer Sound UPJ-1P Loudspeaker
- 2 Meyer Sound CQ-1 Loudspeaker
- 2 Meyer Sound 500-HP Loudspeaker
Stage Band
- 4 Meyer UPJ-1P Loudspeaker
- 8 Meyer UPJunior Loudspeaker
- 6 d&b MAX12 Monitor Loudspeaker
Loudspeaker Processing
- 11 Meyer Galileo Callisto 616 Digital Loudspeaker Management Processor
- Meyer Compass Galileo NetworkMeyer RMS Control Network
RADIO MICROPHONE SYSTEMS
Sennheiser EM 3732-II System
- 24 Sennheiser EM 3732-II Receiver Module
- 42 Sennheiser SK5212 UHF Transmitter
- 6 Sennheiser SKM5200 UHF Transmitter
- 50 DPA d:fine 66 Dual-ear Omindirectional Headset Microphones (Sennheiser 3-Pin Lemo Connectors)
Shure Instrument Wireless System
- 5 Shure ULXP4 Single Channel Diversity Receiver
- 5 Shure ULX1 Bodypack
Cast Onstage Monitoring
- 2 Shure PT10T Dual Channel Wireless Transmitter
- 4 Shure P10R Wireless Bodypack Receiver
BAND MICROPHONES AND DIs
- 1 Yamaha Subkick Low-Frequency Transducer
- 1 AKG D112 MKII Dynamic Microphone
- 1 AKG D12 VR Dynamic Microphone
- 24 DPA 4022 Compact Cardioid Microphone
- 8 Shure Beta 98D/S Condenser Microphone
- 1 Soundfield SPS422B Microphone System
- 30 Whirlwind Hotbox DI Unit
- 1 A-Designs REDDI All tube DI
- 2 Buttkicker Drum Throne Rig w/Buttkicker Concert, Power Amplifier
- 2 DPA d:vote 4099G Microphone
BAND MONITORING
- 1 DiGiCo SD10-24 Digital Mixing Console
- 1 Digico SD10 RE Redundant Engine and Fader Pod
Roland RSS Personal Mixing System
- 1 Roland S-MADI REAC MADI Bridge
- 2 Roland S-4000D Splitters and Power Distributors
- 12 Roland M-48 Personal Mixers (Includes 2 Spares)
- 8 Genelec 8030B Self Powered Monitoring Loudspeakers
- 4 Genelec 8040B Self Powered Monitoring Loudspeakers
- 5 d&b MAX12 Monitor Loudspeakers
SFX PLAYBACK AND SHOW CONTROL
QLab Audio Show Control System
- 1 QLab 3 Pro Bundle Licence
- 2 Hammerfall HDSPe PCI Card DSP MADI Interface
- 2 Sonnettech xMac Mini Server Kits
MADI RECORDING AND PROTOOLS
- 1 DiGiGrid IOC Control Room I/O
- 1 DiGiGrid MGB Coaxial MADI Interface
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