The fun and energy of ABBA lives on in Mamma Mia! The Party, a Greek dining experience coupled with an intimate theatrical performance, which took up residence at The O2 in London last September, after four successful years in Stockholm. Set across two floors, complete with fully mobile cast and live band, the performers deliver both the food and storyline, encouraging guests to join the drama as dancing queens themselves.
ABBA’s Bjorn Ulvaeus, producer of Mamma Mia! The Party, approached three-time Olivier Award winning sound designer Gareth Owen, who specified d&b audiotechnik for the job. "This kind of interactive theater really demonstrates the versatility of the d&b range," notes Owen. "Bjorn Ulvaeus was insistent that we didn’t compromise on sound quality in favor of set design, so we were able to use pretty much every small and medium box d&b make - V-Series, Y-Series, T-Series, E-Series. You name it, you’ll find it on this show.”
Live Design chatted with Owen on his sound design and the tools he used to develop it.
How did you approach this collaboration, as far as translating Bjorn Ulvaeus’s vision/music to an immersive soundscape?
I think the key thing here was trust. Bjorn and I learned to trust each other very quickly. For my part, no one on the planet knows better how his music is supposed to sound so I was quick to embrace his opinions and viewpoints, even if they were sometimes different to achieve.
What were your biggest challenges with the cast and band moving throughout the space?
Without a doubt, the hardest thing was dealing with the fact that the cast (and their microphones) are always in front of the same speakers that the audience are hearing the show from. As you can imagine, this made gain before feedback a constant battle, particularly with the high-volume levels of a lot of the songs.
How did you keep the focus on dialog and maintain intelligibility in the context of this larger-than-life production?
We used TiMax spatial location processing to locate the vocals to the cast members wherever they were in the space. This really helped the audience track the action around the space. Maintaining intelligibility is all about managing the sound of the room and making sure you have good speaker coverage in every seat.
What were your priorities when it came to ensuring a consistent sound experience throughout the venue?
If you have speakers pointing in all the right places and you get them EQ’d so that they all sound basically the same, you can move the action around the space without losing quality. I think it's safe to say that me and my team did more system tuning on this show than any other show we’ve done in a long time - well over a hundred hours of tweaking I would estimate.