When a new show opens in London’s West End, it’s good to get the word on the street. In the case of Evita, it is the song on the street that is getting all the press, and not since Romeo and Juliet has a balcony been given this much attention. Every night pedestrians waiting outside the London Palladium enjoy the musical’s most famous song, "Don’t Cry For Me Argentina" performed on the theatre’s balcony. This free mini-performance is attracting up to 600 people a night—lending a certain authenticity to the recreation of Eva Perón’s iconic appearance on the balcony of the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aries. The ticket holders inside are treated to a close-up live video broadcast, and incidentally, a glimpse from Eva's point of view.
RELATED: Evita Gear and Crew List
Evita's sound designer, Adam Fisher, has been involved with some of the biggest Broadway, West End, and touring shows of the last few years, including Sunset Boulevard, for which he won the Olivier Award for Best Sound Design, The Wizard of Oz, and Oliver! The British designer was also nominated for a Tony Award for Best Sound Design of a Musical for his work on Sunset Boulevard.
Live Design spoke to Fisher as he finished opening two major shows in the West End, Evita, and Hercules.
Live Design: What made you interested in working in the theatre and where did you train?
Adam Fisher: I didn’t official train. I started university but decided I was interested in other things and joined the local crew at the Birmingham Hippodrome. A friend needed cover and asked me to do the radio mics and one thing led to another, then led to a tour, and then moving to London. And suddenly it was my life!
I was always interested in sound and theater and growing up I used to go to the theater with my family, I just didn't know it was a career option. When I realized it was a job you can actually do I thought, ‘Wow! That's a whole world that I didn't know existed.’
Once I was on this bandwagon and making a living, I realized I wanted to be a sound designer and began moving up the rungs. The path I took was sound number two backstage, then a sound number one mixing shows, then I was an associate to Mick Potter for a decade. When I finally felt ready to go out on my own, COVID hit, so my timing wasn’t great...
LD: It seems to have worked out in the end! What helped when you did go out on your own?
AF: I think a lot of relationships that I forged while being an associate, on shows like Les Mis and Phantom. I was very lucky to work on those shows. It was a hard decision to stop following that path and switch to being the designer because working on all those big shows as an associate makes you feel financially safe.
In the beginning, I had to go back to doing college shows and smaller things as a designer. Thankfully, that quickly changed. I think I did a show at Leicester Curve Theatre where I met the director Nikolai Foster there, and we did Wizard of Oz together. I then got to know and work with Michael Harrison. I had worked with some big organizations and directors when I was an associate, so they saw me as a safe pair of hands. I had to take a couple of steps back to prove that I could do it on my own, but I don’t think I could have pursued being a sound designer if I was still doing the previous job. Eventually, Sunset Boulevard came and that was very successful.
LD: What attracted you to Evita?
AF: I'd worked with Jamie Lloyd before, and I knew it was in talks to happen, but when they came to me, I'd already taken on Hercules. Somehow, we worked it out so that I ended up doing two shows at the same time. (Evita opened on June 14, Hercules opened on June 24.)
I wore a groove in the pavement running between the Palladium and Drury Lane theatres for the last two months, but I would have been sorely disappointed if I couldn’t have done it.
LD: Can you talk us through the gear that you chose for Evita?
AF: With Sunset Boulevard it was very much a d&b audiotechnik system, but I've always been a Meyer Sound person so far as loudspeakers go. The Hercules system was Meyer and The Wizard of Oz. We took that as a base and went to the next level. This plan was prior to anything being said about the balcony section, although for Sunset where we had Tom Francis walking down the street outside the theatre so we suspected there would be a surprise. We were actually just waiting for Jamie to decide to do something—then he said let’s do "Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina" out on a balcony.
Familiarity and reliability is important for me, so I have my Digico Quantum 7T console, and generally pretty much everyone has a DPA Microphones, 4066 booms and Sennheiser packs. It is a very heavily amplified show, Jamie’s concept for Evita was that it should be like a gig. It’s very stripped back visually but the sound is big. We use quite a lot of handhelds to get that gig feel.
I think we were the first people to use the new Spectera System in a theatre here, thankfully Autograph Sound was able to get it. Spectera is Sennheiser’s new wideband bidirectional system. It has a radio mic pack and a IEM receiver in it for the outside part of the performance. Rachel (Zegler—Eva Peron) has an earpiece so she can hear the orchestra playing inside. Once we get a smaller radio mic pack for it it will probably replace the radio mic system—currently the packs are quite big so we just use it for in-ears at the moment, after the balcony moment she takes it off during the quick change and heads back down to the stage.
LD: How complex was the balcony scene?
AF: We needed permission from Westminster Council which took a while so it was bubbling away in the background and so it was quite late in the day when we got the go-ahead--not as much time as we would have liked. Lighting and video had their work cut out for them. There was a big conversation about whether we would be amplifying anything out to the street. We have a good relationship with EM Acoustics and thankfully we managed to get some Halo Cs, which is their small format line array and are weatherproof. They did not have any on the shelf and we were very last minute but apparently, they had some unfinished ones they were able to finish for us. We are really only covering the area immediately outside the theatre, but the crowd is all the way up the street now and I’m surprised they can see or hear anything. Sadly, I think Westminster council would have a problem if we started running a PA along the road so we are just sticking to the immediate area.
Some of the ensemble are also outside beneath the balcony but they are just miked and can hear the orchestra over the PA in that area. It is really quite the experience, even for the people in the auditorium. [Zegler] walks through the bar upstairs and out onto the balcony and the camera angle shows the entire street full of people waiting for her. It always gets a gasp from the audience.
For this scene, we have a separate system inside the bar that picks up her show mic and feeds it into a Yamaha DM3 console there which in turn is fed back to the main Digico Quantum 7 console in the auditorium. We have one person in the bar with her to make sure everything is working okay, and another person down on the street with an iPad so that they can adjust the mix for the speakers on the balcony. There's a general level control for that in case the crowd get louder, but the council have quite stringent rules as to how loud we were allowed to go.
We have an 18-piece orchestra in the mix, which is quite rare these days, including a drummer who can’t fit on the platform and has to be in a booth in the basement. He doesn’t mind, he can have air conditioning down there.
LD: This is a visually stripped-down version of Evita. How does that change things?
AF: It might be simpler, in terms of something like speakers, compared to a show like Hercules, which has a big set with massive pillars moving around. I have to be very specific with placements so they don’t get covered up. Evita is very open. However, the orchestra is on stage, not in the pit, and so the ambient level on stage is a lot higher, and there is a trumpet blowing right behind the singers’ heads. We do have to do a lot of balancing to make it comfortable for them.
LD: Is that the most challenging part of this design?
AF: That was more about creating the “gig” feeling that Jamie wanted while still maintaining the amazing orchestrations and keeping all the lyrics distinct. The history is in the songs because we don’t have the visual plot clues. It's a daily battle to make sure people are following the plot as it is quite stylized.
I wanted the sound to be lush and big so most of the show is in surround, it’s very much like Sunset, designed to make you feel like you are engulfed by the orchestra rather than just pummeled from the front. I worked closely with Stuart Andrews who is the keyboard programmer for the show and we had worked together on Sunset Boulevard.
LD: Do you have a favorite part of the show?
AF: Ah, there's so many great songs and moments, but I think "Rainbow High." I've never heard it like sung like that before. Zegler is incredible, just singing like a rock gig. I also love that we have an 18-piece orchestra, it's nice to do something without any tracks, there's nothing prerecorded.
LD: What’s next after you recover from opening two shows at the same time?
AF: I'm doing a UK tour of Miss Saigon, for Cameron Macintosh and Michael Harrison, then Into the Woods at the Bridge Theatre. And next year I’m back to Broadway.