Battersea Park has long been part of London’s entertainment scene, despite the capital’s legendarily uncertain weather. One iconic event was the time, in September 1978, when The Stranglers and support acts including Peter Gabriel and The Skids, played there. In the days before LED screens and intelligent lighting, the band decided to rev up the visuals by introducing several professional strippers (of both sexes) during the song "Nice ’n’ Sleazy." Their appearance was so successful that some of the audience members were inspired to join in the disrobing. The evening is alleged to have ended with a mortar fired from a Sherman M10 tank the band had hired for the day.
These days, that kind of noise would give any sound designer a heart attack, and probably involve the Ministry of Defense, but fortunately technology has evolved to the point where you don't need a tank to make an impact. The latest production to find a home in Battersea Park, Grease - The Immersive Movie Musical, has an extremely advanced sound system and far from encouraging nudity, the organizers suggest a Pink Ladies or T-Birds dress code because this event involves a lot of audience participation.
There are several levels of tickets, some audience members can participate onstage and interact with actors, for example, in the sleepover scene they are given a pillow and blanket and snuggle down in the middle of the action with the performers, or participating in the dance competition until they are eventually tapped out. But every ticket holder is free to walk around the arena, Evolution Battersea, a large conference/event space, following the action, singing along, and buying snacks and drinks. The production works by playing the classic movie Grease on large screens hanging around the venue and in Battersea Park itself, and then switching to a live cast for every musical number. The live cast parts take place on different stages in different parts of the building (decked out to look like the Rydell High School gym, an auto shop, diner and drive-in movie theatre) and outside in the park, made over as a fairground with working rides. The audience has to pay attention to who is singing and where, and with so much going on and everyone in some version of 1950s garb looking like cast members, it can be confusing which means some heavy lifting for both the lighting and sound departments to signpost the action.
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For sound, that falls to Gareth Fry, a multi-award-winning sound designer, with Tony and Drama Desk Award wins for The Encounter and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on Broadway, and three Olivier Awards in London. Live Design talked to him about his approach to Grease, betting on new sound gear, and trying not to disturb the wallabies.
Live Design: This project has a lot going on—indoor and outdoor space, both the cast and the audience members move around and there is quite a bit of ambient noise as people buy drinks and join in with the singing. What is your approach to this chaos?
Gareth Fry: You start by working out the language of it and then find a way to let the audience understand what that language is. They have to spend the first 15 minutes acclimatizing, because it is not something most people have experienced before. They are not just watching a movie although they are surrounded by screens, and they are not sitting still watching a stage. A lot of the design is directing attention and helping people figure out the etiquette. It’s not immediately obvious that they are allowed to either sit or move around, they can choose how they want to experience the show.
Other Secret Cinema shows have not been immersive in this way; the audience can walk around in a world reflecting the film, but they are not watching the film at that point. Or else they settle into the movie and then there are some live action set pieces.
For example, for Star Wars, there was a cantina where you could have a drink and there'd be characters in there with you and a band, or you could walk around a market and there would be Storm Troopers. At the end there was a full-size X-wing fighter descending from the ceiling and Vader and Skywalker have a lightsaber battle. But the audience were not really involved in this. This is a new direction where we are making two parts coexist.
LD: Was switching locations outdoors and having nontraditional stages tricky?
GF: Not really, we don’t have to switch out any gear. I’ve done a lot of site-specific projects outside at Somerset House and street theatre so that aspect I was OK with. And I’m always attracted to the “quirkier” side of theatre and worked with Complicité so the ethos of, “we're not quite sure how we're going to make it work, but we'll make it work,” is quite exciting for me.
LD: What was one of the challenges you had to make work, and how did you do it?
GF: The biggest challenge was the sheer size of the venue. [Evolution Battersea and the park itself.] Inside, there is a 70-meter-long hall with multiple stages, and there is at least 40-meters outside, if not more, that we need to cover and despite the action the band, for the most part, stays in one place.
We needed the cast, who were wearing radio mics and in-ear monitors, to be able to move around those spaces at any point in the show and for us to be able to pick up the sound and feed it back to them. For a conventional radio mic system, it would be complex and expensive and would've involved a lot more equipment, antennas and cable etc. We chose the Spectera System from Sennheiser because it operates on a completely different principle to most radio mics. Its ability to cover wider ranges of space with fewer antennas was very attractive, as was its ability to be the transmitter and also the receiver for the in-ear monitors. Because of that, each performer is typically only wearing one pack, that is slightly larger than one transmitter, but both their microphone and monitor plug into.
Until now, you would have a microphone and that would go into a transmitter pack worn under your costume, and then you'd have a second pack for headphones/in-ear monitor. That's a very bulky set of equipment, particularly if you've got a tight costume or if you're break dancing or other choreography. Being weighed down by all that tech is quite cumbersome so the cast were very, very happy when I told them they only had to wear one. In fact, they broke out into spontaneous applause!
The in-ear monitors were critical for this show because of the size of the space. We can have the band down at one end of the venue and the cast will be performing in front of the PA system at the other end, about 50 meters away. If they hear the music through the speaker system there is a fraction of a second delay, maybe a 32nd or a 16th of a bar after it should happen. The in-ear monitors isolate them from that so they hear the music without a delay.
Sennheiser’s Spectera builds that into the system by default and no one else has done that yet. Of course, now it seems like kind of a no brainer!
I'm always interested in trying new technology but I try to limit the variables of things that could go wrong and not do too many new things on one show. But Spectera proved itself in these circumstances very early on.
LD: How is set up for Spectera?
GF: Another benefit of the system, which, Tom [Lishman] my production engineer pointed out, is it is much quicker to assemble all the components and wire them together in a rack and free up extra labor time. For a 32-way radio mic system, all the receivers and the transmitters for monitors would've taken someone about two and a half days of work in the warehouse and needed two huge racks for the equipment. But it took so little time (and space) we were able to have staff onsite helping in technical rehearsals instead. That is a tangible benefit on the show—spending less of our labor budget in the fit-up process and more onsite.
LD: What other gear are you using?
GF: We are using a Yamaha Rivage, mixing desk, and that's being fed into a TiMax Spatialization engine. and a d&b speaker system with well over a 100 units. I'm very familiar with their range and instinctively know which speaker I can use. I know there will be no surprises and I won’t suddenly realize I need twice as many speakers as I calculated.
The TiMax Spatialization helps us move sound around the space. When the cast are singing in the auto shop, it moves the sound of their voices to the speakers above. And when they're on the band stage, it'll move their voices over there. This is critical so we all know where to look. There is a lot going on and the audience needs these signposts so they don’t miss anything.
It creates a sense of where everyone is in the venue. Something I think a lot of people find disconcerting is when a performer's voice is disembodied from their location, even in a traditional theatre setting. The audience can be looking straight ahead at the stage, but the voice is coming from up above or over to one side. If you close your eyes, you can't tell who's speaking. That was one thing I was keen to avoid, it is difficult enough to deal with when you're dealing with a stage in front of you, but when you're dealing with something that's happening all around you, it's really critical to have that directionality to the sound.
Outside in the park there are stricter noise limits on what we can do. We are by the river and not too close to residences, but we're situated right next to Battersea Park Children's Zoo, so we have to be careful about not pointing speakers directly at the animal enclosures because we don't want to upset the sleeping wallabies and armadillos.
In the center of the outdoor space we don’t have anywhere to suspend speakers from and we didn’t want to impose on the scenery (fairground attractions) so there were compromises.
LD: What happens if a performer gets held up in the crowd and doesn’t get to the correct stage before the cue?
GF: Or they change the blocking! There was one dress rehearsal where the principal and the coach were originally doing a speech from the middle of the big basketball court stage, and they had reblocked it to do that speech from the drive-in stairs. That information hadn't made its way to us and the first thing we knew was when they started speaking. But many of the performers are wearing zactrack tags for followspots and we have shared the system with lighting. zactrack knows where an actor is and routes the mic automatically to the correct speakers using the TiMax system.
TiMax also has a tracking system we used on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child where we've got a big revolve in the middle of the stage. So often the cast is going round and round while speaking and to manually program that would be quite arduous. But the tracking system automatically puts them in the right space.
LD: What has been your favorite part of this project?
GF: We're used to watching movie musicals and so often we experience them on the small screen and that really diminishes the power of the music. For me, the live vocals bring the songs to life and give them an infectious energy. It's such a great film and it really comes alive with live instruments and voices and great choreography on top of that.
There isn’t really a solo number in the show because even when Danny sings “Alone At a Drive-In” we have 1500 people providing backing vocals for it.
LD: How did your career in live sound get started?
GF: I had never worked in theatre, and then one day when I was 19 and living down in Devon, the sound engineer for a show at the Edinburgh Festival fell ill and at the last moment a friend asked if I was free to go and help out. I ended up working on a production of Amadeus at 10.15 in the morning. I was mostly interested in going up there to see standup comedy when I wasn't working, but I got hooked on the interaction of music and language and the effect it has on an audience. Because of that, I went to Central School of Speech and drama to study theater design and was able to specialize in sound in the third year.
When I went to help out in Edinburgh I wasn't expecting much, but it changed my life.
Hear from Matt Costain, the director of Grease the Immersive Movie Musical: