BRING IT ON: THE MUSICAL
PELICAN PRODUCTIONS
A show-cue/signal flow challenge
I had the absolute pleasure of sound designing Pelican Production’s season of Bring It On: The Musical in 2017 at the Norwood Concert Hall. Any mounting of this production demands a great deal of hard work from the outset. Firstly, the show requires a cast capable of Acting, Singing, Dancing and Cheerleading- the type of cheerleading where real people are thrown up to six meters in the air in time to music. And from a tech perspective, exacting lighting, vision and sound elements are vital for this text more than any other show that I have been involved with.
Bring It On: The Musical -is, as it sounds, is a musical loosely based on the 2000 movie Bring it on- with a few plot points that vary. With an eclectic and impressive score by Tom Kitt & Lin Manuel-Miranda, almost every note played in this show is super engaging. The show seemingly has endless elements of foley, prerecorded dialogue, vocal and sound effects that are imperative for the composition and narrative of the show. These elements are not supplied to any licensees of the show, so many of them require synthesis and arrangement. With so many children being launched up in the air for this show, it was decided that as a matter of safety, all numbers that included cheer movement required click tracks. This was to ensure the band did not play critical passages faster than the cheer routines could safely be performed.
The second act of the show contains cheer-leading competition scenes where there is a perceived competition audience within the auditorium. The music arrangements include competition audience chants. Localisation and realism were key to these sounds being accepted by the audience without distraction is some of the busiest scenes of the show. These chants were prerecorded, sung by the full cast during a rehearsal. In order to convey a stadium space, these recordings were run through a convolution reverb plugin using a 5.1 impulse response of a large football stadium.
The additional challenge was to have these musical and non-musical elements triggered with as little difficulty as possible during show run.
The staging of this show therefore presented two unique design challenges- :
A requirement for an immersive system within the audience space that is powerful and capable enough for independent content from the front-of-house system.
A multi-channel sound-effect playback ecosystem that has the ability to be both music synchronous and a-synchronous.
The solution the the first challenge was implementing surround/side and above systems all with discreet program inputs. In this way, audience members would hear this chanting around them realistically simulating the cheer-comp audience within their own space. The outputs that were capable of independent bussing from the sound effect computers were: Left Main, Right Main, Sub (or LFE), Left Side, Right Side, L Surround, Right Surround, and a Pair of speakers immediately above the audience aiming at the walls.
Overall, this system certainly achieved the desired result, becoming a flexible canvas for artistic sound design elements. For those that have not visited the Norwood concert hall, it has quite a long reverb tail and hard walls all-round. This didn’t obfuscate the crowd noises or other timed sound effects too detrimentally. However, with a less reverberant theatre, greater contrasts between cheer audience spaces and the rest of the show space could be achieved, therefore improving the systems impact.
CHALLENGE TWO: I surmised that the surround and sound effects systems should be fed from two separate and largely independent instances of Qlab- (a show control system and playback system capable of many things, but most importantly in our case- multichannel audio replay, open sound control, and midi controls). One of these systems was controlling and replaying all musical elements (click tracks, dedicated lead vocals for items that are arranged as such for cheer competition items, and sound effects in surround for musical breakdowns) which the Musical Director (Martin Cheney & Peter Johns, respectively) would operate. The other system was the step through cue machine of the show, handling automated cues for lighting, vision, some audio console automation, and non-musical multichannel audio playback. The lighting operator (Brad Sax) would directly step through cues on this machine, and also “house-keep” the musical Qlab machine.
The two Qlab machines would be capable of cueing each other which could create a much easier show run given the complexity of every technical element of this show. As seen in both the control diagram and the audio diagram below, in the second season we implemented redundant Qlab systems. Glenn Hill of Crystal Clear Audio built a dedicated four machine dual system, dual redundant Qlab rack system which resided at the front of house position in the Norwood Concert Hall. This system performed unbelievably well, and when an element was found within production runs that was behaving erratically, it was a very hard lesson to consistently learn that our programming was the issue.
Redundant systems offer a level of insurance during a show, but also require higher complexity to handle the switching over of multiple control and audio systems in the event of a machine failure. In our case we chose to use the Qlab arm/disarm Osc cue functionality with like-cues being duplicated and grouped via wildcard numbering. The separate cue systems on each machine could be isolated at the push of a key.
All audio was fed to a sub-mix console- 32 channels in all, and switched with a macro/user defined key in the event of a failure.
We did test the switching of these systems within production prior to opening night with success, and there was no failure event during any of the show runs.
The wrap up
A very complex production design and concept was able to be realised with planning and the good nature of many, many talented people. The show control systems that were implemented resulted in a consistent show quality, pace and result. Although equipment for show control and large scale complex audio systems is quite expensive, the often understated impeding factor of production complexity is production and design time.
I’m proud that we were able to drive creativity so well with the implementation of technology. If I was to redesign this show again, I believe I would certainly prioritise a show control tech lead on hand to manage show control systems-as separate to audio operation. Having a spare ear and a few extra hands during the production period would certainly made for a further polished result.
All in all, I believe that making shows better through experimentation, trial and error, and broadening of knowledge and skills is a positive for our art form; as long as we react to the text, and it’s interpretation on stage. We were lucky enough that managing directors of Pelican Productions, Jen & Kylie were supportive enough to give room for this level of show-craziness.