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Chris Cronin, sound designer for Private Lives on Broadway.
Chris Cronin wasn’t the first sound designer on Private Lives, but this is one relationship that worked out.
Scenic designer Rob Howell jokes that there is a production of Noël Coward’s Private Lives being staged somewhere in the world during any 24 hour period. That’s a testament to the quality of the writing and the timelessness of its narrative, which finds a divorced couple accidentally staying adjacent to one another while honeymooning their new spouses on the French Riviera. Naturally all sorts of nostalgic and sexual shenanigans ensue. Originally written in 1930, the play resonates with modern audiences with its mischievous tone and sly views on marriage and divorce.
This latest production on Broadway, starring Kim Catrall and Paul Gross, originated in the UK over two years ago. It moved from a regional British theatre to the West End, then crossed the ocean to Toronto before making an abbreviated run on Broadway. As is often the case with cross-Atlantic theatrical immigration, not all of the production personnel came along. In this case, original sound designer Jason Barnes had other commitments, so veteran American sound designer Chris Cronin was brought on board to duplicate and augment his work.
Chris Cronin: I basically reproduced Jason’s original work and we added a few little flourishes with our production. The director was happy with where things were, but Jason wasn’t available to come over and execute his sound design again. We added microphones for some slight reinforcement to the Toronto and Broadway productions because in the UK they don’t need that as much. UK productions don’t tend to feature reinforcement because the shape of their playhouses is very different. Their playhouses tend to be tall and narrow, where ours tend to be wider and deeper but not as tall, so the architecture of the houses tends to require that we reinforce our plays a little bit more than they do in the UK. And some people will say that American audiences aren’t trained to listen to plays the way that audiences in the UK are.
During the first act, there is music coming from within the hotel that reaches the characters in the balcony. It was rather subtle. At first I was not sure where the sound was coming from.
It’s very indistinct.
It is. Was it playing before the beginning of the show?
It’s hard to hear it—especially as people start coming in and when you get a full house talking and whatnot—but there is French music of the period playing as a preshow. But as I said, it becomes indistinct as the buzz of the house gets louder.
So it works on a subconscious level before curtain then?
A little bit. And Richard Eyre, the marvelous director, is very skilled at allowing the actors a little moment to listen themselves and register, aside from the obvious moments when they visibly hear the music and respond to it.
In the second and third acts, the music on stage comes from the gramophone and the piano being played.
That is very practical. It’s placed right on stage. Those are recorded. Paul Gross is miming playing the piano. He does a very good job at it. There is also a sound effect to augment when the water is spurting out of the fish tank. While it was falling on the carpet, it didn’t really make a lot of noise by itself, so there is a little bit of a splashy sound. Although everybody is more impressed by the fact that there is a big fountain of water spraying across the stage.
It seems that the sound is coming on stage from those things.
There’s actually a speaker in the gramophone and a speaker in the piano and they are augmented a little bit with the front PA. But for the most part the gramophone is a gramophone and the piano has a little speaker in it.
What kind of amps did you use on stage?
Both the gramophone and the piano are d&b E3s inside the props with E-Pack amplifiers. Equipment wise, the entire show is remarkably sparse. The desk is a Yamaha 02R96, and Qlab 2 is running on a pair of redundant Apple Mac Mini’s, via MOTU ultralite interfaces. Main speakers are Meyer UPA-1p/ UPM-1p and MM-4 boxes, while the house delays are d&b E3’s. Sound effect speakers on stage are a combo of Meyer UPA-1c and d&b E3 boxes. Amplifiers are d&b EPAC, Crown MA1200 and Lab Gruppen FP2400Q units. Microphones are DPA 4021’s and a pair of Sennheiser 5012 TX’s with DPA 4060 heads. Our superb sound engineer is Rafe Carlotto.
How many channels are you using on a show like this?
Very few. I think there are 10 sound effects channels for the cue system and there are six reinforcement mics on stage. There are four foot mics along the front and for acts two and three, particularly act three, there are a pair of Sennheiser 5212 transmitters in a couple of the furniture pieces for reinforcement mics further up into the playing area. The whole point of the sound design is to be supportive and unobtrusive. We’re trying to help set mood and place and there are some practical, textual considerations—they play the gramophone, they play the piano, the phone rings.
How are those sounds cued?
It’s between the board operator and the stage manager. Some of the cues are called. One of the longer piano bits Paul Gross has memorized such that he gets going with it, finds his rhythm and does his thing using the piano as a clock. He knows what the pauses are, he knows the beats. The board operator Rafe Carlotto is fantastic. He’s mixing the foot mics wiith the console stationed in a box house right and is watching for the phone to be picked up, for them to put the needle on the gramophone, for her to back up against it so that the needle skips.
All kudos to Jason Barnes, the original sound designer. I added four or five things, but I would say probably 85% to 90% of it in terms of the sounds and sound effects themselves are Jason’s. Matthew Scott worked with the National Theatre during the original production on all the music choices, so all of that came to us on these shores prepackaged. It wasn’t quite so easy as just reheating the meal, but I just had to make a couple of new sauces and put them on top.
One of the sound cues that we added that they hadn’t had before in Private Lives is in the third act when Simon (played by Paisley Day) wakes up and whacks his head on the underside of the piano. It’s a piece of movement that hadn’t happened before and they tried it and liked it. Of course, it’s a fake piano, so if you whack the underside of it, it just sounds like an empty box, so we added a little sound effect of piano strings ringing to give it a little bit more authenticity. It worked very well and stayed in the show. Those small touches are often called for when reproducing another sound design. I don’t know what space they were in before. I know most of the theatres were very narrow, so we had to work a little extra hard this time in speaker placement to make the first act underscore as indistinct as it was because, the Music Box being a relatively wide theatre, what seems indistinct on one side of it seems quite forced when you’re sitting on the other. So there was a little work we had to keep it similarly indistinct both on house left and house right.
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