THEATRE & STAGE 57
S pring Awakening . & Juliet . Come From Away . Back to the Future . In the Heights . These are some of the many stage productions that Gareth Owen has had a hand in. His career began in local nightclubs, where he was responsible for the lighting. But, as often happens in live entertainment, Owen was asked to switch gears and instead handle sound for local bands. “Nobody in the club knew anything about sound – and neither did I,” he admits. “I got away with learning on the job without too much criticism from the audience. You certainly wouldn’t get away with doing that today.” Owen then joined SSE Hire and toured the world with rock bands, working on stadium series before sidestepping into theatre. “I became the go-to person for rock musicals – the sort people want to sound like concerts.” Enter shows like MJ The Musical. WANNA BE STARTIN’ SOMETHIN’ “I remember getting the call about doing MJ The Musical, ” Owen recalls.
When I first started, sound
“The first cassette tape I ever bought was Michael Jackson’s Thriller , so I’ve been a massive fan my whole life. When the producer, Lia Vollack, called, I literally had to mute my phone, scream, and unmute it. It was quite a moment.” Owen’s familiarity with Michael Jackson’s discography proved to be useful. They wanted to design ‘the best sound on Broadway’ – that is, before the pandemic forced venues to close their doors. “The brief changed to: ‘We’ve got to get the show open and try not to spend too much money, because who knows how long it’s going to take for theatre to bounce back?’” Despite the tighter budget, “we didn’t compromise the end result,” says Owen. He used an Avid VENUE mixing desk (according to Avid, the S6L is Owen’s console of choice for the vast majority of his shows), and a d&b Soundscape PA system. “We linked it to a tracking system – the zactrack actor-locating system – so every performer wears a tracker, and the Soundscape system moves sound around the stage. Wherever you are in the auditorium, the sound always comes from the person who’s singing or speaking.” He also added Sennheiser Digital 6000 series radio mics and an Allen & Heath ME-1 orchestral mixing system to MJ ’s arsenal. “It’s rock concert- level sound in a Broadway theatre.” Musicals like MJ are choreographed to a tee; Owen worked with the lighting and video departments so everything was in sync. “We’ve got click tracks running through the show, and we’re sending a timecode to everyone. We’re using software called rTracks, which my team wrote – we’re in the process of finally releasing it to the public,” he reveals. THE WORLD OVER When Owen designs a show’s sound, it’s not just for one show; it’s every version,
no matter the venue, the cast, the city. Whether it’s a limited run or travelling circus, “everything that you hear is my responsibility,” he says. “Obviously, there’s only one of me,” he continues, “and I can’t be in 50 places at once. One of the big differences between rock ’n’ roll and theatre is that the person who’s making decisions about how the show will sound is not actually the person mixing. In theatre, the sound designer decides how the snare drum is going to sound, how the vocals are going to sound, what reverbs we’re going to use – and then we have a team of people whose job it is to mix that every night and mix it the same way. “As a sound operator in theatre, it is necessary to mix what the designer has created, even if it’s not necessarily to your taste,” continues Owen. “That’s quite a difficult thing – certainly for people who grew up in rock ’n’ roll – to suddenly be in that position.” While he might travel on occasion, Owen has a team of associate sound designers who regularly check on the Broadway, West End and touring shows, ‘just to keep everything in line’. But how do designers account for the individual venues, and the differences Owen had to work very closely with the lighting and video departments to ensure everything was in sync was something to be apologised for. Microphones were hidden, and the sound was minimal
Sound designer Gareth Owen (above) has become a pioneer of immersive sound design
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