Friday, November 26, 2021
When you paid top price for Broadway tour seats — and can't hear the dialogue
Datebook: Paul Bendix of San Francisco was looking forward to attending his second major in-person show since the pandemic hit. It was opening night for BroadwaySF’s “My Fair Lady” at the Orpheum Theatre on Nov. 3, and he and his wife had orchestra seats. He hadn’t seen the Lerner and Loewe musical since he was a kid.
But after the curtain went up, he heard a horrible echo.
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5 comments:
This is a fascinating article that was so much more than I thought it would be based on the title. During tours, we talk about scenery and how each venue has to be able to accommodate the demands in order to work, but I hadn't considered the acoustical ramifications of having drastically different venues with the same sound system trying to compensate for that. Even simple things like the local humidity or the bumpiness of the truck ride can affect the gear and ultimately the sound, as the article notes. Even further, tech time can only get you so far, since squishy human bodies that comprise the audience also have a huge impact, delaying the ability to correct issues until there are butts in seats. In this case, while BroadwaySF doesn't technically have an obligation to fix the sound of the theater, I feel like it will lead to fewer tours heading to the area. In that world, money really talks, so losing business may push the venue to invest in their acoustics.
The thing that stood out to me about this was why hadn’t the sound department heard this echo beforehand, or why had the venue not informed the show’s production manager about the sound problems in the space if it had happened before. It seems that the venue didn’t see it as that big of a problem even though it does affect people's show experience. I think it’s very interesting to see the comparison of attendee experience versus ticket sales, as the first part of the article seems to focus on the personal experience of a show attendee, while the section with the Townsend Teague interview seems to be focused on the revenue and ticket sales, even calling audience members “ticket buyers” which to me is a very different way of viewing your audience. It’s also interesting that Teague doesn’t mention which venues have sound problems, which I can see as protecting ticket sales and also in a way to cover himself, but it seems like that might be giving other shows and audience members a disadvantage when performing or seeing a piece.
I think a lot of people don't understand how difficult it is to make things sound good, and amplified vocals touring through a variety of venues is pretty much the worst case scenario. That said, there's a LOT of money that goes into these commercial productions, and what people are paying for is for those issues to be solved. It's on the producers to make sure that the issues are sorted out at each stop of the tour, and that may mean allocating more time to tuning and testing. It also may mean that the tour should invest in additional equipment to make circumstances as friendly as possible to these kinds of problems. For instance, the article notes that sometimes equipment has to be thawed out after being transported through blizzards. I hadn't heard of that before, but depending on the equipment that could wreak havoc on certain items, and that really just shouldn't happen. Many of these tours are transporting instruments, and they're certainly transporting people, so they definitely have the ability to transport things in a safe, climate controlled way.
Would agree with other commenters here that this seems like something that should have been caught earlier, and also an issue I’m surprised we don’t hear about more often. The need for touring shows to adapt to new spaces on incredibly short schedules is something we talk about a lot, and small differences between theaters and small issues with venues can create big problems for the audience. The venue’s response here makes me think about the relationship between the tour and the different venues, and if this venue responded appropriately. The venue here seems to have taken the stance of ‘this was a problem with the touring equipment, so it’s not our problem, sorry’, which is reasonable, but also doesn’t help address the issue of audience experience. I did find the almost anti-amplification stance the article seems to take near the end a bit weird. It makes a lot of comments about how ‘we’re too lazy to just listen to the people’, but in venues designed for microphones, it’s simply not possible for the sound to carry that far unamplified and still be understandable, and the author’s whole point was that they had a bad experience with unintelligible dialogue.
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