LightSoundJournal.com: A musical epic that defies categorization, David Byrne’s American Utopia has earned acclaim as a Grammy-nominated record album, a sellout concert tour, an HBO film directed by Spike Lee, and finally as a Tony Award-winning Broadway production in a split run. The first engagement, at the intimate Hudson Theatre, ended its performances in February 2020 and a second run at the larger St. James Theatre opened in September 2021. For both productions, Meyer Sound LEOPARD® line array loudspeakers were selected to anchor the main audio systems.
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There are a couple of really unique factors that make this sound design so interesting to discuss. First, the actors are also the pit orchestra, playing multiple instruments on stage while also having quite complicated and fluid choreography. For a show with 12 performers, it utilizes 70 channels of Shure wireless microphones, which implies that the input side of this show is quite busy for a show at this scale. On the output side, I found it interesting how the designer tackled the challenge of having hanging arrays that were requested to be completely outside of all sightlines. For this task they used Meyer LEOPARD line array loudspeakers, which were both loud enough to fill the venue while simultaneously being small enough to fit a whole array outside of the sight of the audience. While being a relatively small loudspeaker, it also had very high quality built-in subs, which really brought out the low notes in the percussion and guitars. This show seems very interesting with a lot of sound engineering challenges, and it was quite cool to learn about how the team overcame these to make a great show!
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