Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Head of Sound
It was great fun to originate the mix for this exciting new pop musical based on the six wives of Henry VIII. I delighted to be involved from the very start and set up a system in the rehearsal room in order to develop the sound design as the show was being crafted.
I worked closely with sound designer Paul Gatehouse throughout the process to build the key elements of the show’s sound.
It became apparent at the beginning that this wasn’t a classic musical theatre show and needed to have a concert/pop style of sound but with the clarity and intelligibility of a theatre production.
For the front end the show was programmed on a DiGiCo SD10T with a Soundcraft Realtime Rack offering UAD plug-ins inserted across the console for high quality processing.
It was great opportunity to try out the new Sony digital handhelds which were an integral part of the equipment choice and worked extremely well along with the DPA d:facto capsules. We decided fairly early on at all the Queens would have in ear monitoring to reduce the noise onstage and give each performer their own unique sound world as well as the advantage of easily maintaining their voices over a long period of time.
After the rehearsal room we moved to Norwich Playhouse where technical rehearsals began and the show began to take form.
As there was a lot of technology involved it was clear this would need to be well coordinated with other technical and creative teams. For example the musical director would a fire tracks with timecode at specific points from the stage and everything would need to sync together seamlessly.
By having the band live onstage aesthetic was also an important factor to consider.
After a week in Cambridge we took the show to Edinburgh Fringe festival. This would offer us some interesting challenges as the show played on top of other productions in the space and had to be installed and taken down on a daily basis. Therefore, the sound team had to develop a system and routine that meant the show could easily be reliable and repeatable.
TEAM:
Sound Designer: Paul Gatehouse
Production Engineers: Josh Richardson, Mickey Del Buono, Kelsh B-D
Sound No. 2: Eleanor Theodorou
By: Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss
Directors: Lucy Moss & Jamie Armitage
Choreographer: Carrie-Anne Ingrouille
Set Designer: Emma Bailey
Costume Designer: Gabriella Slade
Lighting Designer: Tim Deiling
Orchestrator: Tom Curran
Musical Supervisor: Joe Beighton
ABOUT:
The musical is a modern retelling of the lives of the six wives of Henry VIII presented as a pop concert, as each of the wives take turns singing and telling their story to see who suffered the most due to Henry and should, therefore, become the group's lead singer.
MEDIA:
REVIEWS:
SIX, ‘the most uplifting piece of new British musical theatre’
★★★★★
The Evening Standard
★★★★
The Guardian
★★★★
The Telegraph
★★★★
WhatsonStage