On the actual topic of conversation -- I always try to start all mics on everyone in the hair, on center if possible, or running opposite a part in the hair if the hair has a part. I'll only start mics on the ear if the actor has a lack of hair, it's in the look of the show, or the actor is too quiet and I need to get every ounce of
gain before
feedback.
As for the mics in Something Rotten -- that's
par for the course on a big musical. A2's on the large shows really pride themselves on hiding mics as good as possible -- they are aided by a ton of different tricks in this, and a ton of different painting and coloring supplies -- to match forehead tone on the cap, hair tone on the
wire, and then neck tone on the back.
Regarding separating vocals from band -- this to me is disorienting as an audience member. This appears to be a preference for many sound designers on broadway, but I don't like the way it sounds. Other than sound effects I always route vocals and band identically when possible, and simply use the volumes of the various speakers in the room to fill the sound as evenly as possible so the audience can hear clearly without it having to be too loud. When you
play music on your stereo you don't have the vocals coming from different speakers than the instruments ... so why should you do it in a theater?
You're thinking too small -- when you have a sweet 5.1 home theater
system on your TV the vocals are pumped through the center
channel primarily with some L/R fill and everything else is pumped L/R.
The reason for differential sourcing and not identical sourcing is 1. To get as natural as possible and 2. To clean up a mix -- a
speaker can only produce one frequency at any discrete
point in time, sending as little as you can to any individual
speaker is the best course of action -- the big shows with insane budgets will sometimes double-hang
speaker systems and route just band and just vocals to their double-hung speakers. On the natural sound, using the Center as the workhorse and then L or R + input delay generally helps lower the picture and steer it upstage towards the actors mouth. The big shows go one step further and use a point-to-point delay matrix which will take the individual
microphone inputs and feed a discrete delay time and
gain relationship to every
speaker in the
system. Then you source your band to speakers that try to propagate the natural sound from the
orchestra pit and you can get some pretty good results.
Long story short, you take what you have to start with and try to make the best product, scaling up with budget and time constraints. Not every
speaker needs every thing, but there are no hard and fast rules for what we do -- just general thoughts on what's considered best practice. If I only had 10 speakers to
cover a 300 seat theater I'd probably
send everything to everything, but with scale comes options on how to best use resources for the best end result. Most designers I've worked with who've been doing this long enough have developed their own individual sound -- each one different because no one can agree on any one way to do things.