Our
theatre has been getting complaints for the last several years that audience members cannot hear the action onstage during our straight shows. And they get younger and younger! Honestly these are not old people, and they don't request listening devices. We are convinced this phenom is cultural: people are so used to watching netflix with
headphones on
etc that their brains can't sit and watch live
theatre and comprehend. It's a real problem for us now and we have to start micing our straight shows. We've NEVER had to do that and I'm dreading it, but our managing director is tired of the complaints.
I dislike this sort of speculation. That being said, the first opera I ever saw at The Met my only comment when I left was, "That would have been better if they were mic'd" and that is supposedly a world class opera
venue. I've seen a few dozen straight plays on Broadway and sometimes I want reinforcement, and we're talking 1,200+ seat venues, but more often than not it just takes 10 minutes to sink into the world of the show, let go of that thought, and enjoy the entertainment. It also took a theater degree for me to learn to just chill out and let go of the desire for louder and 99% of your audience doesn't have one of those. I know this isn't what your managing director wants to hear, but maybe it's as simple as explaining via a blurb in the playbill why the choice to go without reinforcement?
Tangent: Don't even get me started on the older crowd who crow, "In my day they could belt to the back of the
house without mics" or "In my day they could speak a
play to the back of the
house" - styles change, what's in style right now definitely doesn't work like the old stuff worked and sometimes you need mics. Modern musicals are orchestrated much differently, your orchestrations don't
drop away to leave room for vocals, your modern plays are written a lot like movies without the benefit of the close-up. Acting styles have changed to suit the times and I don't like hearing about the old days. We got what we got now and we have to figure out how to make it work, there isn't some lack of talent to sing or speak louder - it's truly a case of, "they don't make 'em like they used to" because styles have evolved. (unless your director has decided to cast a ton of movie actors in your
play, then you are 100% allowed to complain that they just whisper all the time).
Our ears are just trained to want things louder, I wouldn't go as far as to say everyones ears are toast from listening to
headphones too loud - I know I don't listen to things too loud and I crave amplicification from world-class performance venues. I'm just a product of my upbringing, it's as simple as that. A PA that does natural reinforcement is like 5x the cost of one that does just straight amplification - so at a certain
point maybe you break from the reality of the show and just mic everyone in lav's and mix it like a musical?
Aside from the several old
PZM's and
PCC's that we have in
stock (which I never use), any good advice for newer options for boundary mics??
Start with what you got and see if it fixes the problems you have before you toss money into a money pit. The moment you convince management to dish cash on a solution they are going to expect results and you don't know if this will get you the results.
We've been looking into
Shure's wireless
boundary mic but never used them. Would they
pick up actors from the
stage edge??? Or is this more of a conference room table device? I like the idea of wireless so that we can move them around during tech more easily (on the floor, walls,
etc) to maximize
pick-up on different sets.
I'll always be the person in a corner going, "
PZM's are for conference tables and tap dancers". I think it's a huge high school/community theater mentality that these things work for straight plays (yea, controversial opinion). That being said, I do always seem to
line the edges of my decks in musicals with
PCC's as a last
line of defense if every mic on
stage goes out. My last full-time tour gig I think I did 225 shows in the year and maybe had to lean on the
PCC's for a single actor in a crowd of mic'd actors exactly 2 times and both were not fun. Mileage varies quite widely. On a 65"
proscenium opening I may have 8-10 evenly spaced and even that the actors have to be in the sweet spot in front of the mic to get decent audio. If they go more than like 8' upstage of those mics I just give up.
----------------------------
There are a few stabs at mic'ing straight plays when lavs are out of the question, that seem to work in my experience. One takes skill/money and both a gracious director and
lighting designer and one takes throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks. All require skilled operators mixing off a script. There is no easy "set it and forget it" way to do this.
Skill/money method: Divide your entire
stage into evenly divided boxes. Hang a hanging
cardioid mic centered on every box. Instead of line-mixing the show, you area mix the show - you
mark up your script based on where the action in the
play is taking place. There's a
bit more to this method to make it really shine, especially if you can get a bunch of speakers, but it by far produces the most natural straight
play reinforcement I have ever seen. Downside: The mics need to be like 12' off the
deck so you really need an understanding director.
Throw things at a wall method: The usual mic you see Off-Broadway is the DPA 4021, you
line the
edge of your
deck with these dudes (You'd be using
PCC's for this). Then you just start hanging shotgun mics pointing at all the major action spots that take place like 10' upstage. When this stops working or you're out of shotguns you just start slamming wireless lavs into nooks on the set. Downside: Lots of trial and error.