When you think of the best seat in the house maybe the stalls come to mind, or a royal box. But the real best seat is one that few people get to sit in: the sound booth, a mysterious area of the theatre filled with banks of machines and flashing lights, and completely off-limits – until now.
Autograph Sound is the world-leading sound design and equipment rental company, whose highly skilled employees and cutting-edge technology power most of the shows in the West End. Autograph gave The Stage exclusive behind-the-scenes access to one of London’s highest-profile shows, revealing the secrets of how sound and sound technicians help to tell the story of a show, and how they use a huge range of skills, techniques and equipment to make theatre come alive. The complex and brilliant sound design for the show is by Tony and Olivier award-winning Nevin Steinberg, who is also responsible for Dear Evan Hansen and Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.
It’s 7.15pm on a cold Monday night in London. Crowds are starting to assemble in the foyer of the Victoria Palace Theatre, around them are ornate gold carvings and white marble pillars. There’s chatter and excitement: they are about to watch that evening’s performance of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s epoch-making musical Hamilton.
But at the other end of the theatre, in the winding maze that makes up the backstage departments, there’s a different kind of buzz. It’s the focused, slightly nervous thrum of theatre professionals getting stuck into the highly technical, skilled jobs they perform every night – jobs that make everything the audience sees and hears happen flawlessly.
In the sound department, by a huge bank of blinking, whirring computers supplied by Autograph, Hamilton’s head of sound Alice Afflick-Mensah is eating her dinner. There’s about half an hour to go before the curtain goes up and in this room there’s a moment of quiet. She has been head of sound since February 2022, and along with a team of three – Curtis Chadwick (sound number two/deputy), Sarah Atherton-Knight (sound number three) and Ella Baker-Roberts (sound number four) – she is responsible for each of the hundred or so microphones, 250 speakers, the many amplifiers, computers and sound-mixing consoles that are used to help deliver the story.
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Down the corridor, in the dressing rooms, her sound numbers three and four are fitting and checking the cast’s wireless microphones, tiny units that are almost invisible when in place. “The team knows exactly what they’re doing,” says Afflick-Mensah. “I don’t have to ask her to check the mics. We have really strong communication, often without having to say anything at all.”
With all the microphones checked and fitted, sound number three comes in. One of the performers washed his hair late so it’s quite slick, she explains. She’s worried the microphone might slip during the performance. “We’ll keep an eye on it,” says Afflick-Mensah.
There are fail-safe backups built into everything here – a fundamental part of Autograph’s ethos. One bank of computers runs on an uninterruptible power supply, which is effectively a large battery. In the event of a loss of mains power, this allows the system to keep running long enough for it to be shut down properly. There’s also a separate audio console that monitors the band’s personal mixers and allows individual cast members to hear exactly what they need. The performers playing the two main roles of Hamilton and Burr each have two head microphones (in theatre sound speak, they are "double packed") in case one of them fails during the show.
At the beginners call Afflick-Mensah follows a route out of the backstage maze, into the auditorium, and into a box at the back where the sound desk is located. She takes her place in front of rows and rows of buttons, faders and coloured lights. Sound number three stays in the sound department, keeping an eye on everyone’s radio transmitter signal strengths from down there. Sound number four is in the wings to make sure head mics can be adjusted and corrected during costume changes. Meanwhile, sound number two is having a well-deserved night off.
“Act I is relentless,” Afflick-Mensah says as she stands at the sound desk waiting for the green light from the stage manager that means the show is about to start. Later, sound number three explains: "The first time I learned Act I on the desk, I got in such a muddle that I had to take a break after the Schuyler Sisters. It’s so mentally exhausting.”
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The green light comes on. As soon as the band strikes up and the first song begins, Afflick-Mensah’s fingers flicker across the faders with lightning speed. The whole show is in her head – there’s no script as there isn’t time to turn the pages, so sound operators know the entire script line by line and the whole musical score note for note. As Hamilton and Burr match wits on stage, their respective microphones are turned off and on in the split second before and after they speak. If she misses a single moment, it would be glaringly obvious: there would be no sound from the stage. “You only have a mic turned on if it’s in use,” she explains, “otherwise you’d get something called phasing between the mics, which takes away the clarity.”
Opening and closing the mic faders is simple enough when there are just two or three people on stage, but in Hamilton there are regularly seven or eight main cast in a scene, not to mention the large ensembles of singers. It’s as complex as playing a musical instrument.
But being a sound technician isn’t simply about turning microphones on and off; it’s also about finding the best way to help tell the story. Sometimes that means triggering a particular effect at the right time, or predicting what each performer will do. Will they sing a line more quietly than usual? Stand somewhere slightly different? If they do, Afflick-Mensah has to react instantly. “You can tell how they’re going to sing,” she says. “It’s a sense you develop, just from looking at the performers.” She is in a duet with the performers on stage.
In the song Wait for It, some of Burr’s words are accentuated by manually triggered echoes at the end of each line. As he sings "Theodosia writes me a letter every day", Afflick-Mensah adds an echo on "day", which lingers and then fades aways, bringing out the fierce, slightly mournful nature of the lyrics. At that moment, with Burr alone on stage, the sound is the most important thing in the room. Controlled by Afflick-Mensah, the echo adds so much power and emotion to the line. Tonight, the climactic song Burn comes in a little more quietly than usual, so Afflick-Mensah raises the volume to give the song its full power.
Little messages from sound number three and four pop up on a screen every so often: the head mic that they were worried about has slipped too far up the performer’s head. “Will adjust during the next song.” Afflick-Mensah whispers: “Thank you” into her walkie-talkie without taking her eyes off the stage.
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This evening a couple of the main cast are off and covers are performing instead. This is an added challenge when mixing a different combination of actors and voices on stage. While the understudy in the role of Angelica Schuyler sings Satisfied, Afflick-Mensah takes the opportunity to adjust the equalizer settings for that voice. She saves the equalisation changes into the desk computer programme so that it can be recalled the next time the understudy takes the role.
Equalising is a way of finely controlling the different frequencies in the voice or any of the musical instruments or other audio sources whose sounds are controlled from the mixing console. Afflick-Mensah has access via the console to extremely powerful equalisation tools for every source, so that everything sounds perfectly clear and balanced in the Victoria Palace auditorium.
She is used to changing these settings very quickly. The challenge many theatre sound technicians find is that they don’t have any rehearsal time with the cast and band when learning the mix. “Performers might have up to six weeks of rehearsals,” she explains, “but we get six hours a day with a MADI recording of the show, adding what you have learned everyday into a live performance.”
That’s six hours to learn every cue, to hear every performer sing every song in every combination, while manually mixing, making sure each microphone is programmed to have exactly the right equalisation, the right volume, the right placement of the mic on the performer’s head – ensuring the sound of every instrument in the band is correct and that the resulting final mix is as good as it can be. Every night.
A message pops up on one of the screens just before the interval: “Tea or coffee?” it says. It’s from sound number four, who is monitoring from the sound department backstage. The lights go out for the end of Act I, and Afflick-Mensah heads back to the sound department where her cup of tea awaits. During the interval, sound number four is using a pair of pliers to twist wire into the shape of an ear. One of the original cast is returning to the show shortly and he needs a head mic. Every single one is custom made to fit each performer’s ear.
With hardly enough time to finish the cup of tea, the interval is nearly over and Afflick-Mensah heads back to the desk for Act II. Later, as the final song – Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story – starts up, Afflick-Mensah is still concentrating closely on the stage, her hands still glued to the bank of faders on the sound desk, sliding up and down effortlessly. Then the show comes to an end, the applause starts, and the delighted audience members pull on their coats and scarves, ready to return to reality and the cold London air.
It’s extraordinary to think that Hamilton is just one example: every show in every theatre in the country, even across the world, has a sound team whose skills are essential to the audience’s experience. That’s become even more true in recent years as audiences have become used to ever more sophisticated and high-quality sound, not just in live settings or in cinemas, but even from the comfort of their living rooms. Audience expectations of sound have increased hugely, and sound operators in theatre have to meet or, in most cases, better those expectations.
“Thank you so much,” one audience member calls over to Afflick-Mensah in the sound booth at the back of the auditorium. “That was incredible.” The blinking computers are shut down, there are a few checks to go through. When that’s all done, Afflick-Mensah can go home, ready to do it all again tomorrow.
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