Australia - Production house Dead Puppet Society is known for combining craftsmanship with cutting-edge technologies and collaborating with world-class arts companies and creatives to produce large-scale, design-led theatre works that shake up genres, incorporate contemporary forms of puppetry, and push the boundaries of live performance.
Opening in February at Sydney’s Capitol Theatre, Dead Puppet’s latest production is a new version of the five-time Tony Award-winning Broadway hit Peter and the Starcatcher.
For this musical, Dead Puppet’s creative director David Morton and the team engaged the services of Gold Coast-based sound, light and production technology specialists Captivate AV to design and deploy a sound system that would ensure audiences enjoy the full experience of the show’s ambitious sound design.
“The Capitol Theatre is a 2000-seat venue with stalls and a dress circle level,” reports Captivate AV audio engineer Isaac Ogilvie.
“Being a shell venue means that we needed to bring in all of the speakers required to put on the show. In a large venue like this speaker cohesion is so important so, from the front field to the main hangs to the delay speakers, we knew that we wanted one manufacturer to cover the lot. For this production, we’re using an entirely Nexo rig.
“We’ve got Nexo Geo M12 for upper left and right and lower left and right coupled with MSUB18 subs. We’ve got Nexo P18s running in-fill left and right and double stacked L20s running subfield left and right, then Nexo P8s for our singular delay ring under the balcony.
“We also have a fleet of Nexo ID14s and ID24s providing a surround sound experience for the audience both in the stalls and in the balcony,” continues Isaac.
“We had no doubt that Geo M12 was the box of choice for this venue. Running active we knew that we were going to have the coverage we needed horizontally and coupled vertically to cover the room from the front row to the very back. Running the box in active mode gives us the ability control the crossover at the amplifier rather than inside the box.”
Taking up the story for Dead Puppet Society, David says: “For this version of the production, we take that sort of actor and musician-driven playfulness on stage to build the story in the minds of the audience.
“Then working with our creative and technical team we make that a physical reality in the theatre. So, we might imagine Tinkerbell as a tiny glowing light that then becomes this fully articulated puppet.
“The same is true of the sound world where we get these Foley instrumentations that set us in the depths of the jungle, but then the work of Matt Erskine our sound designer suddenly wraps around us in the theatre using the surround system, so we actually feel like we’re sitting in the middle of a tropical rainforest.
“You’re sort of unsure where it begins and ends, but you just realise at some point that you’re actually inhabiting the same place in the story as the characters we’re following on the journey.”
“When designing a speaker system for a theatre show there are three things that we’re primarily concerned about: coverage, image and tone,” comments Isaac, returning to the subject of the sound system.
“This is the first time a Geo M12 system has been flown in this venue, and we have been blown away by the results.”
