Stage Directions • April 2019 • Audio: Atlanta’s Center For Puppetry Arts

At Atlanta’s Center for Puppetry Arts, puppetry is serious theater. The center is America’s largest organization dedicated solely to the art of puppetry and houses the world’s most extensive collection of Jim Henson objects and puppets. It hosts more than 170,000 visitors and 500 performances each year in its two active theater spaces, the Mainstage Theater and the smaller Downstairs Theater.

The two spaces recently were upgraded with the addition of Allen & Heath dLive C3500 digital mixing systems allowing the ability to create audio scenes and coordinate the show mix and audio cues with lighting, special effects and other systems via Figure 53’s QLab software.

Stage manager Jessica Lewis explained the impact of audio in puppetry, “Our audio is very, very important because as puppetry performers, the people speaking lines are frequently hidden under and behind things. So, no matter how well they project, that’s not going to do any good. Our casts, which range from three to seven people all use wireless mics and we double-mic the actors with body mics. One puppeteer may do several characters so losing a single mic could take out multiple characters.”

The recent production of Paul Bunyan and the Tall Tale Medicine Show used twelve wireless mics for actor/musicians, puppeteers and instruments along with a wired microphone for the piano. The Mainstage Theater doesn’t have an orchestra pit so musicians are usually on stage in front of the proscenium. Some shows, such as Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, replace the live musicians with recorded music tracks (all vocals are done live). Both the Mainstage and the Downstairs Theater have Shure wireless microphone systems.

Recorded tracks supply sound effects along with Foley sound that allows the Center to coordinate and trigger sound effects to specific actions. “We’ve used surround sound for atmospheric effects – stormy nights and things like that – and for sounds that are supposed to be moving around the stage,” Lewis explained. “There’s a tennis match in Dr. Seuss’ Cat in the Hat where there is no visible ball. But the cat hits the ball and you hear it up front and a few seconds later you hear it in the back of the theater.”

Stage monitoring is critical in puppetry as well and the center uses wedge monitors for flexibility and simplicity. Lewis continued, “Performers may have a wall two inches in front of their faces, so it’s difficult for them to hear each other or the music and sound effects. In our current show, for example, we have three monitors for the performers – one for the piano player out front, one that covers most of the stage for the actors and one that covers a particular performance area for part of the show.”

Puppet shows may have complex sound designs with frequent scene changes. “Puppetry moves really fast and we have people who voice multiple characters – sometimes in the same scene,” noted Lewis. “I did the scene programming for Paul Bunyan and the Tall Tale Medicine Show, in which we had about 150 scenes and probably 350 cues in that hour-long show. Among other things, a new scene may include microphone mutes and unmutes, gates and EQ changes; it may route microphones through reverberation or other effects and it can make changes in the monitor mix. Besides audio console cues, those 350 go-strikes include music tracks, lighting and video cues.”

Technical director Gregory Montague explained why the center chose to move to digital mixing, “The way our shows are structured, our stage manager mixes everything and runs all of our cues during the show. Sometimes she’s asked to do 17 changes in 30 seconds, you just run out of hands and what I call ‘brain space’. So, we needed to find ways to best use her capabilities and purchase more of that brain space so we would be able to create and perform more complex sound designs.”

Montague and Lewis considered several different digital mixing platforms. “We looked for a soundboard with enough automation to do what we needed and the capability to link with our QLab software. We needed the flexibility to repatch in the middle of a scene if one mic of a performer’s double mic system fails,” he said. Lewis added, “I wanted a digital console so I wouldn’t have to keep the whole show in my head and I could watch what’s happening on the stage, and take notes for things we could do better. And I knew that digital mixing would be helpful during tech week as the sound designer was making changes and I am programming.” Montague continued, “Jessica mixes with one hand on the soundboard and one hand on the QLab computer. So, we needed to shift the soundboard’s layout so the right faders would show up under her hand at the right moment. We wanted to improve our sound quality, too. The dLive is a very flexible console; it allows us to be highly agile and the more we learn about it, the better it gets.”

While Lewis worked with a demo unit that was on loan, Montague attended an Allen & Heath seminar and demo hosted by Peachstate Audio of Atlanta. “It was a must that we know the console could be programmed to meet our needs so the demo was essential,” Montague said. “We just kept checking off the check marks and the Allen & Heath met all of our requirements.” The center used grant money from the David, Helen and Marian Woodward Foundation of Atlanta to purchase two Allen & Heath dLive C Class Digital Mixing Systems from Peachstate, one for each space. Each dLive includes a C3500 Surface and CDM32 MixRack along with Dante networking cards. The dLive’s internal effects allowed the Center to eliminate its external effects units. Lewis uses the dLive’s Dyn8 multi-band compressor to take out harsh frequencies from microphones and adds dLive reverb on selected voices. She makes a video archive of each show adding multi-track audio from the mixing console and the camera to a recording on a laptop. And, despite a major change from analog to digital and the many capabilities of the new mixers, training has gone well. Lewis noted, “We managed to go from install to making it do most everything we needed in 3 days and I’m training our other two stage managers now. Pretty easy learning there.”

Lewis concludes, “We are really committed to providing excellent sound for our ‘just a little puppet show’ performances and I know the sound quality has improved since we installed the dLives. I’ve actually overheard people leaving Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer who attended this same show in past years saying, ‘This is the best it’s ever sounded.’” She adds, “I think my job is pretty cool. I get to use all this amazing technology to facilitate artists to give their gift to the world.”