Ever wondered which microphone you should use if you’re slapping it with your penis to make a beat? Yes? Well, read on ….
Blanc de Blanc, the show that sold out at the Sydney Opera House finally makes its return to Sydney, this time at a fabulous new Strut & Fret venue on the edge of Surry Hills called Grand Electric.
The Production Manager and Show Operator for the show is Cat Neufeld, a freelance technical manager, lighting technician and occasional lighting designer. London-born and Edinburgh-based, Cat works with clients all over the world.
Set Construction led by Stagekings.
“When we first got to the theatre last October, it was fairly dilapidated and essentially an empty room, apart from the existing proscenium and built-in stage which the Blanc set currently sits in front of,” revealed Cat. “The echo and slap-back in the room were unreal; you could clap in the centre of the room and still hear it almost three seconds later. Happily, a lot of our venue restoration and resulting additions solved this problem just by putting more objects in the room to absorb sound.
“We put in a custom steel mezzanine for VIP seating against the downstage wall, installed cocktail bars, and crucially hung some beautiful green drapes along the ceiling from the upstage wall to downstage. James Browne, our venue designer, did a perfect job, and happily, that worked out well for audio too. Most Strut & Fret productions are usually hosted in touring Spiegeltent venues, including this show (we’re in the Magic Mirrors tent in Auckland right now), so I believe James wanted to add a nod to the stunning velvet drapery that is found on the ceilings of those tents and bring it into our space. We’re also in a residential area in Sydney, so we’ve been careful to add plenty of padding to the base of our under-stage sub and EQ all our tracks so as not to shake the windows out of their houses!”
Strut & Fret, the independent production company that creates shows like Blanc, have been a client of Cats for years. She spent five months a year touring as the lighting operator for the original Blanc de Blanc, which she was actually on tour with in Tasmania when the pandemic hit in March 2020.
“I’ve been wanting to come back ever since, and our director Scott Maidment found out that I’ve been doing more production management overseas, so it made total sense to assign me to Encore (a new show evolved from the original) as both PM and show operator for my Australian return,” she explained. “We’ve also just refurbished and opened our first permanent theatre space, the Grand Electric in Surry Hills, so I’ve been production managing that, with Encore being the perfect show to launch the space. Pre-production was uniquely interesting because it involved both making permanent decisions for a venue that will host many different types of productions in the future and making decisions to suit this specific show for a few months (and when it returns in the future).”
Cat says that their Sydney season is a little different to life on tour. She usually arrives about 2-3 hours before the show to power on the PA and lighting in the venue’s courtyard, which opens for drinks 1.5 hours before the show. Then she powers up the theatre, does presets and soundchecks with the company manager, and then they open the house an hour before the show.
“I op the show (including sound on this occasion as it’s very straightforward), and then we hang around until the bar closes so we can power down,” she added. “I then head home or chill in the venue doing production paperwork for a few hours; this year it’s an international tour involving New Zealand, so there’s a lot more admin than if we’re just doing Australian festivals. Sometimes we have double show days at the weekends, and we’ve managed to get the quick turnaround between shows down to fine art with the help of our FOH team.”
The show’s original lighting designer is Philip Gladwell and the lighting is a crucial part of the show’s appeal. Jess Mews’ fantastic hoops act is the newest one in the show, coming in a couple of months ago, and Cat designed the lighting for that, using a previous act’s state as a base.
“Her facial expressions are key to her character, so I put in just enough front light to highlight her features and then based the rest of the design on circle gobos to match the hoops, which are metallic silver and reflect light fantastically when moving at high speed and flying through the audience,” she explained. “There are some colour changes and bass drops to match the track and make things dynamic.”
The rig in the Grand Electric is comprised of mostly ETC Series 2 Lustrs, Robe Spiiders and Martin MAC Quantum Profiles. Every fixture is used very efficiently, with lots of deliberate live moves and strategically placed spotlights in the darkness for both comic and dramatic effects. A good example of a comic effect is during a spotlight-based number when the spot swings from a performer to the company manager, who’s standing in an aisle pretending to text on their phone. They look up in pretend shock, appear to consider the situation, and then break into dance for a few seconds to loud cheers from the audience, before the spot swings to the next performer. This show is the perfect balance of comedy and unbelievable circus skill, and the lighting helps to define this. Currently, the lighting rig is hired from both Chameleon Touring Systems and Forefront Productions.
“This show has had the same relighter, Ben Neucom, since its Sydney Opera House premiere a few years ago, so updating the showfile has been wonderfully straightforward,” commented Cat. “I’m also an ETC/Eos programmer, so can make mid-season edits as and when they’re needed. About half of the numbers in the show are timecoded, particularly the spotlight sections and the dance numbers that have too many cues for a human operator to reliably trigger, and the other half are manually fired cues. These include newer acts and anything involving aerials, vamps, particularly dangerous stunts or the winch, as manual control is much safer and more adaptable.”
Relighting takes a while as there are so many specific spots and effects, but given they mostly have the same rig every time they change location, it’s a fairly well-rehearsed process.
“The cast is wonderful too, and once we program their spotlight they pretty much always find it, which as we know is a beautiful, rare thing!” laughed Cat. “The initial installation of the Sydney set had its pluses and minuses; it was brand new and custom-built for the venue, with Sam Hopkins doing a magnificent job on the bubble LEDs, but also required shipping a couple of hundred RGBW programmable lightbulb-style DFS3000 lamps from Glasson Electronics in the UK, as well as importing some materials from the USA. It was quite something to orchestrate, but I’m sure you’ll agree that the outcome is more than worth it.”
A permanent Nexo system was purchased for Grand Electric, as it was perfect for their budget, sounds fantastic, and has a minimal footprint. Some of Strut & Fret’s other shows that will likely do residencies at Grand Electric in the future have very tall set pieces, so not having a massive line array blocking both those and the beautiful gold proscenium arch has been a massive bonus.
The flown boxes (2x Nexo P15 point source speakers) are light enough to be slid along the venue’s lighting bars to accommodate deeper or shallower sets in the future, while the 2x Nexo P8s for delays in the mezzanine area can remain in place. There’s also a Nexo L18 sub under the main Encore stage, which produces superb sound for their generally bass-heavy show soundtrack. As a 50kg box, it’s quite helpful for weighing down the set braces too!
Buzz Speaker Hire sold them the PA, amps, 4x stage wedges, multicore and Behringer X32 for, according to Cat, a great price, and was unbelievably patient and efficient when installing it for them. They’re also currently hiring their wireless microphones and IEMs from them and will remain happy clients for a long time.
“We usually use a Behringer X32 but can adapt to Yamaha, DiGiCo etc depending on where we are and if we’re fitting into another venue’s existing setup,” added Cat. “It wasn’t my idea or programming, but the audio setup is pretty clever. We run most of the show from QLab, using MIDI triggers to lighting and show control commands to sound. This means that the four singing numbers in the show can all have their own scenes, which can be triggered/loaded automatically when the track is started on QLab or the previous act finishes, for example. Most of the mics are muted and unmuted automatically in the same way, as are the singer’s IEMs, so apart from some live mixing, the idea is that the sound operator doesn’t need to touch the console much. As an operator with a heavy lighting bias and a lot of manual cues, this is perfect for me!”
The hosts use two hired wireless headset mics, and the singer has IEMs that she wears for three out of the four live singing numbers. Then they have their own Shure SM58 for beatboxing purchased because it’s dropped from full standing height at the end of the number, so the grille gets a bit bent. The wireless headsets always have to be double-eared and remain in place without tape, as the hosts do cartwheels and other acrobatics while wearing them and also take them on and off very quickly throughout the show. Cat gets in a sound engineer to ring out the mics at the start of each season, as the hosts are directly in front of the PA throughout most of the show.
Now to the big question …. was the performer really slapping his ‘appendage’ against a mic and if so please elaborate as to which mic won this honour and why?!!
“Ha, I can confirm that what you saw was no illusion! I chose the AKG P170 condenser to pick up the slapping sound, as it’s suited to higher tones,” said Cat. “As this mic is used in an…intimate…place, I figured it made sense to buy our own for that too. The performer is very skilled at positioning himself in a way that he can be as close as possible to the mic without hitting it directly. If anyone reading this wants to experience what we’re talking about, you’ve got three weeks to check us out in April!”
www.blancshow.com
https://www.strutnfret.com/grand-electric/
https://www.catneufeldtech.com/
