Edna’s fourteen and is head over heels in love with Harry – he’s beautiful, talented, perfect. But he’s also the face of ‘True Connection’, the world’s biggest boy band. And getting his attention will stretch the resources of anyone – even someone as clever and resourceful as Edna.
Yve Blake’s uproarious musical FANGIRLS made its much-anticipated return to Sydney’s York Theatre in the Seymour Centre this month. The show is a Belvoir co-production with Queensland Theatre & Brisbane Festival, in association with Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP).
A show that’s Beyoncé concert-meets religious revival, with a wicked sense of humour, about love and other big feelings in the age of the internet. This is for anyone who’s ever been a fan – especially for anyone who is or has ever been a girl with a screaming stadium of feelings inside.
Michael Waters designed the sound for the original 2018 production as Director Paige Rattray required a sound designer with musical theatre experience.
“No one in the writing/development team had ever done a musical theatre production,” said Michael. “The cast hadn’t been engaged at that point, and even so there were only two who ended up being cast, everyone was new to the discipline, including the producers.”
Michael says that he augmented what was already produced by David Muratore, the music producer and co-sound designer. The show consists of recorded music tracks, and so Michael had to move them around spatially introducing David into the realm of surround sound world.
“Everything up until then was in stereo and sounded brilliant,” he added. “I then had to make the live vocals sit within the mix so it sounded homogenous and not have any disparity between the live content and tracks. So using multisource speaker systems, I was able to separate the tracks to attempt to make it appear there was a band playing, giving some separation and movement to the music. Using some judicious placement of vocal reverbs we were able to glue it all together. I took care of the bulk of the sound effect production and added to what David had already embedded within the music. It was a lot of fun turning the Seymour Centre into a 20,000 seat stadium for the beginning of the second act!”
Michael utilised the inhouse PA at The York saying it required some embellishment as the incumbent configuration didn’t quite cover the bottom or top rows of the seating banks properly. There were five hangs of four deep d&b T10s.
“Given this musical has a lot of very funny, quick-witted dialogue and lyrics (which needs to get over the music with clarity), I added a fifth d&b cabinet on the bottom of each array and re-angled them,” explained Michael. “I also got them to lower the subs which were bolted to the roof and causing uncontrollable coupling harmonics in the ceiling.”
Michael also got four Clair CP-118 subs from JPJ Audio and used that aux as an LFE component for some of the more extreme bass drops in the music, in particular the end of Act 1 and beginning of Act 2 for the concert stadium scene.
For surrounds, they rented in Meyer UPM1-P from AVE. Foldback MM4XPs and Upstage Screen Effects speakers were L’Acoustics 112Ps, from JPJ.
Additional Sennheiser RF systems to supplement Belvoir’s inventory and bolster 16 x SK500 G3 systems, came from Loud and Clear. The cast wears DPA4066 mics, with Edna, the main character, backed up with a DPA4061 attached to the boom. Three Sennheiser e945 are used for handhelds.
QLAB is used extensively. One cue list does Music Tracks, another does Sound Effects. Both cue lists send OSC commands to the lighting desk, and also to the video computer running QLAB extensively for the video screens.
The Musical Director plays live through the show using an Akai midi keyboard and Ableton using instruments created by David Muratore.
Lighting designer Emma Valente says Paige Rattray the director was excited about creating a piece that felt a little too big for the theatre it was in.
“We initially designed the piece for the Billie Brown Theatre at QTC and the upstairs theatre at Belvoir.” She explained. “She wanted the sound, light, set and video to be able to create the excitement of a large stadium show.”
Emma’s design aimed to try and support small intimate performance moments, with musical numbers and a big rock concert feel. There is also an almost cartoonish colour story that tracks through the whole piece. Where Justin Harrison (Video Content Design and Production), David Fleischer (Set, Video Content and Costume Designer) and Emma establish Edna’s colour – a signature pink in the first act, which begins to morph and drain as they move into slightly darker thematics in the second half. The design has less and less colour until they are almost in a black and white aesthetic.
“The biggest challenge was the fact that there was no set architecture,” added Emma. “Spacial dynamics was being created by the furniture and the screens. Usually, I could use the architecture of a set to create depth and to provide different looks. To solve this I worked closely with David and Justin as they produced the video content to ensure the video was helping to provide a backdrop for the piece.
“David and I wanted to create the feeling of a teenagers fantasy as part of the design. We decided on holographic and iridescent as visual motifs. David wanted the feeling of being inside a unicorn vomit. To assist this idea we added practicals (a unicorn lamp, fairy lights and a lava lamp) as part of the set dressing for different scenes and then added LED strip to many of the furniture pieces to give them extra unicorn pop!”
Chameleon provided most of the fixtures in the rig, plus the Seymour Centre standard stock. There were 30 x ETC Source4 LED2LS 25deg-50deg Zooms doing a three-directional general wash on the Seymour Centre thrust stage. Ten Martin MAC Viper Profiles doing key lighting and some low key effects. Ten GLP impression X4s doing backlight, effects and two ere used as footlights. Twelve Molefay Duet Blinders and seven ShowPRO Fusion Bars were added for a Rock Concert feel.
There are around 300 cues in Fan Girls, 50 of which happen in the first four minutes of ACT 2 which is a mini rock concert. Many cues are OSC triggered by the Musical Director who operates QLAB for all the songs and conducts and some are called by the stage manager.
“We opted to not timecode, so each song has a series of follow ons,” said Emma. “I spent a lot of time with the music initially working all of these out and have a pretty impressive excel spreadsheet. The programming always felt like a race against time, as we didn’t have much more programming/ tech time than a normal theatre show, but had heaps more programming to do on the ETC Ion. I’ve had three excellent programmers over the three seasons of the show (Chris Goeldner, Blake Garner and Steve Hendy) who have all worked hard with me to redraft the design each time.”
Emma’s favourite lighting moment of the production is the Beyonce moment in the Banger of Act 1 “Got No Chill”. It’s a full fantasy moment for the protagonist and costume, video, music, lights and fan are all working together to create a pretty brilliant fantasy pop star moment.
Like many of us, Emma is thrilled to be back doing what she loves.
“After being in Melbourne and not working with real live humans for almost 12months it feels spectacular to be back in the theatre, especially doing a piece that’s so energetic and joyful,” she commented. “There was a moment there, where it seemed unlikely that I was going to be able to come, and had to consider the possibility of designing lights on Zoom, which, I imagine would have been pretty depressing.”
Emma does lots of different kinds of things in the theatre, not just lighting design. Currently, she’s working on a show as a dramaturg for Hong Kong festival which is a version of Camus’ The Plague, She’s also designing lights and video for an event called TakeBaCk! and she’s doing a sound design for MTC.
Photos: Brett Boardman
