One of the first shows to re-open to the public anywhere in the world after Covid19 struck, Magic Mike Live Australia is held at its own custom-built, portable Australian venue – the world’s largest purpose-built Spiegeltent named The Arcadia because it’s like a ‘modern-day Eden’.
Since 2019, the Magic Mike team has been designing and building The Arcadia with the legendary 100-year-old, Belgian tent building family at Het Spiegelpaleis in Belgium, who have been building tents for close to a century.
In February, everything was ready to go for a May premiere in Melbourne. The cast and crew travelled to the small village of Oostmalle, Belgium, to put the finishing touches on The Arcadia and rehearse. They even put on two invite-only performances for the locals as word spread about town.
The Arcadia was sailing the high seas when the pandemic hit and the company had to deal with 28 marooned sea containers in Australia while also furloughing shows in London and Berlin and managing construction on a new venue in Las Vegas.
Fast forward a few months and the cast and crew finally arrived in Australia where they spent two weeks in mandatory hotel quarantine before jumping into rehearsals in late November. A dance school in Sydney was utilised for rehearsals so no time was wasted whilst the Spiegeltent was being constructed at Sydney’s Moore Park. Rehearsal audio systems were prepped and built by JPJ Audio who duplicated the front end of the system, with a smaller loudspeaker package, which meant Sound Designer Nick Kourtides could work with the dancer/musicians on all their IEMs, tracks and stems, with everything in continuity but for the house PA. Audio for the actual show was supplied by London-based Orbital Sound Ltd.
The Spiegeltent is a sight to behold; the signature element of the two-story glass facade is a metal heart that has hundreds of arrows embedded in it and a glass lobby that pours out onto a stunning, heated terrace where guests can come early and enjoy a drink or two.
Dual spiral staircases flank the entrance to this unique performance venue which is one of the most spectacular, in-the-round performance spaces you’ll ever see. The 600-seat, two-story venue features a stage in the middle of the room surrounded by plush couches, easy chairs and elegant cafe tables that supplement the traditional theatre seating.
There are repel points throughout the structure so you never know where a performer will land, a rotating, custom-built piano that sits atop an elegant grand staircase, and a stunning two-storey bar.
The majority of the creative team worked on the original Las Vegas production as well as the London and Berlin shows. Speak to any member of this team and they will tell you that they work in tandem and parallel with each other to design the show.
Other venues that host this show are immediately limited by their ceiling heights; but with a custom-built venue, the sky was the limit – excuse the pun – and this enabled Kourtides to use full-size line arrays for the first time.
“That delivered a potentially even better experience than our other shows,” he revealed. “In Sydney, we have eight clusters of d&b audiotechnik T10 arrays, most of which are eight boxes deep, so there is a lot of directivity. Utilizing d&b’s Array Processing and ample fills to cover obstructions, as well as a surround system, we achieve +/- 2 dB wherever there is an audience member. The directivity of the line arrays is not just helpful for intelligibility, it also means we can contain our noise footprint to within the tent. That is very important towards both compliance with Australian outdoor noise regulations and being good long term neighbours on our sites.”
Ten additional single T10s are deployed as vertical point source delays on the tent poles themselves. This provides extremely narrow coverage – no more than a seat or two wide, where the poles themselves are an audible obstruction to the clusters for those patrons.
Nick comments that his biggest headache is ensuring there is enough low-end energy in the room to make sense in scale with the choreography, whilst not presenting too much of that sub-bass footprint to the surrounding outdoor aprons.
“We deployed essentially two discrete subwoofer “arrays”; embedded in the stage are six d&b JSubs arranged essentially in an out-firing rectangle and then in the crossover circle behind the last row of the stalls, are 24 VSubs arranged as 12 stacks of two, in-firing. The JSubs are in Infra mode, which begins to limit their output above about 50hz. We use the additional filtering in the d&b DS100 to high-pass and delay the VSubs so they align with the other speakers, but essentially don’t share a frequency range with the JSubs, so they barely interact. We get broadly even coverage between 30-100hz in the tent, but leverage the inherently directional subwoofers to gain significant attenuation in all directions outside.”
It’s a dialogue-driven show so from an acoustic perspective it was necessary to ensure the audience received clear vocals in a really generous way. Some bulk of the audience will spend an amount of time with the show not being presented right towards them, and during Covid-19 there is necessarily less physical interaction as well.
“Consequently in d&b’s ArrayCalc, we model every inch of the space to make sure the system over-delivers everywhere,” Nick added. “In the round, we obviously need 360° of coverage, and we aim that every member of the audience hears the sound from basically the same direction as the source. Though we’re deploying a system design that is from the centre of the room outwards, we also can use the surrounds to pull focus towards the dancers as they play around the room.”
A clear and intelligible dialogue had to always be understood above the noise of the crowd (and it does get noisy!) and the music when necessary, without blunting the level of the songs or the energy of the show.
“The mix has to always feel like the show is a bit in your face, but it’s never painful, with an arc of dynamic throughout the evening. We move between a dialogue with un-amplified audience members to high energy 10-minute medleys,” explained Nick.
The control and processing package is kept consistent between the different shows globally, with DiGiCo the console of choice. In Australia, a DiGiCo SD10T with tracking backup is used and Nick says it is nearly full.
“That surprises a lot of technical people, but half the console is taken up with the live musicians consisting of two vocalists, a piano, full drum kit, an acoustic guitar and all associated with that. The rest of the night, the mix maybe only two or three faders, but what you’re doing is quite tricky – to match the levels of delivery and the audience, handle sound effects, and playback that spans underscore to full-on club tracks. I think some of our operators think that they are signing up for a track show with a couple of mics, but are pleasantly surprised at the challenge that blends concert levels and theatrical sensibilties!
“The matrix to deliver that into the PA is a bit unusual. I take stem mixes out of the SD10 into the DS100, which handles delay matrixing, alignment, and EQ of the 170 loudspeakers in the tent. I use the DS100, instead of as a more typical Soundscape spacialiazation engine, but simply as a time- and cost-effective way of handling a 64 x 64 delay- and processing matrix for all the stems and loudspeakers.”
With the noise that the crowd can make and the fact that the performers are all over the room, custom mould IEMs were a must for the musicians. Microphones are a combination of Sennheiser capsules and Shure Axient as they both provide the quality and reliability essential to the show.
“The Spiegeltent version of the show, even with the Covid restrictions, is some of our strongest work in the global portfolio,” concluded Nick. “We believe it’s one of the best places to see the show in the world and it really does sound great. The acoustic environment of a tent full of people and a soft roof, plus the work done with relatively, by theatrical standards, long line arrays delivered dry and intelligible signal. We’re actually using some of the DS100’s reverberation engine on some of the playback music because it did feel too dry in the tent! Every woman in our audience needs to see and hear a bit of themselves in our MCs, and I’m really proud of our team and this rig to help deliver that experience.”
Magic Mike Live Australia is scheduled for a six-month run in Sydney, before moving to Melbourne in June 2021.
Sound Design: Nick Kourtides
Associate Sound Design: Martin Carrillo, Brendan Aanes
Production Engineering: Keifer Spencer, Dan Bailey, Dan Headlam
UK #1: Jamie Ford
Australia #1: Evan Drill
Australia #2: Tracy Leong
Sydney Additional Engineer: Geoff Reid
Audio systems provided by: Orbital Sound Ltd.
Rehearsal audio systems provided by: JPJ Audio
