Live theatre returned to Melbourne during November’s Melbourne Fringe with the doors of Ormond Hall swinging open for a hilarious, outrageous and first-show-post-lockdown live variety event, hosted by the infamous Reuben Kaye.
100 people in a room (safely distanced with contact tracing, of course) sat back and soaked up the atmosphere as they enjoyed the first live show in six months …. in classic, late-night-Fringe style. This was Midnight Mess.
Despite it being an older venue and not having a few hundred bodies to absorb audio reflections, Ormond Hall has one of the best sounding heritage spaces to mix in, according to Paul Muller of ALV Group who looked after the audio for the event.
Reuben Kaye is the consummate professional and knows exactly what he’s looking for – big, bold, clean audio with just a touch of reverb to set off his huge vocals and dynamic range. If you’ve not had the opportunity to listen to Reuben, you really need to, but you might want to leave the kids at home or at least be prepared to explain a few jokes on the drive home!
Paul decided that a d&b audiotechnik PA system would be best for this gig saying, “To understand the choice we made it probably helps to know that the whole gig was planned and executed in under five days – with less than six hours for bump-in plus set up sound and lighting. Then we only had one rehearsal for a show that was going to be recorded by the news media as well as Museum Victoria as part of the State’s historical record. Consequently, the show needed to be perfect as we weren’t going to get a second chance to tweak it. That’s one of the reasons why we recommend d&b audiotechnik for both our touring and install work, the integrated workflow and the consistent tonality.”
Given the setup needed to be quick and the team were not going to have time to hang a small line-array, which would have been their first choice, they designed and simulated a left-right point source setup with lip-fill for front row coverage.
“Our simulations validated that choice of d&b audiotechnik Y-Series Y7P point source mid-high cabinets, on top of Y-Series B6-Subs deployed in a traditional left-right configuration,” explained Paul. “The Y7Ps are an amazing speaker, crisp clean high end and a punchy mid-range with a dipole design that provides incredibly even coverage in a deceptively small box, but just to make sure, we deployed two E8 lip-fill speakers across the front of the stage to give us confidence that the front rows were going to get a consistent experience. The stage fold-back were 3x M4 wedges.”
All of this was run from two D80 amplifiers utilising d&b’s R1 software to ensure the whole audience had the best seat in the house.
With all that, the PA was ready for soundcheck in under an hour from the time of arrival, allowing the crew to focus on RF, lighting and control. Control was a DiGiCo SD11 on sound, Hog 3 for lighting and QLab for AV integration.
“Remember that we’d not seen or rehearsed any of the six acts beforehand,” added Paul. “We had singers, comedians and theatrical acts each with a range of cues from the simple to the complex. We needed to be prepared for any request, so flexibility was critical as was speed and reliability. Both the DiGiCo and the Hog 3 enabled our teams to program a sound or a look quickly and QLab helped us ensure the whole setup was bulletproof end to end.”
Will Stuart was on lighting and collaborated with each artist on cues and looks for each part of their act – some were pretty straight forward, others needed four to five lighting and sound cues, depending on the performance.
“The most challenging thing was ensuring that the dynamics of each performer were consistent as we moved between different genres and styles – other than that it was being ready for anything!” added FOH engineer Dan Hawes who also ran monitors using the same DiGiCo system. “With a mix of vocal, comedy and theatrical performance, we went with Sennheiser EW100 series with SE Electronics MC2 V7 capsules for Reuben and the other singing act on the night with e845 capsules for the comedy acts and Shure SM58s for all wired microphones needed on the night.”
Of course, in addition to all the usual concerns and choices when it comes to mics, with COVID you now also have the issue of health and safety. In the case of Midnight Mess, ALV chose to supply unique mics for each artist in addition to having a stagehand cleaning them between each performance to ensure that if there was a mix-up the safety of the artists and the crew would be protected.
Fold-back wedges were used as there were so many artists in such a short period (an hour for the whole show) and their COVID plan required separate mics and packs for everyone, IEMs would have introduced health and technical risks without much gain.
Managing social distancing of artists and crew was a major challenge. Wearing a mask while you’re trying to bump in and operate a show, cleaning mics, mic stands, anything you touch really – all was a big task. COVID has changed everything for our industry in 2020 and that night was a reminder of just how much.
“To judge by the reacting on the night, the show was a raging success. It’s hard to express how great it felt to have been part of the first public indoor gig in Victoria – making history – but we’d be lying if I said there weren’t more than a few nerves,” concluded Paul. “But for us, the highlight was putting people back to work. People who love creating an audience experience – it sounds cheesy but anyone who’s in this industry knows that we do it for the crowd, we do it for the artists. Putting on Midnight Mess gave us all hope that our industry will be able to get back to doing that again regularly before too long.”
