Just Add Sound
I took a little break from producer duties (which mostly entails reading emails, writing emails, submitting paperwork) to head over to rehearsals this weekend. Our composer/sound designer Cliff Caruthers brought in some soundscapes and live microphones for the actors to play with.
Microphones? The designers and director Rob Melrose took the concept of a radio play as the jumping off point (after all, we did produce two podcasts of The Creature in the past several years). But don’t expect live foley and all that stuff. We’re after a presentational look. It’s kind of hard to explain: it’s not quite a radio play, it’s not Word for Word, but it’s not full-out realism (we haven’t built a ship stuck in the ice). But the microphones are suggestive of a radio play. Tony Kelly, who runs the Thick House (our venue) jokes that no one has rigged the place more for sound than Cliff. We’re most likely going to end up with a sound table in the house.
The microphones are amazing. Captain Walton (Garth Petal) uses them to read his letters, and they’re so engaging. Some of the hanging microphones echo, so when Victor Frankenstein (Gabriel Marin) calls out to captain Walton from his sled on the ice, it’s haunting. And of course some of the Creature’s (James Carpenter) lines are just creepy. All the microphones really add lots of layers to the text, lots of dimensions–and Cliff is such a wizard.
His original soundscapes and effects are just as haunting. It’s always difficult to bring in sound and music to rehearsal for the first time, especially this early, when it throws the actors a little bit. As with all shows, the actors just have to get used to it–it’s all part of the rehearsal process. and these guys are pros, so they’ll get it, and when it works, it really rocks.
