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There is an old Latin saying, “nanos gigantium humeris insidentes,” which translates to “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants.” Of course, this has become a Western metaphor meaning someone who develops future intellectual pursuits by understanding the research and works created by notable thinkers of the past. In the world of theatrical sound, and especially theatrical mixing, this metaphor could not be more accurate. We are all dwarfs climbing up inch by inch to reach the shoulders of those who came before us. Hopefully, when we get there we add something to the field so it continues to evolve and grow. The difference between the mythological origins of this statement and theatrical sound is that some of our giants are still walking among us. Our field is so young that we have the advantage of being able to see the creation and growth and hopefully some of the future of this trade. In order to attain the majestic views from atop the shoulders of these pioneers, we need to look back at where we came from.
One brisk morning I found myself loading-in to a theatre in Macon, Georgia for a one-nighter. It was a beautiful old theatre and the crew was very proud to talk about its history. (The theatre even sold a coffee table book about the history of southern vaudeville houses, which I purchased and slowly checked the theatres off as I visited them.) The crew enjoyed showing off their trapdoors that were cut specifically for Houdini. As a touring stagehand I was fascinated by the thought of people touring in the 1920s, and that someone had to advance the theatre and tell them where to cut the trapdoors.
In the afternoon, once the show was loaded-in, the house carpenter told us there was a haunted tour of the theatre and asked if we would like to take the tour. Who could resist? So the house crew scattered and we were led through the theatre by the house carpenter. Every once in a while a house stagehand would pop out of a wall through a secret door, or a hand would creep out of a secret hole and grab a shoulder. It was great fun. The final stop on the tour was the thunderclap room.
We entered a large eerie space (Lights 235 and Sound 110 – Go). It was directly above the seating chamber of the theatre. The house carpenter pointed out a red splotchy outline of a body on the wall. Apparently, decades earlier someone who worked for the theatre had committed suicide in this room and his rotting, dead body baked in the sweltering summer heat of Georgia until it swelled up and exploded, leaving a permanent stain on the wall. They had to remove a wall and use a crane to remove the remains. It was horribly sad and extremely gruesome, and a dramatic ending to the haunted tour. It was explained to us that this was the thunderclap room where stagehands used to create sound effects for the plays. Of course the most common sound was banging a piece of sheet metal to create a thunderclap, which was amplified by the space of the room and forced out of the tiny opening that pointed down at the audience. It was amazing. We were standing in an acoustic speaker, and it showed me how far sound had come in a short time.
Theatrical sound was all foley in the beginning. Foley is the art of making sound effects live with objects. It is a very honest way of adding sound to a play and it is still used today on stage and screen. There are times when someone standing offstage slamming a door sounds infinitely better than any recorded sound of a door slam coming from a speaker offstage. Live gunshots are always better. Doorbells and phone rings…definitely better. But there are limits. If you need an airplane to fly by, it is a little impractical to actually fly a plane through the theatre, so it was inevitable that recorded sounds would become essential to theatrical sound. The first production credited with using a recorded sound cue, as cited by Bertolt Brecht in Belgium, was a play by Tolstoy about Rasputin in 1927, directed by Erwin Piscator. Piscator was a Dadaist and he really pushed the envelope of the technical elements in theatre. In this case he needed a sound effect that included a recording of Vladimir Lenin’s voice. From this humble Dadaist, Socialist beginning, recorded sound became a part of theatre, although it wouldn’t take hold in mainstream commercial Broadway theatre for another couple of decades.
Recorded sound cues slowly crept onto the stage, but it wasn’t until the 1950s, when movie directors began directing stage plays, that recorded sound cues became more the norm. There were some who took notice of the imminent rise of sound in theatre and established themselves at the forefront of the movement. Masque Sound is a rental shop that specializes in Broadway theatre. Three Broadway stagehands started Masque Sound in 1936 when they purchased a small record label and began to produce sound effects records and rent sound equipment to Broadway shows. In the early 1950s, Masque Sound was the first company to adopt tape technology for the theatre. Since then, Masque Sound has expanded along with the growth of the theatrical sound industry. Sound Associates is another sound rental shop that was there at the beginning. Sound Associates began in 1946 and has grown as well to be one of the major players in theatrical sound for touring and Broadway.
Even though shows were starting to use recorded sounds and people were creating the cues for the shows, at that time there was no sound designer position in theatre. The first person known to have received a credit as sound designer on the poster and in the program alongside the lighting and scene designers was David Collison, at London’s Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith in 1959. Mr. Collison started in theatre as a stage manager and went on to become a very successful mixer and designer. The first person credited as a sound designer on a Broadway show was Jack Mann for Show Girl in 1961. Jack Mann started out in theatre as a performer. He was the Master of Ceremonies in The Green Pastures in 1935. He transitioned over to sound in the 1960s and designed classic musicals such as Company, A Little Night Music, Follies, Sweeney Todd, and West Side Story. It wasn’t until 1968 that a regional theatre gave Dan Dugan sound design credit at the American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) in San Francisco, and with that it seems sound finally had a legitimate place in theatre.
Theatrical sound was something very different back then than what we are used to now. Abe Jacob, who is considered the godfather of theatrical sound, was interviewed in September, 2000 by David Johnson in Live Design magazine:
Theatre sound design at the time was handled by the show electrician and stage manager. For the most part it was merely a matter of putting in the dressing-room page system and five mics across the front of the stage. The stage manager would tell the electrician, who was hired to put the board in, that this is the mark you put the knobs at, and when the director’s in the house, you put them up or down a little bit—and that was sound. Now certainly there were individual performers prior to that time who wore wireless mics, so that was another thing that was turned on and off when the star was onstage, but again it was brought up to a mark and left.
(You can read the full interview online at http://livedesignonline.com/mag/show_business_abe_jacob/)
Mary MacGregor, a Broadway sound person who has been working on Broadway for the past 30 plus years remembers what it was like to work sound on Broadway in the early 1970s:
Sometimes all we would need to do was hang a shotgun mic on the first electric. That mic would feed the dressing room system and the front of house. I remember having to ask for a place on the pipe and a separate pick point for my cable so it wouldn’t buzz and the head electrician was so annoyed that he couldn’t bundle my cable in with his. We were only hanging one mic and we were already in the way. They didn’t know what was coming next.
Abe Jacob marks a very distinct change in theatrical sound. He got his start in San Francisco mixing sound for such 60s rock stars as Jimi Hendrix, The Mamas and the Papas, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. He also designed the sound system for the Monterey Pop Festival, among other things. He became involved with theatrical sound in the early 1970s when he worked on a production of Hair outside of New York. As we all know, Hair is more of a modern rock musical than a show like Show Boat. It is a completely different sensibility and one that requires more skill and dedication to the mix than an electrician sitting backstage setting recorded levels can give a show.
Mr. Jacob explains how he started in theatre in the 2000 Live Design interview:
It was easy, because no one else was doing it. Before theatre, I was doing a lot of concert sound. The whole idea was that I was doing concert sound and then started doing theatrical work on the West Coast, and through that got involved with other productions of Hair that happened outside of New York. And I ended up in New York at the time of the previews of Jesus Christ Superstar, when they had some sound problems as well as other technical problems. I happened to be at the theatre at one of the cancelled performances and re-ran into Tom O’Horgan, whom I’d worked with on one of the Hair companies outside New York, and he said, could you help? I was in town for a few days and did, and I guess I’ve been here ever since. That was early 1970. And word just got around. We did Superstar, and it worked, and from that point on, various management offices would get in touch with me. I was actually planning to move to New York because I was going to manage Electric Lady Studios, Jimi Hendrix’s recording studio down in the Village. That was the secure job that I had to come here to so I could live, and then theatre was on top of that. But that lasted about six months and the theatre became much more lucrative.
At that time there was no position for a sound operator, but that was about to change. Mr. Jacob explains:
I brought in some people who had mixed concerts with me to run the shows now that we had the opportunity to design. And the things I insisted on were that the operator, since he’s running the show, needs to be in the audience where he can hear what the audience is hearing and away from backstage next to the dimmer boards. That meant another person to do it, and so that’s how the sound operator got to be a part of the crew. And it established sound design as a credit on the title page. I suppose the first big musical we did from scratch, where I was hired before they went into rehearsal, was Pippin (directed) by Bob Fosse. And then it just seemed to go on from there. I was fortunate in that I was able to work with directors who shaped the American musical theatre in the early 70s through the 80s—Michael Bennett on Seesaw and A Chorus Line, Bob Fosse on Pippin, Chicago, and Big Deal, and Gower Champion on Mack and Mabel and Rockabye Hamlet.
Even though directors and producers had warmed up to the idea of sound as an important part of theatre as well as the need for a designer and an operator, the critics were not so swayed. According to Mr. Jacob, “It was almost immediate that critics started making comments about the sound in the theatre, and that it was going to bring about the death of the American musical as we knew it.” Mr. Jacob believes that one reason sound started to become accepted by audiences, though, was because of the invention of the Sony Walkman®, which changed the way individuals listened to music and changed what they expected to hear in a live show. With the invention of the Walkman came the ability for people to walk around listening to music through lightweight headphones, which heightened the listening experience and increased their awareness of the quality of the sound they were listening to. Not only that, but movie sound began to improve and raised the bar for what people expected to hear. As their awareness of sound quality increased, so did their expectations for live performances. Now it was up to the theatre to live up to these expectations.
Abe Jacob is considered so important to theatrical sound for several reasons. He brought studio and rock concert techniques to the theatre. He helped solidify the sound designer position as well as the sound operator position, and he helped carve out a mix position for us to work. His resume is incredibly impressive. He designed Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar, Beatlemania, the original The Rocky Horror Show, A Chorus Line, and Cats. Mr. Jacob also hired a string of mixers who themselves became the next wave of Broadway sound designers, including Otts Munderloh, Tony Meola, Steve Canyon Kennedy, Jon Weston, Lew Mead, Duncan Edwards, and Kurt Fisher. Abe Jacob is to theatrical sound what Paul Erdös is to mathematics. Erdös is considered to be so influential to math that mathematicians have what they call an Erdös number, which indicates how many degrees from Erdös you are. If you published a paper with him you are a 1, if you published with someone who published with him you are a 2, and so on. Theatrical sound should have a Jacob number for mixers. (Since I have mixed for several of Mr. Jacob’s mixers, that would make me a second generation, or a 2.)