If you have made it this far, the only thing left to talk about is running the show and loading it out. The challenge to running a show is management. You have to manage your time and plan battery orders and workcalls. You also need to maintain a good relationship with the shop to take care of gear as it breaks. Hopefully your show will run for years and if it does, you will have to deal with monotony and complacency. You will have to find a way to keep the show fresh and not drift from the designer’s vision. Occasionally the designer will stop by and watch your show and note it, but the designer really hopes not to hear from you for a long time. The designer just wants a smooth-running show with no problems. And that is a challenge as the actors get bored and start nitpicking one department after another. Eventually all involved get their turn in the barrel. You also have to find and train a sub, which is an even bigger challenge. When I learned my first Broadway mix, the mixer told me, “I need you to be good at this because I am going on vacation with my family.”
After your show runs for 20 years or a few months, it will be time to take it all down and send it back to the shop and start over on another show. We work in a business where our jobs are transient and we have to keep that in mind as we sit on our little musical. It is important to keep your name out there even when you have a job. And when you see the signs of the ship taking on water, you better call your designer and find out if there is another show out there. Classic signs are when the show cuts the workcalls from every week to every other week or starts printing the Playbill cover in black and white instead of color. Luckily the Broadway Grosses are posted online every week to keep stagehands on edge predicting when their show will close. Will it make it to January or will it close in September? Or the worst option… will it close the week after the Tonys, leaving you out of work for the very, very dry summer?
I hope you found this book an interesting read and I hope it gave you a glimpse into the world of mixing musicals on Broadway. I hope you learned some things that will help you wherever you work, and if you come to New York to work I hope this book gives you a little leg up. It is definitely a different world here. There is a good career to be made in sound, but there is a learning curve to understanding what we do on Broadway. I hope this helps you over the hump. Of course I am sure the first person you meet in New York will tell you everything in this book is wrong and he will be right. Sound is the most changing and unstandardized part of theatre. Every shop has slightly different terminology and every mixer has his method. This book is glimpses of what I have found to be standard and what I have been taught by lots of people. There is no right and wrong in sound as long as it sounds good, and of course that all depends on the ear of the listener.
Finally I want to share some wisdom from my good friend, Jordan Pankin, who mixes Wicked and is an excellent mixer. Whenever the stage manager called “Places” he would look at me and say, “Remember… Places starts with a pee.”