Taking the Audience Into the Woods
After a decade away, Idina Menzel’s grand return to Broadway comes through the emotional drama Redwood. It’s a musical about a woman grieving the loss of her son. Jesse (Menzel) spontaneously abandons her wife and her life in New York City to escape to the solitude and serenity of the forest in the Redwood National and State Parks in California. There, she encounters two high-climbing forestry employees who teach her about the power of communing with nature as she seeks to heal from her trauma.
Immersive and Impressive
The video and scenic design for Redwood is truly impressive. A curved bank of video screens wraps around the stage (best experienced from the front of the mezzanine) to present urban and forest imagery. There is also the facade of a simulated redwood tree upon which three actors (Menzel, Michael Park, and Khaila Wilcoxon) climb, perch, and rappel. It’s a lot to take in, and sound designer Jonathan Deans, a four-time Tony Award nominee, ensured that his work on the show was equally as immersive and integral as the visual components.
It was a challenge for Deans and his team to place the sound system in and around the projection screens and scenic elements. He implemented a point source system at the orchestra level and line arrays for the mezzanine. Additionally, there is a proscenium-driven sound for the beginning of the show which then transitions into the immersive, multi-channel sound going around the audience throughout the forest scenes which dominate the musical.
Deans also needed to keep the focus on the vocal performances of the actors, “being able to manipulate and move that from song to song, scene to scene,” he says. “And then when you come back into New York City, the flip-flopping of how that’s done is tricky. It takes time and a lot of effort, with little chiropractic adjustments to the sound system as needed. But I have to say that working in collaboration with everyone was a joy.”
He praises the “amazing” Redwood music team which includes Ableton and MainBrain programmer Scott Wasserman, music supervisor Tom Kitt, music director Julie McBride, synth programmer Hiro Iida, and composer Kate Diaz. Dean’s audio team includes programmer Brian Hsieh, A1 mixer Ashton McWhirther, A2 backstage Jamie Tippett, and Mike Tracey for production sound.
The Sound System
The Redwood sound system is mostly comprised of Meyer Sound loudspeakers, including Leopard, LINA 18, Ultra-X20, Ultra-X22, 1100-LFC, 750-LFC, and 900-LFC models. There are also some d&b E5 and Anchor AN-1000X speakers planted amid the Meyer congregation.
“The thing about Meyer Sound is the voicing from one speaker to another is very important,” Deans stresses. “You have to have different size speakers for the location and what you’re trying to do. We actually move sound around the surround so the voicing and the character sound of each loudspeaker needs to be taken into consideration. Meyer Sound has a very neutral sound, so one can create soundscapes easily with the many different sizes and models that we installed in the theater.”
Redwood is being mixed on a DiGiCo Quantum SD7 console, and the microphones are DPAs with Shure transmitters. All five cast members are double miked. The pit musicians are captured with DPA and K&M mics, and the band, even with some robust tom drum sounds, never overwhelms the vocals. The Redwood score is a modern Broadway musical meld — beyond orchestral songs, the musical styles range from R&B to ambient to acoustic blues. Naturally, such genre shifts require proper level adjustments to make it all flow smoothly, which it does.
“It’s very much a song-by-song way to program and mix it,” Deans elaborates. “Our mixer, Ashton McWhirter, mixes song by song, but at the same time the big picture is to remember the overall dynamic and of the production. We have to allow the audience to be taken on a journey. The songs are part of the storytelling, and so even though it may be seen as having different styles, they still have to belong to the book and to the performances.”
The Narrative Journey
Deans says that the opening number “Drive” was the hardest to design because while it’s allowing the audience to enter the story, it immediately drops them into the chaotic world of Jesse who is struggling with loss, grief, and a frayed marriage. “Our main character starts the story having anxiety, panic, and needing to escape, needing to get away,” Deans elaborates. “We see and feel the cacophony of Jess’ current state of mind. It’s one of those very tricky situations of being able to present this and allowing the audience to enter the storytelling.”
While the show has a number of sound effects, they are injected more for atmosphere than strict replication. One of the most striking is when Jesse’s photographer wife Mel (De’Adre Aziza) shoots photos aimed to overlay over forest imagery around the stage. In one scene when Jesse calls Mel, there are city noises in the background, but they soon drift away once location is established. The audience knows where Mel is. And when there is a fire among the redwoods, there is no sound of crackling growing into a blaze.
“We don’t have any fire effects,” Deans notes. “Visually we see an abstraction of fire — being very careful and respectful, especially of the time now with the L.A. disaster. But again, this is a story that has been worked on for many years. It’s the music and lyrics that create the intensity without the need of any fire sound effects.”
Into the Woods
In contrast to the turbulent urban scenes, the sound of the redwood forest permeates Deans’ sound design throughout the show, but at a very subtle level. He spent time among the redwoods to record their actual sounds. “Anytime we’re in the redwoods [onstage] you’re hearing that recording of the redwoods being played just very subliminally,” he explains. “It’s one of those things that if you switch it off you’d go, ‘What happened?’ But you just leave it there where nobody’s aware of it. You don’t think about it too much. You get used to it.
“The lovely thing about redwoods is when you go into the middle of them, the trees themselves, the isolation from the rest of the world — it’s pretty cool to sit there and just listen,” Deans continues. “I just sat there and listened and recorded. I myself had to be far enough away from my recording apparatus so that I wouldn’t hear myself breathe or move. I had to walk away and just leave the recorder.”
Deans was struck most by the sound of silence amid the redwoods. He would just hear the movement of the branches, but not the big ones. “It’s all the little creaks and groans that are just as things are settling, as things are growing, as things are moving, and it’s just a very, very slight movement,” he explains. “There is a slight breeze from time to time that comes in. There are birds that happen here and there. There are little insects that come by, it’s just beautiful and peaceful. You feel life is living and growing.”
Given all of the climbing in the show, and one scene where Menzel glides around the tree and sings (while securely attached to ropes), it would seem that miking the actors might be problematic. It wasn’t. Deans credits how the actors put on their helmets and gear, along with the way that the company Bandaloop, responsible for the vertical movement and choreography, collaborated with the audio team. “Maybe the worst thing is when the carabiners hit each other and you hear the cling,” Deans says.
When the musical moves into the redwoods, the audience becomes enveloped with surround sound through the immersive Meyer system. “That’s what you’re looking for — it just belongs to what they’re seeing and feeling, and in some cases, what the audience expects,” Deans remarks. “When going into the Redwoods, there’s the song called ‘Trees.’ We move the orchestra into the immersive system tying to the visuals, and it’s pretty impactful. Later, we see these actors climbing the tree, and your perspective is tricked between the projection, the actors, and how the music is placed. All of those things fit together really well, so at the end you come out going, ‘Whoa, that was pretty cool.’ But one should not be able to dissect it — tying the experience together creates an overall experience rather than enjoyment of just one design aspect.”
In the end, it was the cooperation of the different departments which lead to the harmonious design elements fueling the audiovisual aspects of Redwood. “The collaboration and understanding and respect for everyone’s work was driven by Tina Landau, our director, who also wrote the book and is a total powerhouse,” Deans declares. “It was an amazing experience to work with her.”
