Modern Broadway develops musicals with Hollywood-like production values, most recently with the adaptation of the hit 1992 horror comedy Death Becomes Her. A fairly faithful retelling of the film, the new Broadway version pushes boundaries of sound and staging in the way that the original incarnation expanded CGI vocabulary. “Nowadays we’ve definitely crossed into cinema,” confirms sound designer Peter Hylenski, a Tony Award winner. “We’re creating these fantastic sound effects sequences.”
This is the tempestuous tale of two middle-aged women (Megan Hilty as famed but fading actress Madeline Ashton, Jennifer Simard as rising literary star Helen Sharp) warring over plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Christopher Sieber), whom the former stole from the latter years earlier. Both ladies have purchased a potion granting them eternal life, but their intense physical confrontations lead to unexpected consequences like a twisted neck and a shotgun hole in the belly. Naturally, such creepy kooky shenanigans lend themselves to a show ripe with rapid-fire one-liners and zany stage combat.
Making it All Happen
Under Hylenski, the audio team includes associate sound designer Dan Miele, production sound engineer Simon Matthews, FOH/A1 Callan Hughes and A2 Stanley Wiercinski. Death Becomes Her runs on a DiGiCo Quantum 7 console with the actors miked with Sennheiser MKE 1 lavs and pushed out via more than 200 speakers, including Meyer Sound Leopard and 900 LFCs (a Hylenski favorite), flanking and residing onstage along with surround sound disbursement throughout the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. Meyer Ultra-X20s and Ultra-X40s are used for delays. “It is a big room,” Hylenski acknowledges, “and it’s got a really long under-balcony, which is always a challenge to make sure we’re delivering the same show in the front as we are in the back.”
The sound designer is juggling a lot — a cast of 20 and a pit of 18 musicians, with the drummer and percussionist residing on the sixth floor, as part of the pit is used for a lift. The show offers great opportunities to play with sound in exciting ways. Of the more than 200 sound cues, some are triggered by MIDI or time code, while around 40 are manually fired by FOH mixer Callan Hughes. Thunder and lightning effects are synched with the lights, most notably during the famous sequence where Sharp is pushed down a staircase, cracks limbs and winds up on the floor with a twisted neck… yet remains alive. The musical version pulls off this famed, gruesome moment with an impressive ballet of slow-motion tumbling, snapping effects and visceral lighting.
“This is the same design team from Moulin Rouge,” Hylenski notes. “Justin Townsend, the lighting designer, is very much into the precision of how the lights align with the musical beats and the hits and being able to pack a lot of specificity and a lot of cues into a short amount of time. When we got to the stair fall, we were really trying to figure out: How do we synchronize all the sounds? How do we make sure it’s the same every night? What is our yardstick? Obviously in musical theater we don’t have a linear timeline like a film, so we create our own version of a timeline by using click tracks which run from an Ableton system in the orchestra pit. The musicians listen to a tempo mapped click, while the system concurrently sends time code to the technical departments. Each department — sound, lighting, and video — synchronize to this code during those points of the show. Lighting also controls the video, the big video wall, and the projectors, so it can all be synchronized.”
The sounds of Ashton’s bones’ snaps and cracks were sourced from different places. Hylenski says that some were pitch-shifted tree branches or twigs; others were manipulated ice cracking sounds. Many were mixed together. When he first started doing sound design for musical theater, sync effects were simpler (such as telephone rings or dog barks) and scripts offered the minimum of information to tell the story. Nowadays, stage shows require more sophisticated and multilayered work.
“One of the things that I learned by studying film and film sound was that often, a sound effect doesn’t need to a be a literal representation,” Hylenski says. “For example, a ‘bone crack sound’ probably isn’t the recording of a bone cracking. It might include the sound of celery snapping to add more drama or more crunch. Your brain then intreprets what it sees combined with what it is hearing, and you take the listener to an almost hyperrealistic world in order to deliver this over-the-top version of these sounds. Even the thunders are manipulated — not just a standard recording of a thunder. Often, we’re either mixing two together, pitch shifting, where I like to take the sounds and maybe add lower octaves with a subharmonic synth, so you can really add depth and dimension. There’s not much in the way of a stock sound that gets played — everything gets touched in some way or another.”
Engaging with the hyperrealistic approach of Death Becomes Her, Hylenski figured out “how to make something fantastical happen out of every sound. It’s a lot of fun.” The show has many different sound effects — a car being driven, punches, shovel hits, gunshots, thunder and lightning and those cracking bones. Many of them were library sources — Hylenski has an extensive collection after all these years — and he freshens them up with new manipulations. He will chop, mix and pitch shift to create what he needs. Sometimes he records his own effects.
Another highlight of the show is the bloodless decapitation that takes place in Act II. It features an interesting audio combination. “There’s definitely a metallic sword sound,” Hylenski explains. “There’s probably a golf swing in there. It may have some whoosh type of effect mixed in too.” Another memorable sound is the metallic “ching” of shovels hitting their mark, be it a human head or another object.
“There has to be a little bit of a cringe factor in there,” he adds. “The reaction that the audience gives is exactly what you’re trying to draw out of them, that collective ‘oh!’ That’s really what you’re going for. So there’s got to be a little squish, a little ‘thud’ kind of thing.”
A big moment Death Becomes Her takes place off-stage when Ashton cocks a shotgun, leaves the mansion, and “shoots” Sharp offstage. Then via the video wall in back, the audience sees an image of the latter flying from upstage right to left, followed by the sounds of trash cans flying, a cat yowling and a car alarm going off. Sharp re-enters center stage with a smoking hole in her dress. It garners a lot of laughs.
“That shotgun scene is a completely blank canvas,” Hylenski says. “The performers leave the stage, and then we take over from there. That type of thing can be rare in a musical theater setting. Generally speaking, the characters are still on stage and you’re trying to add effects. But something like this is really fun because the baton has been handed to you. You have to think about: What is the story we’re telling? What is the pacing? What is the tempo? What is the comedy of how we tell this story through sound?”
While the scene was originally being worked out, the visual of Sharp whizzing across stage was still being generated on video. Everything was being told through sound.
“We’ve got her flying across,” Hylenski says. “What does that sound like? [Then] finding vocalization that matches that, and what happens next? Does she just fall to the ground? We took a moment to think about some comedy. The next thing you hear is a bunch of crashing trash cans, and there’s a cat in there, then a car alarm goes off.” The resolution is the leading lady walking back through the door and turning off her car alarm with the remote.
“That whole sequence is our opportunity to tell that exact story of what happened when they walked off-stage. Obviously, Jen Simard is in the middle of a costume shift, so there’s a lot going on backstage, but we’re telling the story. There are sequences like that that are a lot of fun and that we don’t often get a chance to put together in a musical theater production.”
The moment where Sharp decapitates Ashton required stunt doubles to come onstage and set up the action, ending with a live and “headless” actor onstage, followed by Hilty’s seemingly severed head being wheeled out on a bar tray by Simard. The illusion itself is impressive, and the sound amps up the action. It also offers another spot for Hylenski to be inventive with his sound design.
“Working through all those illusion moments, working through the fact that we don’t hide there are [stunt] doubles, ratchets up the camp, tongue-in-cheek nature of it, and that allows me to take liberty sound-wise,” he says. “I can then push those boundaries, and I can find comedy in the sounds. It absolutely works hand in glove with what’s being delivered on stage.”
Death Becomes Her continues through August 2025 at Broadway’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.
