On Your Feet - Meyer Sound

January 2016
www.lightingandsoundamerica.com
$10.00
On Your Feet!
Broadway celebrates
Emilio and Gloria Estefan
ALSO:
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Stephen Colbert
Princess Cruises’
Magic to Do
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High End Systems
SolaWash Pro 2000
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America January 2016
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GetYou
How its design team keeps
On Your Feet! light on its feet
By: David Barbour
T
Photo:s: Matthew Murphy
thm
RhisyGonna
he first post-Hamilton hit of the Broadway
season is, interestingly, another tale of
immigrant success: On Your Feet!, subtitled
“The Story of Emilio and Gloria Estefan” is a
show-business bio musical in the tradition of Jersey
Boys and Beautiful: The Carole King Musical. But
unlike those shows, which follow a trajectory of
youthful enthusiasm followed by disillusionment in
the corridors of the music industry, On Your Feet!,
which opened at the Marquis Theatre in November,
is a remarkably appealing success story featuring
two talented, hard-working protagonists who help
change the face of pop music in their adoptive
country. As recounted in Alexander Dinelaris’ book,
young Gloria Fajardo and Emilio Estefan, both
Cuban-born, meet in Miami. He has a group called
the Miami Latin Boys and is looking for a female
singer. Recognizing her deep-seated ambitions as
well as her shyness, Gloria’s grandmother pushes
her to audition. Soon, Gloria is the featured
vocalist, she and Emilio are in love, and the band,
renamed Miami Sound Machine, is a smash hit.
The action of On Your Feet! follows the band’s
struggle to cross over from the Latino market
against the advice of hidebound recording
company executives who don’t want to risk Miami
Sound Machine’s already lucrative prospects, while
Gloria must contend with her disapproving mother,
a father afflicted with multiple sclerosis, and her
own insecurities. Through it all, the Estefans’ rocksolid marriage keeps them strong, even when
Gloria is critically hurt in a bus accident while on
tour, an event that threatens to end her career.
On Your Feet! benefits from its likeable
characters, inspirational story, and well-timed
undertone of immigrant pride. (It helps that Ana
Villafañe and Josh Segarra give effortlessly charismatic performances in the lead roles.) The
musical’s most reliable applause line comes when
Emilio, fed up with a recalcitrant music industry
suit who sees Miami Sound Machine as an ethnic
act only, grabs the fellow by the lapels and says,
“This is what an American looks like!”
And, of course, if doesn’t hurt to have a score
consisting of such indelible, infectious pop hits—
like “1-2-3.” “Here We Are,” “Get on Your Feet,” “If
I Never Got to Tell You,” “Rhythm is Gonna Get
You,” and, of course, “Conga”—to drive your story.
Unusually, many of the numbers work surprisingly
well as book numbers, helping to elucidate the
characters and move the story along.
And does On Your Feet! ever move: The
director, Jerry Mitchell, is a past master at giving
musicals a headlong pace and cinematic fluidity,
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Dancers in front of the on-stage bandstand, which moves up and downstage as needed.
and here he is aided by the driving choreography of Sergio
Trujillo. Working with a familiar team of designers, Mitchell
has come up with a production that serves the needs of
intimate book scenes and splashy concert sequences, and
which moves across time and space with the speed of a
bullet train.
Scenery
On Your Feet! begins with a bang: Kenneth Posner’s
lighting ballyhoos the house, followed by a blinder cue,
and the Kabuki curtain in front of the stage vanishes in a
flash, landing us in the middle of a Gloria Estefan concert,
the star backed by a glittering bandstand. It’s exactly the
kind of visual surprise one has come to expect from set
designer David Rockwell.
“Jerry wanted an instant magic trick to open the show,”
Rockwell says. “For example, in Legally Blonde [on
Broadway in 2007], we had the exterior of the sorority
house, which irised open. The time around, we went for
something more propulsive: The fabric rips apart and
disappears, and, suddenly, the music is right there, in your
face. It’s something we’ve never done before.”
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The effect is something of a thesis statement, Rockwell
says: “A few things were sacred to Jerry. One was the
sound; we worked with Gloria, Emilio, and the Miami Sound
Machine team to figure how to present the sound physically
and what that would look like. We also looked at Gloria’s
tours to get a sense of that period in concert touring. The
show is framed by concerts.” (It begins at one of Gloria’s
concert gigs, then flashes back, ending with her comeback
appearance, after the accident, at the American Music
Awards; the final megamix sequence is reminiscent of a
Gloria Estefan concert.) Rockwell notes: “The proscenium is
framed in a lighting truss that is a scenic element and also
holds many small moving lights.” In another scenery-lighting
collaboration, a strong visual statement is made by a trio of
articulating trapezoidal trusses that appear with the
bandstand (which moves up and downstage as needed). The
proscenium and trapezoidal trusses provide Posner with
many necessary lighting positions.
“The bigger challenge,” Rockwell says, “was that Jerry
wanted the show to move like a film. We wanted to tell the
story in the lightest way possible. It’s a very gentle story; it
doesn’t have a huge conflict. It’s really about falling in love
Villafañe, who plays Gloria, uses a Shure UHF-R handheld mic with a Beta 87 capsule.
with the characters and their amazing relationship.”
Getting started, he adds, “We made image boards of
Havana, Miami, and Vietnam [where Gloria’s father serves
in the Army], which led to our work with Darrel [Maloney,
the projection designer] when he came on board. We also
thought about which textures would work, which led us to
Certain numbers feature a set of articulating finger trusses.
the world of louvered shutters,” a visual detail that is highly
evocative of Cuba; there are two sets of sliders, all of
which feature collages of window shutters on one side.
One set of sliders rotates to create the wall of letters sent
to Gloria by her fans after the accident. The shutters are
internally lit by Posner, and they also function as surfaces
for Maloney’s scene-setting projections.
Distinguishing scenery from projections is something of
a guessing game for the audience in On Your Feet! Several
backdrops, including the Miami projects, where the young
Gloria is introduced, and a number of Miami streetscapes
are, despite their painterly qualities, video images. “We
want you not to be able to tell what you are seeing,”
Rockwell says. Taking advantage of the technology, he
adds, “The projections can be transformed in a way that
scenery can’t. For example, in the flashback dream ballet
that takes places after Gloria’s accident, we see the world
of Havana [previously in color], but now it’s in sepia tone—
that wouldn’t be possible with a scenic drop.” He adds,
“The RP screen has been painted to age it, so the photographs and backdrops have the quality of memory pieces.
The aging treatment softens and frames them.” This helps
blur the line between scenery and projections.
Maloney, expanding on this point, adds, “The sliders were
also given a paint treatment with mica, which really helped in
terms of contrast and saturation. We really wanted to
capture the essence of Miami and the other locations
without being literal. The images are layered and color
treated to give them a heightened, vibrant, energetic sense
of memory.” He adds, “Working with Ken Posner was great.
The lighting and projections were closely tied together, and
because we have four converged projectors, we had plenty
of brightness; it was never necessary to take the lighting
down for the projections. Being able to punch through and
match the lighting’s color and intensity was really exciting.”
Scenery and projections (and lighting) really work in
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harmony, during the lengthy, complex “Conga” sequence
near the end of Act I. Convinced that they have a breakout
hit and frustrated by their unaccommodating recording
company, Gloria and Emilio vow to turn it into a hit any
way they can. Emilio pitches the song to DJs and nags
Phil, their contact at the record company, while Gloria
plugs the song in every available venue, including bar
mitzvahs and Italian weddings, ending in a triumphant
performance in Las Vegas. As the action moves from radio
stations to New York office suites to various events, with
dialogue scenes woven in and around verses of the song
“Conga,” the sliders act as “wipes” in a film, erasing one
location and establishing another; projections on the
sliders help us keep tabs on where we are in each
vignette. Another complex scenic move occurs in Act II,
when Gloria is performing “Oye Mi Canto” at Wembley
Arena; the second electric flies in with her backup singers
on it and, thanks to the sliders, the action suddenly shifts
to the airport in Madrid, which cues a flashback in which
Emilio recalls emigrating from Spain with his parents.
Other sets realized by Rockwell include the kitchen of
the Fajardo house in Miami, where Gloria’s mother and
grandmother live; the record company office, decorated in
gold to match the gold records on the wall; and the studio
where early Miami Latin Boys/Miami Sound Machine
songs are recorded. An outdoor Mexican restaurant,
where Emilio and Gloria first declare their love, features a
cut-out of a tree, laden with hanging lanterns and posed
against a backdrop of deep night-blue; when the big kiss
finally happens, Maloney’s projections supply the requisite
fireworks. One particularly splashy set is Havana’s Club
Montmartre for a telling flashback in which we learn that
Gloria’s mother had a singing career in late-’50s Cuba,
which was derailed by family obligations and Castro’s
revolution. “The nightclub is one where Gloria and Emilio
had specific input,” says Rockwell. “They knew the club
and had images of it. That piece is quite a representation
of the place as it was. The projection on the back is a
kaleidoscopic image of pieces of Havana.”
One of the most powerful moments features the bus
interior, ending in the infamous crash. “The bus is very
complicated,” Rockwell says. “We have scenery moving
from three directions, including the elevator. The crash is
created by a bank of lights, and then we go into that
beautiful dream ballet.” Scenery for On Your Feet! was
built, painted, and automated by Center Line Studios.
Maloney is using the D3 Technologies media server
platform. “I try to use it on every one of my shows,” he
says, adding that it is also featured in the Broadway
musical Allegiance, which was his other major fall project.
He cites its flexibility as one key reason for using it. “You
can map content to the surfaces in so many ways. We
went from four rear projectors in Chicago to five in New
York, and the content didn’t have to be reworked. We have
66 • January 2016 • Lighting&Sound America
The second electric flies in with Gloria’s backup singers on it, for a sequence set at Wembley Stadium. Note the slider, which features
a treatment of louvered windows, here acting as a projection screen.
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This scene, set in the Miami projects where Gloria grew up, combines dimensional scenery (the fountain) with projection (the image of
apartment buildings upstage).
four 21K Panasonic projectors tracking scenery; not many
media servers can do that, especially when the scenery
starts spinning. The tracking aspect is new; Sound
Associates [the production’s video supplier] supplied the
external coders that go with it.”
The D3 media server comes with a previsualization
component that, Maloney says, proved to be especially
helpful: “We had many meetings, working out the scenic
moves with Jerry; Ken could see the images and David
could see the composition of the panels.” Images are
delivered via four 21K Panasonic projectors from the front
and five 21K Panasonics from the rear for the RP. “They’re
great because they’re very bright and quiet for their size.
We manually control their irises through D3 because of
black-level issues, to get the right contrast. In a really dark
scene, like the fireworks scene, we dial the iris way down.”
“It was a big puzzle and it took a lot of tech time,”
Rockwell says. “We made quite a few refinements in
Chicago [where the production tried out]. Jerry is really
willing to take the time to make scenic moves into dance.”
68 • January 2016 • Lighting&Sound America
Lighting
What with the constantly changing locations, flashbacks
within flashbacks, and splashy concert sequences, On
Your Feet! constitutes a very busy night for the lighting
crew. “I think there are 1,200 cues and I think we wrote
1,400 or 1,500,” says Posner. In preparation, he adds, “We
previsualized for two weeks at ETC’s studio [in New York],
working out the focuses, groups, effects, and the opening
sequence. Anthony Pearson [associate lighting designer]
and David Arch [programmer] were also able to lay down
the first 10 – 15 minutes of the second act [which shows
Gloria’s career really taking off]. It gave us such a head
start on designing the vocabulary for the lighting. I could
show ideas to Jerry and get his feedback while he was still
in the rehearsal studio. We showed him ‘dailies’ of each
production number. In Chicago, we were able to move
through the opening of the second act very quickly, with
300 cues on time code.”
The extensive cueing, and, of course, that elaborate
front-of-house truss, were necessary, Posner says: “It was
always Jerry’s idea that the show take place in the concert
Posner’s lighting ranges from splashy concert sequences to moodier, more intimate looks.
world, and is framed by scenes of Gloria at the pinnacle of
her career. That truss started out in a much more
simplified version, almost like a 1980s rock-’n’-roll rig with
PAR cans; we then put in LEDs to expand our color range.
Anthony said, ‘What about these things called
Intimidators?’” Pearson was citing the Intimidator Beam
LED 350, manufactured by Chauvet DJ, which can be
seen in a number of moments, including the opening
ballyhoo. “It’s a 75W disco unit and they hit our price
point; with those narrow 4° moving lights we can get that
energy right into the house,” Posner says. Adding to the
punch is a set of 38 Diversitronics finger strobes and four
Martin Professional Atomic strobes, for more concert-style
eye candy and blinder cues.
Posner’s workhorse automated units include 46 Philips
Vari*Lite V3500Qs and 22 Clay Paky Sharpy Wash 330s,
plus 17 Martin MAC 700s, the latter used mostly in the
concert sequences. “This part of the design is very much a
standard Broadway-scale show,” Posner notes. “What
makes it dynamic are the scenic elements [the trapezoidal
trusses and a set of articulating finger trusses]. All of the
overhead electrics are on individually controlled motors to
create different ceiling configurations. Sometimes the
trusses are in perspective, and sometimes we bring them
to the floor for backlight on the band.”
Clearly, working with moving scenery, trussing, and
lighting led to the creation of complex sequences requiring
airtight coordination and, again, plenty of prep work. “Most
of them are synched to time code,” Posner says. “During
the weeks of rehearsal, we’d take the video from the
number worked on the previous night, get all the specials
and focuses, and just layer it in.” He adds that the design
only got more complex as the show moved from Chicago
to Broadway. “When we did the finale megamix in
Chicago, we had 20 cues; by the time we got to
Broadway, it was closer to 300.”
At the same time, On Your Feet! is filled with intimate
and often highly dramatic scenes, many of them taking
place far from the flash of the concert stage; these are lit
with the designer’s signature taste and delicacy. “It was
always important to me that there be a contrast between
the Miami Sound Machine rock-’n’-roll world and these
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heartfelt, simple, slice-of-American-life book scenes,”
Posner. “At the top of the second act, for example, they
are on their world tour, and, following the playoff of ‘Party
Time,’ the sequence’s final number, the music cuts off and
we bump it to a very austere book scene in Gloria’s
mother’s kitchen in Miami. It all drains away and leaves
you with a stark, simple feeling.” One of the most dramatic
lighting effects, of the truck that crashes into the Estefans’
bus, consist of a batten, loaded with individually
channeled ETC Source Four PARs. “It starts with the
headlights of the tractor-trailer and then it abstracts,
becoming a line of light,” the designer adds.
In terms of the lighting’s lively rainbow-hued color
palette, Posner says, “It was truly a collaboration with
Darrel Maloney. He’d put an image up and I’d be inspired
by it. Or I’d use purple cyan for a backstage scene and
he’d alter the color in his artwork. For example, Darrel is in
control of the color in ‘Tradicion’ [sung by the young Gloria
just outside the Miami apartment blocks].”
Aside from the gear already mentioned, Posner’s rig
includes approximately 222 ETC Source Fours in various
degree sizes, 78 ETC ColorSource PARs, three Lycian
1293 followspots, 49 City Theatrical QolorFlex RGB warm
white LED strips and 25 QolorFlex RGB natural white LED
strips, 18 lengths of Vivid RGB LEDNeon-Flex, 23 lengths
of ADJ Flash Rope, five MR16 striplights, ten 2-light
Molefays, 66 Wybron Coloram scrollers, three MDG
Atmosphere hazers, two Look Solutions Unique 2.1
hazers, three Look Solutions Viper NT foggers, four City
Theatrical SHoW DMX NEO wireless transceivers, and two
racks of ETC 96 x 2.4kW dimmers. The show is run on an
ETC Eos TI console, which was programmed by Arch.
Lighting gear was supplied by PRG.
Posner, like the other members of the team, remains
quite clear about where the show’s heart lies. “It’s a love
story, about two people who complement each other so
well and how they fight their way to the American Dream.”
Sound
Just as Posner must balance the demands of intimate
dramatic scenes and flashy concert sequences, so the team
at SCK Sound Design—which consists of partners Steve
Canyon Kennedy, Andrew Keister, and Walter Trarbach—
had to cope with what, Keister says, “is a small love story
that just happens to have these large concert scenes.”
Naturally, Keister says, “Your system has to be capable
of delivering the largest moment in the show; it doesn’t
matter if you’re doing it for only 15 seconds.” And, entering
the theatre, one is struck by the enormous line arrays on
either side of the proscenium. This is atypical of a Mitchell
show because “Jerry is very much a director who doesn’t
like to see speakers,” notes Keister.
However, as Rockwell notes above, preliminary design
talks focused on creating the appropriate concert look for
70 • January 2016 • Lighting&Sound America
the production. And, Keister adds, “As we thought about
what the show needed in terms of a system and what would
be the appropriate look given the show’s concert nature, we
felt that this was the right way to go. We did some
renderings and showed them to Jerry. It wouldn’t have been
impossible to mask out the speakers, but he thought about
it for a moment, and said, ‘It’s an appropriate look for the
show.” Also, he says, “There are two fairly isolated systems
in the room,” each handling one aspect of the production.
The speakers framing the proscenium consist of, per
side, a dozen Meyer Sound LYON linear line arrays. “We
used them for the first time at The Radio City Christmas
Spectacular last year. For this show, I thought they might
be overpowered, but there’s a quality to the high frequency
that I fell in love with. They are expensive units and there
aren’t a lot of them available in rental stock. But Sound
Associates really bent over backwards to give us the
system we wanted even though our budget was somewhat
constrained. We’re really grateful because, as it turned out,
some of the scenes near the end of the show turned out to
be louder than I thought they would be and the additional
headroom in the LYONs proved very helpful.”
Getting the right sound level—honoring the music
without blasting the ears of an audience not used to
rocking out—was another task to be addressed. “We
always take in a lot of data when shaping the sound,”
Keister says. “We have an older Broadway audience; that’s
the reality. We want to take the concert scenes to an
incredible energy level, yet do it in a way that’s comfortable
for the audience. It involves taking lots of measurements,
laying them on top of each other, and also talking about
what our feelings are in relation to the data.”
Explaining further, Keister says, “We take a calibrated
SPL unweighted measurement once a second for the
length of a show, plot it on a graph and look at marker
times and volume versus what we felt about the show.
During previews, we get a lot of repetition and we start to
see statistical correlation with what we’re liking and what
the audience is responding to.” The rest of the sound rig
includes Meyer MINA compact line arrays, in the center of
the proscenium, for downfill and d&b audiotechnik E6
boxes for the underbalcony delay.
“The real difficulty with that room is that it has so much
absorption,” Keister notes. “We have a much larger-thanusual surround system, in which we’re simulating room
response.” It consists of 44 d&b E6s, located on both
audience levels, which provide “a base level of simulated
early reflections that doesn’t change.” (He adds that every
theatre has it quirks: “We were at the Oriental Theatre in
Chicago [for the tryout] and it was such an incredibly live
room that we couldn’t wait to get to the Marquis.”)
The system that carries the book scenes consists of
Tannoy 3836 dual-concentric 15" speakers with no cabinet
drive to contain them, a technique Keister has used in the
The articulating trapezoidal trusses are seen in the megamix finale, among other scenes.
past. “Martin Levan [sound designer of Cats, Phantom of
the Opera, and Sunset Boulevard, among others] came up
with the idea in the 1980s. His goal at the time was
incredibly accuracy terms of speech reproduction. The
physics of how the Tannoy speaker works without a
resonating cabinet is similar to how a human voice creates
sound. It takes a lot of time-aligning to make it work, but
when you get a good-quality input going into them, they’re
phenomenally natural-sounding.” The layout consists of a
pair of Tannoys in left and right front-of-house positions and
four upstairs for balcony coverage. Providing on-stage
foldback for the cast are Meyer M1Ds built into the
downstage deck, plus eight Meyer UPA2s. The fourteenmember band uses the Aviom personal monitor mixing
system.
Although sporting a head mic like the rest of the cast,
Villafañe appears in some numbers with a working Shure
UHF-R mic with Beta 87 capsule. “Some cast members, like
her backup singers,’ have fake handhelds,” Keister notes.
“We told Jerry that if we wanted concert volume, the leads
had to be on handhelds; there are limitations on what you
can do with a mic on someone’s head. We struggled a little
finding a handheld mic that we liked within the context of
the show. We started out using mics that cost twice as
much as the Shure and we couldn’t get the sound we
wanted.” The rest of the cast is on Sennheiser MK2s with
SK-5200 transmitters. The show is run on a DiGiCo SD7T
console. (The “T” means it is optimized for theatre applications.) Sound gear was supplied by Sound Associates.
“The show was an immense amount of work, tying
lighting, music, and projections together,” Keister says.
“But it was such an enjoyable piece; I haven’t had this
much fun on a show, ever.”
Aside from those already mentioned, additional
personnel on On Your Feet! includes Dick Jaris (associate
set designer); Nicholas Hussong (associate projection
designer); Michael Carnahan (studio associate); TJ
Greenway and Gaetane Bertol (assistant scenic designers);
Timothy Reed (assistant lighting designer); Josh Liebert
(assistant sound designer); Joey Frangieh (assistant
projection designer); Chris Miller (illustration/content editor);
Denis Randall (animation/content editor); Jimmy Fedigan
and Randall Zaibek (production electricians); Curtis Sharma
(head electrician); Julie Randolph Sloan (head sound/FOH
mixer); Brian Messina (lead followspot/moving light tech);
Jim Mayo (house electrician); Craig Caccamise (assistant
house electrician); Joe Sardo and John Carton (electricians); Greg Peeler (production video); Matthew Young
(projection programmer); Byan Odar (head carpenter); Max
Reed (deck automation); Matt Walsh (assistant sound);
Kathy Fabian (prop supervisor); Andrew Meeker (head
properties); Diana Rebholz (assistant properties); Michael
Dereskewicz, Morgan Moore, and Jim Waterhouse (model
makers).
Riding a wave of strong reviews, On Your Feet! is
currently posting high grosses weekly and will enter the
awards season as a strong favorite. The Emilio and Gloria
Estefan success story continues.
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