NEW YORK, NY (June 4, 2024) —Hell's Kitchen has all the ingredients for a Broadway hit, and onstage they blend together to create a captivating crowd-pleasing spectacle. The brainchild of 16-time Grammy Award winner Alicia Keys, the musical is inspired by the singer's time growing up in 1990s New York and follows young high schooler Ali as she navigates her first love, an overprotective mother and a demanding mentor to discover her true calling as a musician. Throughout, Keys' familiar hits and a string of new songs drive the story and keep audiences on their feet the whole time. Making sure audiences can hear every note is sound designer Gareth Owen, whose work on the show has earned him a nomination for Best Sound Design in a Musical, one of 13 Tony Award nominations the production garnered in April, less than a week after opening on the Great White Way.
meanwhile Hell's Kitchen While the nomination happened almost overnight, the journey to the Shubert Theatre was a lot longer than that. Keys first began developing the show in 2011, and it finally made it to the stage last fall with an off-Broadway run at the Public Theater. Owen was already attached to the musical then, but the audio system he built at the time was a far cry from what's used on Broadway today. “We had to use whatever equipment we could get our hands on, which is a given in auditions: you use whatever is available to you in terms of resources,” he said.
As a result, when the show moved to Broadway, Owen and his team started almost from scratch, working with longtime theater sound provider Sound Associates. “We changed the console, the PA system, the amplifiers, the processing,” he recalls. “It's easier to list the things we didn't change when we moved to Broadway.”
Moving the show uptown also allowed Owen to change the house console to an Avid S6L, the desk that's also used in all his other current Broadway productions.M.J. (This production won a Tony Award.) & Juliet, Tommy and Back to the FutureThe desk swap wasn’t entirely painless – it took about a week to copy and reinterpret each setting from the other brand of console onto the S6L – but it proved to be time well spent, as the programming and settings translated accurately.
He said the show's mix is based around contemporary pop, so a lot of plugins are used, noting, “I'm running pretty much everything that exists in AAX DSP format within the console, but externally I have a plugin host system that mainly runs reverbs. I'm running emulations of the tc electronic VSS3 and VSS4 HD reverbs, a Bricasti M7 emulation by LiquidSonics (Seventh Heaven plugin), plate reverbs, and a bunch of funky effects from SoundToys.”
But much of the software used at the FOH position is custom built. Owen's software house, Show Control Ltd., creates digital tools specifically for his productions, so creations like rPatch, a 64×64 Dante-enabled digital patch bay for radio mic systems, and rLab, a group of QLab plug-ins, are put to good use every night. There's also EnSnap, which was built to control d&b audiotechnik's Soundscape immersive audio system, and Owen's company ended up licensing the software directly to d&b.
Soundscape technology is Hell's KitchenAs one of the first Broadway shows to use d&b XSL PA (Owen's & Juliet Reportedly the sound design was the original responsibility, the main Soundscape array is a d&b XSL hang with six SL-Subs flown, with E6, E8, Y7P and Y10P boxes handling delay and surround processing, and a row of E6 front fills at the front of the stage, just above the SL-Subs below the front edge of the deck.
“What's great about this show is that the set designer, Robert Brill, isn't trying to hide anything,” Owen says. “The set design is very industrial, as is the lighting design, so the result is that everything is very exposed and intentional. It's fine for most of the talking heads to be visible, as opposed to trying to hide as much as possible, which is what a lot of set designers want.”
While an industrial feel sets the show's mood, all eyes are on the big musical numbers and quieter, dramatic moments from start to finish. The ensemble is recorded with DPA 4066 headworn microphones connected to Shure ADX1M micro wireless bodypack transmitters, with some key cast members also wearing two bodypacks with backup Sennheiser MKE 1 microphones on booms so the audio team can switch to the backup in the event of an emergency.
Because the production employs a number of wireless systems, the audio team uses multiple Wavetool systems to monitor them all, using them not only as the main monitoring system backstage, but also as remote monitoring stations for the front-of-house mix positions. In addition, a portable Wavetool tablet is used by the audio crew backstage to check microphones. “I can stand next to the performer in the dressing room, check the mic and say, 'This is good' or 'I'll fix this,'” explains Owen. “One person can do all the checks, and because the client and the Wavetool remote systems are independent of each other, two people can work on different things without interfering with each other. It's a true workflow and a time saver.”
“There's another feature in Wavetool that I'm personally very proud of, because it was my idea: you can rewind the audio from anyone's radio mic. If a front-of-house engineer says backstage, 'I think Ali just cut off,' you can rewind 15 seconds and hear what happened. This was an idea I'd been talking about for years, but never thought it would come to fruition. It's such a useful feature that I wanted, and all of a sudden it just magically appeared.”
The orchestra is supported by a handful of musicians below the stage, visible from two towers that adorn the set. Performers hear themselves through Sennheiser HD 25 and Sony MDR-7509HD headphones connected to an Allen & Heath ME-1 40-source personal mixer. “Not only is the mixer really well-built, but the audio quality and flexibility are by far superior to anything else on the market,” says Owen.
There are also several traveling musicians who move around the stage, and their playing is transmitted via a Shure PSM 1000 wireless system. But not all of the instruments onstage are real: The pianos that the actors “play” are each equipped with speakers, amplifiers, and Shure PSM 1000 receivers. “The person onstage pretends to be playing the piano,” Owen says, “and then we transmit the sound of the real person playing it so that it can be heard coming from the piano. We call this 'reverse radio.'”
A modern musical packed with hip-hop beats, jazz, old school R&B, rap, and more, with all kinds of technology thrown in. Hell's Kitchen It doesn't sound like a typical Broadway show, but Owen loves it that way: “For a long time, traditional musical theatre sound was about pretending that sound didn't exist – microphones hidden in hats, the orchestra coming from the orchestra pit, and you only hearing people onstage. The idea was that 'good' sound design was something you didn't realize was there.
“People go to the movies and hear the orchestra reverberating all around them and experience it. They put AirPods in their ears and get this amazing sound, they get in their car and hear 29 speakers, they spend $600 at Target and put this amazing surround system in their living room, and yet we go to the movies and act like sound doesn't exist. I realized, 'No, the world has moved on. I'm going to stop apologizing for sound.' I made a conscious decision to go in a totally different direction, which is cinematic sound design. So I'm not going to do a show that sounds like a traditional Broadway show. It's not my forte.” Maybe. But depending on how his latest Tony nomination (his fifth) plays out, Owen might just create his own new tradition.
