CREATIVE TEAM INTERVIEWS
SOUND DESIGNER
NEVIN STEINBERG
Nevin has worked on a number of high profile productions, including Hamilton, In The Heights, La Boheme, and Hadestown, for which he won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Sound Design. He works in both theatre and with orchestras, and is in demand as a sound designer throughout the world.
The work of a sound designer is to create an environment in which the audience have an amazing experience, but also one in which the performer to do their job to the best of their ability. That means that a sound designer needs to be an excellent listener. They need to listen well, rather than just have good hearing! Listening is not a passive act.
Working on the show began with doing a deep dive into Tina Turner’s back catalogue and associating it with the numbers that are included in Katori’s libretto. My job is to ask what we are trying to accomplish through the storytelling in the show, and use sound to help achieve that.
Catalogue, or jukebox, musicals (Katori Hall calls Tina a bio-musical) present different challenges to those of original musicals. Tina’s is a difficult story – it’s a struggle from trauma to triumph, and although the music is already extremely popular, we have to make sure that we do justice to the story that we are telling.
We have to take the audience from the most quiet and intimate conversations to the huge concert experience, and we also have the dream state (Etherland) because it’s a memory play, and those moments in clubs and dressing rooms. All of this requires different elements of sound design. On top of that, we’re also telling the stories of iconic artists and producers – Tina, Ike and Phil Spector, for example. We have to take into consideration the time of day, the era in which the scene(s) take place, the style of music that’s being performed, for example.
“The sound designer is in a powerful position: we have a lot of control over the audience experience.”
In the planning stages, once you’ve had a dialogue with the creative team, and had a detailed look a the script, it’s then a case of plotting out the different moments and the transitions between them. Sound designers need to consider the arc of the story and ask what experience we’re trying to give the audience, and then we can allocate the technical tools to achieve that. We are essentially creating a world, and we have to ensure that our world sounds right.
In terms of research, there’s a lot that we have to look at. Let’s consider River Deep, Mountain High, which was produced by Phil Spector. He’s famous for his ‘Wall of Sound’ – a world into which Tina and Ike walk into and are both intimidated by it. Ike definitely feels diminished by it. It’s like nothing they’ve come across before and we have to show that on stage. In terms of sound design I have to ask myself why it’s so different: what’s different and exotic about this sound? Therefore with the transition into the scene the audience hears that sound of analogue tape being rewound, and it’s audible. It’s exactly the sound you might hear as it’s run back after a take. You also hear the orchestral instruments (acoustic instruments) tuning, and then you have the epic and iconic sound of all of the orchestral parts, and instrument doubling that Spector is so famous for, and that’s what accompanies Tina in this song.
We ask, “what does the audience need in order to believe
what they’re seeing and hearing?”
Perhaps the most challenging section of the piece is the sequence at the end of Act One that begins with Tina singing Proud Mary, she has a physical fight with Ike and then runs across the highway to safety at a motel. It’s absolutely essential that the sound, lighting and projection all work together at this point. It’s potentially very chaotic and we have to help the audience understand the emotions and thoughts passing through Tina’s mind, during an energetic performance of Proud Mary, then the fight, her flight to the motel and then to the desperate silence of standing in front of the motel reception desk.
We can control volume but we can also control the direction that sound comes from. There are speakers at the front of the stage but there are also speakers throughout the auditorium and that’s a really helpful tool in manipulating the audience experience. For example, when the ensemble enter from the auditorium at the end of Act One, their sound follows them: the sound comes from the back of the auditorium first and then follows them further into the auditorium and up to the stage. That’s really powerful, particularly as they are singing her name.
For the concert at the end we’re saving something: we’re capturing the spirit of a concert so we have to hold something back for then!
My advice for aspiring sound designers:
Computers and the online world offer a whole host of opportunities to experiment with sound design. Use the opportunity to complete research, too. Listen to recordings from the 1920s and the 1930s. Listen to recordings made on different mediums too, such as records, CDs, cassettes etc. We’ve moved from a mechanical to a digital process of recording so there are lots of changes in the way that things sound.
There’s a variety of free programmes and editing software that provide playgrounds of exploration.
Formal training is always helpful, but eventually it’s just a case of DOING IT. You learn as much from your mistakes as you do from your successes and working with live performers is always going to have that risk, so we continue to embrace it and learn from it.