As some of you already know, I had a beef with the performance of Million Dollar Quartet I saw last month at the Goodman’s Owen Theatre.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Among the usual responses pointing out that I’m an idiot came a fascinating and funny takedown from the actual guy in the sound booth. His name is Nick Keenan. He’s the number two sound engineer at the Goodman, and he, like others—including the Reader‘s Albert Williams—took issue with me for blaming the wrong person. “I LOVE being accused of tyranny,” Keenan wrote, but “it is never the sound engineer’s responsibility to make a decision such as ‘let’s be really loud during this show.’” The sound engineer’s role is “simply to effectively execute and maintain a consistent mix over the course of the run.” He added that he’d like to start “a meaningful dialogue about why shows are getting so loud,” and included a link to his blog, theaterforthefuture.com.
Turns out there’s nothing more complex and thorny in theater than sound, especially since the technical capabilities for producing it have recently taken a huge bump up. On his blog Keenan notes that “sound engineers will remain the public whipping boys and girls” for everything wrong with this mix of technology and art until the public has a better understanding of the highly collaborative process of determining what sounds just right. “You would not believe how hurt and hurtful people are made by sound that makes them feel uncomfortable… whether too loud or too quiet,” he writes.
Thanks to technological advances, theater sound engineers are now more like studio engineers, “controlling every sound, every word,” Keenan says—and using compression to compensate for performers who don’t know how to project. Ironically, as earphone-addled audiences get deafer, performers are getting more soft-spoken: high schools buy expensive wireless mikes, he contends, rather than train students to make themselves heard.
