Sound Check: Anatomy of a Theatrical Debacle

I arrived at the theater, and as I walked up the stairs, Tim came around the corner towards me, looking calm. Tim's my partner in running Everyday Theater, and our company's artistic director. Tim looking calm before one of our shows is unheard of ... the fragility of his pre-show psyche is legendary. Something was wrong.

"What's up?" I said.

"Well, we have no monitors," he said, way too matter-of-factly. "The monitors are gone."

"Gone?"

"Gone."

I looked at my watch. 9:15. Doors were at 10:00. We had 45 minutes to get set up, sound check all the performers, and open up what was going to be a sold out show. And there were no monitors.

Monitors are the speakers on stage that point towards the performers so they can do important things like hear themselves. They are critical for any musical act, but even more so for beat boxers, and we were producing the Vowel Movement's Bi-Monthly Beat Boxers Showcase ... or trying to, anyway.

The previous group's performance had just wrapped up, and the audience was filing out as I waded upstream into the theater. I reached the sound booth and met Dan, our sound technician who was replacing our normal sound guy, who had been called out of town that day. Dan, I was assured, had worked this theater before, and knew the system and the board.

I found Johnny, the guy who oversees the physical theater and the gallery-cum-event space that occupies the adjacent room, and asked him about the monitors. That day, they'd taken them down and removed all the wiring to create a "screening room" for their event in the gallery that night. Apparently he needed reminding that we're a musical show, requiring monitors, just as we had for the last dozen shows we'd done at that very same theater. Johnny just scratched his head and looked genuinely bewildered, like we hadn't been doing shows there for the past 12 months. It felt like talking to a crackhead about geopolitics.

After making some pointed requests through clenched teeth, we got the monitors back. But no cable ... rendering them useless. We scurried to jury rig the system, running an XLR cable (borrowed from one of the performers) down to a single JBL speaker we propped on stage. It was 10:00. We sound checked quickly, and everything sounded pretty good. We'd dodged a bullet. We opened the house at 10:15, unaware that the real trigger had yet to been pulled.

Despite the sound check, the sound started off buzzy and hissy. Dan rationalized it with a somewhat random, but vaguely plausible explanation. I asked him to try and correct it. From that point on, things went off the rails for Dan. The sound was too quiet, then too loud, too much bass, then not enough bass, feeding back, tinny -- in short: all over the place, and constantly changing. The beat boxers didn't know what to do ... and their frustration was so palpable you could touch it from the back of the room. There were a handful of moments where Dan lucked into a sweet spot where it actually sounded good, the performers rocked it, and the audience went nuts. I told Dan that whatever he did, to just. leave. it. right. there.

But it got bad again. Really ... embarrassingly ... bad. I winced. I gritted my teeth. It became clear that the closest Dan had ever come to being an actual sound technician was hauling speaker stacks and setting up mic stands. Eyeball deep in frustration, I leaned in and calmly said to him, "You really have no idea what you're doing right now, do you?" He wouldn't admit it, but he was clearly in way over his head ... he was just twiddling knobs at random, hoping for something to go right. And it wasn't. And Dan, truth be told, was dumb as bricks. To this point, the only dumber people I've ever had to deal with were mopping the floors in my high school, or pumping my gas. He had absolutely no hope in this situation, which required some intellectual acuity ... or at the very least an ability to follow a finger.

I ran back stage and grabbed Tim, telling him I was booting Dan off the board, and he had to fix it. Tim struggled to untangle the system as Dan had left it, and managed to get it somewhere close to sounding decent. But by this time, the sound had run out of ways to suck.

And while my night felt like that nightmare where you're driving a car from the back seat, and you can't quite reach the pedals or the steering wheel, and you're heading for a wall -- the audience absolutely. loved. the show. At the end, they were screaming for more and more encores ... true testament either to the absolute brilliance of these performers, or the myopic perspective of a producer.

I will say this: the post-show cocktail that night tasted particularly good.