Director Steve Witting arrived at Weathervane with a well-conceived
and detailed idea for how music could best interact with Ray Cooney's
farce. In some ways a director who so clearly hears certain music at
specific moments makes a sound designers life both easier and more
difficult: you go into the play with the bones of your design already
in place, and from there it's only a matter of fleshing them out. On
the other hand, "only" implies that this is inherently easy: my
experience is that directors will often have nebulous or genre based
ideas for the sounds of their plays, which will then take shape
around the key tracks I've given them. Building a design around
components that a director has already chosen requires the designer
to not just develop a thorough understanding of the play and how the
director understands it, but also why they understand the
play the way they do, and how their musical selections have
proceeded from and informed that understanding.
Fortunately, Steve and I were able to build a raport early on, and
partially necessitated by the tech and dress schedule of
Weathervane's repertory calendar, we came to our decisions
quickly. Something that worked particularly effectively was
beginning intermission part of the way into a track (Dusty
Springfield's "What's it Gonna Be"), and then concluding the
intermission by beginning at the top of that track, and fading out
as we got to the place in the track in which intermission began. In
this way, we were able to show that no time had passed in the
action of the play, and also generally got a laugh from the
audience when they recognized the technique, which helped warm them
back up for the second half of the farce.
(hide)
