Show sound designer Mick Potter was responsible for making sure that Eastern sounds are music to the ears of Western audiences at Andrew Lloyd Webber's Bombay Dreams.
BUENA PARK, CA (July 23, 2004) — The Broadway extravaganza Bombay Dreams, the story of a slum boy who rises to fame and fortune making "Bollywood" movies, features a score combining traditional Indian rhythms, pop music, hard rock, soft ballads, lots of ethnic percussion and surround sound. Show sound designer Mick Potter is responsible for making sure these sounds – foreign to the majority of western audiences – are music to the ears of the patrons at New York’s Broadway Theatre.
"One of the main challenges was trying to make it quite cinematic, even though it’s a book musical," he explains. "I used a digital console and a lot of surround sound because nearly all the orchestra is mixed in surround, which is pretty unusual for a Broadway show."
That console is a Yamaha PM1D digital mixing system, equipped with 96 inputs and 74 outputs with dual DSP main and backup engines. Sound contractor Masque Sound was instrumental in making the board available for Dreams, and also provides systems for a majority of Broadway shows and touring productions such as Aida, Mamma Mia!, Phantom of the Opera and Rent.
"The idea for making Bombay Dreams sound like a movie is due to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s record producer Nigel Wright," says Potter. "The biggest singular challenge was figuring out which numbers would work in surround and which wouldn’t."
Front of House engineer Jordan Pankin mixes Bombay Dreams' challenging soundtrack on the PM1D.
Part of that complete aural experience – and another mixing challenge – includes two percussionists, housed in two of the theater’s boxes on either side of the stage. "They obviously have to play with the orchestra as well as along with each other," Potter explains. "And they are very loud acoustically. The way around that was that I fed them gradually into the systems that were further away from them. If you’re near them, you hear them virtually acoustically. The further away you sit from them, the more of them you hear through the sound system, which seemed to be the only way to treat them really."
Engineer Jordan Pansky, a veteran of Broadway shows Sweet Smell of Success and Man of La Mancha, handles front of house duties for Dreams. "Sound-wise, it’s a very complicated show," notes Pansky. "However, the PM1D really simplifies things. The onboard effects virtually eliminate having extra racks. The recall is amazing – especially when you can bring up your scenes again and again and all the settings are there at the touch of a button."
Scott Kalata, Director of Sales Services at Masque, said the decision to use the Yamaha PM1D was based on the specific requirements of the production team.
"Dreams is the first Broadway show to use a PM1D at front of house, with a Yamaha DM2000 for submixing," states Kalata. "Since the PM1D’s release, a number of Broadway sound designers have expressed an interest in using Yamaha’s digital boards."
