Sunset Boulevard

Production Sound on Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Boulevard at the Savoy Theatre with Nicole Scherzinger. Sound Designer Adam Fisher. Lloyd’s signature pared-back staging combined with Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom’s live cinematography.

The production’s signature moment was also its biggest sound challenge. Tom Francis opened Act Two by leaving the stage, walking out of the theatre and around the side of the building onto the Strand, in the middle of the West End at half past nine on a Saturday night, then back in and down four storeys into the auditorium, singing the title number the whole way with the orchestra playing in the room and the camera feed streamed live to the production’s centrepiece LED wall.

Keeping a radio mic and in-ear monitors rock solid across that route, from a busy London street through stairwells and corridors into the stalls, meant designing an RF system well outside the usual theatre playbook: a multi-zone antenna scheme mixing directional and omni-directional antennas, camera-mounted receivers to keep the signal locked as the performer left the building, and frequency coordination against one of the densest RF environments in the country. All of it had to work eight shows a week without a safety net. Radio mics ran on Sennheiser Digital 6000 and in-ears on Shure PSM 1000, with Autograph Sound supplying and supporting the radio package.

Sennheiser wrote up the approach with Adam Fisher, Autograph’s Matt Bird and me: Multi Olivier Award-winning London production of Sunset Boulevard utilises Sennheiser for creative performance solution.