Amplification

Shotgun Players

Illustration for Sunday in the Park with George

I saw two shows by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine recently, Sunday in the Park with George at Shotgun Players and Into the Woods at the San Francisco Playhouse, and had rather different reactions to them.

I had never seen Sunday in the Park — I managed to miss several local productions over the years — and hadn't heard the score. It's true that I have the two Hat books and I could have, should have, taken the time to read the lyrics, even though the books are awkward to read from. I don't have a recording of the songs.

I did not particularly connect with the story or the score. No shade on the performers, who sang and acted well, but the music made little impression on me and unfortunately, the amplification didn't balance the tiny orchestra and the singers correctly. The instruments were simply too loud, and I could only make out about half the words. That is a big problem with any English-language score, and, well, it's Stephen Sondheim and you really want and need to be able to discern what the heck everyone is singing about. 

I'd like to see it again, under different conditions: better musical balances and also...I don't feel that the tiny stage at Shotgun's theater serves this work well. The painting - A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — is quite large and the musical built around it needs some room to spread out. Shotgun's run of the show has been extended to February 15 (!), so if you'd like to see it, there are very likely tickets available.

Into the Woods landed rather differently. I had a slight familiarity with the show and the songs, because long ago I'd seen the film version of it. Regardless, a wonderful cast, Susi Damilano's superb direction, a charming unit set, and, well, everything, made it a thoroughly delightful evening. I particularly loved the stabby Little Red Riding Hood.

In this production, the amplification works much, much better than that for Sunday in the Park. The balances are correct: the tiny pit band is audible, but they never, ever, drown out the singers, whose enunciation is excellent. I probably caught 90-95% of the words.

A few weeks ago, when Joshua Kosman discussed Sondheim, the recently-deceased Tom Stoppard, and Into the Woods on his Substack, composer Gabriel Kahane, whose work I like a whole lot and have reviewed very positively, chimed in to say he was not much of a fan of Sondheim's music, that he'd read the Hat books and gotten a lot out of that, but then he'd gone to see Into the Woods and found the songs musically undistinguished.

After seeing the show, I sort of get where he is coming from: he is hearing a certain homogeneity across the songs in the show that can certainly be heard as melodic and rhythmic tics. But here's the thing: the other Sondheim shows I know at all well, A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd, are musically nothing like Into the Woods. I know Night Music very well, because long ago I played flute in the pit band for a local theater production in Bergen County, NJ. Its special trick is, as Joshua Kosman points out, a profusion of what sounds like to the casual ear like waltz time. The melodies aren't at all alike. From this, I'm sure that whatever Sondheim is doing in Into the Woods, it's all deliberate and thought out carefully.

Getting back to the matter of amplification and sound design, I inevitably find myself asking "But why are you amplifying your singers?" After all, the stage bands are tiny and so are the theaters. Wikipedia says that the Ashby Stage seats 119 people, while the San Francisco Playhouse seats 199.

People, those are tiny theaters and the actors cast in these shows know how to sing! What, exactly, is gained through amplification?

Years ago, when Sweeney Todd toured to San Francisco and played in a substantially larger theater — this was the production where the actors also played the instruments —I actually asked about it. I was told, I believe, that they wanted all audience members to have the same auditory experience, regardless of the venue. 

I think that my reaction to this was something like: But this is live theater. Where you sit does make a difference. That's a feature, not a bug. I guess that with amplification and its flattening effects everywhere, producers and audiences have come to expect that everything will sound the same, like you're listening to a recording.

And this brings me to something I read in the New York Times a few days ago, a profile by Joshua Barone of Beth Morrison, who has, over the last 20 years, become an extremely important producer/impressario of new operas, through her Beth Morrison Projects. She can put together a composer and librettist, help cast an opera, find venues. She has become indispensable to producing new opera outside operas commissioned directly by opera houses. 

Morrison says that she has “very strong opinions on the kind of art [she wants] to make,” then she's quoted later in the piece saying this:

Critics have also taken issue with Morrison’s insistence on amplification, especially in black box theaters. But, Morrison said, Wagner probably would have done the same thing. He wanted to use every tool at his disposal, and she aims, with each show, for “a theatrical sound installation.”

“Many companies will not do this, and that’s fine,” she added. “But that’s not the world that I want to live in. I profoundly believe that putting a microphone on an opera singer completely changes their ability to act.”

Let me say that if composers choose to amplify their works, sure, fine, it's their decision to make use of, as Morrison says, that particular tool. They know what they want in the way of vocal style in their works, for whatever reason: they prefer the sound of an amplified voice, they're concerned about how to orchestrate to allow an unamplified voice to be heard, they don't like the sound of the unamplified operatic voice, they're worried about whether the singers can put across the words. Amplification can be done well (for John Adams's operas, sound design by Mark Grey) or badly (San Francisco Opera's Sweeney Todd, speaking of Sondheim, and Show Boat).

These are complicated problems and composers have chosen a range of solutions in traditionally-sung opera. Singers are affected not only by orchestration, but by the size and acoustics of a venue, the language in which a libretto is written, the composer's musical style, the singability of the libretto, and how the composer sets the words. 

However, I'd really like to hear a lot more about Morrison's contention that "putting a microphone on an opera singer completely changes their ability to act." For one thing, my understanding is that microphone singing requires a wholly different technique from traditional operatic singing; I remember a singer I know commenting about this, when they started working with an ensemble that used amplification. 

For another, I've seen many opera performances, some amplified, most not, of works written between 1607 and now, with a wide range of performers. A lot of them were great actors, and it's really hard for me to accept that their acting abilities would be "completely changed" (implied: improved) if they were amplified. Their acting depends at least as much on what the composer and librettist give the singers and, ah, how good the director is as on whether they're amplified, and, well, I would say a lot more.

Not that it's very possible to even run an experiment. Could you get the same cast to perform La Traviata with and without amplification? Can you get the same cast to perform Nixon in China with and (clandestinely) without amplification? It certainly would be interesting.

Let's move on to Morrison's contention that Wagner probably would have done the same thing, that is, used amplification.

I consider it intellectually risky to try to ascribe theoretical actions to long-dead people. You know, Bach would surely have written for the piano if it had existed in his time; Chopin and Beethoven surely would have loved the modern 9-foot concert grand, etc. Composers will use the tools of their time, and I'm going to say that my guess is that the music they wrote would have been different if they'd had different instruments available! Beethoven and Chopin both wrote peddling effects and articulations that are easier to achieve on a lightweight fortepiano than on a modern concert grand. We might guess, but we cannot know, what they would have composed if suddenly a 1930 Steinway had appeared in their studios.

There is one exception that a friend mentioned to me when I quoted Morrison to him: that passage in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, first movement, where the bassoons play a phrase that is elsewhere given to the horns. That's because the natural horn of his day couldn't play that phrase in every key Beethoven needed for the movement. These days, we have valve horns, and that passage, which sounds faintly absurd in the bassoons, is generally assigned to the horns. 

But we do know something about what Wagner might have done about issues of singer audibility, because he actually did it: he built the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which is laid out like an amphitheater, rather than in tiers like most opera houses, and in which he put the orchestra on descending risers under the stage. The Bayreuth sound is unique and magnificent, and singers don't have to force or press or have enormous voices (as opposed to normally large operatic voices) to be heard. This is one thing we do not have to guess or make hard-to-support conjectures about.