Scene and heard
From blending live video and performance to integrating immersive soundscapes, theatre and AV have never been more entangled
Words Verity Butler
As the ways in which people prefer to consume entertainment have drastically evolved – the world of stage has also reimagined the theatre experience.
More than ever before, interactive, holographic and virtual storytelling techniques are being deployed by some of the world’s best-selling shows. These futuristic and digitised versions of live performances have been seen to rake in some impressive figures – often, notably, piquing the interest of audiences who wouldn’t necessarily classify themselves as ‘theatre nerds’.
This new approach has also received its fair share of controversy, with some criticising it for being damaging to what theatre stands for.
“You often hear silly blanket statements from people saying that certain tech doesn’t work in theatre,” comments Tony Award-nominated director Jamie Armitage. “The truth is anything can work; it’s the storyteller’s responsibility to make sure it lands.”
LIVE sits down with Armitage, along with other directors and technical integrators, to understand exactly what it takes to make AV in theatre ‘land’ and explore the award-winning shows that are spearheading this movement.
My name is Regina George
If you’re a fellow TikToker, you’ll instantly recognise the above as a viral line from the sultrily sung Meet the Plastics number from hit musical Mean Girls. If not, you’ll still likely recognise the name from the wildly popular original 2004 film starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams. The international success of the film meant fans all over the world were delighted by the announcement of a musical adaption being in the works – revealed on 3 October 2016, an iconic date because of its mention in the film.
A rock musical with lyrics by Nell Benjamin and music by Jeff Richmond, and accompanied with a book by Tina Fey, the story focuses on Cady Heron, a teenage girl who transfers to a public high school after being homeschooled in Africa for her whole life. At her new school, she befriends outsiders Janis Sarkisian and Damian Hubbard who persuade her to infiltrate the ‘Plastics’.
When it premiered at the August Wilson Theatre on Broadway, FRAY Studio worked closely with both director Casey Nicholaw and set designer Scott Pask to create the sophisticated, fast-paced and at times surreal world of North Shore High’s famous students.
“We first worked on the show when it launched, then on Broadway, then the US tour version,” says Adam Young, co-founder and creative director at FRAY Studio, “and now it has landed in the West End. What’s unique about this show is that the entire set is built from LED screen – a creative decision that was made right at the start of the process.
“With the script written by Tina Fey, her style of comedy and writing involves lots of short scenes – there were even some songs that jumped between 25 locations in the one song.”
The video content backing the show’s set throughout the performance offers the audience a unique insight into the characters’ inner worlds.
“Nicholaw had never incorporated video before, but he knew it was the right way to go with this show. When FRAY got involved, we pushed it towards LED screens rather than projection, as Broadway musicals can be very brightly lit, so projection wouldn’t be able to cut it alongside stage lighting,” says Young.
The video content for Janis, the ‘art freak’ of the show, was drawn up with markers and has a rough, unpolished feel. Whereas the video initially revealed Queen Plastic Regina’s inner world to be pink and polished, before transforming it to become James Bond-inspired when she begins to seek her revenge.
“Due to the large volume of LED involved, we essentially had to develop the entire show before rehearsals even started,” Young continues. “That involved previsualising everything in Disguise. Nicholaw emphasised that the video content was as much a character as the people on stage were.”
In all the musical numbers, the video worked in sync with the choreography, lighting design and live band, taking the production beyond the constraints of the stage and reflecting the vibrant attitude and wry humour of Tina Fey’s writing. Universal Pixels was selected as the most suitable candidate to meet the show’s challenging technical demands.
“The complexity of this project stemmed from the fact that LEDs are not traditionally used in theatre,” adds Hamanshu Patel, project manager for live events at Universal Pixels. “It became clear to us that the best option was to implement the Roe Black Onyx 3 panel – and we ended up with close to 450 LED tiles.”
Bringing LED to the stage brought with it a host of new challenges. “There’s a lot of automation and moving parts,” Patel continues, “traditionally on a music tour, we’d just leave the cables dangling at the back of the screen, but in theatre these have to be tucked away, making sure they don’t get caught on anything while the LEDs move in.”
With the show’s vibrantly bold palette, particularly the extensive use of hot pink, colour is a critical piece of the overall technical puzzle.
“Since the screen takes up so much of what you’re seeing on stage,” expands Young, “when you combine it with stage lighting, makeup and everything else involved, you really have to consider the balance you create on every screen.”
For Universal Pixels, time – or the lack thereof – was a major hurdle. “I think we had a three-week turnaround for getting the custom cables made because they couldn’t be measured until we actually got into the theatre,” says Patel. Universal Pixels stepped up to the plate, being a crucial component of the show’s technical set-up and success.
Mean Girls only emphasises AV’s increased standing in the theatre space, and Young believes that “we’re definitely going to see more LED go into theatre productions – especially now that the cost is at a point where budgets can actually accommodate it.
“We’re also seeing a blurring of the lines between cinema and stagecraft, with younger audiences used to and therefore seeking more dynamic and fast-paced forms of entertainment.”
A selfie of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a creative’s dream when it comes to source material. A classic exploration of morality and the consequences of unchecked desires, Wilde’s critique of Victorian society and the duality of human nature invites readers to reflect on pursuing pleasure without regard for ethical boundaries.
As discovered by Kip Williams, award-winning Australian writer and director of theatre and opera, the themes within the 135-year-old tale couldn’t be more applicable to society in 2025. Following a successful career directing major theatre and opera productions, Williams’ ‘cine-theatre’ trilogy of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula brought him international acclaim, leading The Economist to call his work ‘the future of theatre’. His groundbreaking production of Dorian Gray delivers an explosive interplay of live performance and video in an astonishing collision of form. It’s due to make its Broadway debut in March 2025.
“The piece is appropriately wild in its paradoxical deployment of form,” explains Williams, “because the bedrock of it is an ancient, analogue model of theatre, in which an actor comes to the audience to directly tell them a story. The audience then stays connected with that same actor throughout the entire two hours of performance.”
What Williams alludes to is the striking solo performance format of the show, with the one actor taking on all 26 roles, both on stage and via pre-recorded content. Emmy Award winner Sarah Snook – star of the HBO smash hit Succession – will reprise her role for the Broadway production, having won an Olivier for the London show.
“There’s never a moment where you’re not connected with the actor either live on stage or on the screens, and their body becomes the entire imaginative universe in playing every single one of the characters.
“One of the big set pieces in the show is a dinner party sequence, where Sarah performs with about seven different versions of herself at one time.”
With theatre becoming increasingly immersive, Williams’ blending of screen and stage is a craft he has been honing throughout his whole career.
“I’ve been using video in theatre for ten years in my practice,” he emphasises. “Prior to Dorian Gray, I had a number of steadfast rules that I stuck to because it had to stay true to the essence of what theatre is about. One of those was that the video had to be live – the audience could see the live performer and camera operator – and that the live images existed only in the now. With Dorian Gray and the cine-trilogy, I decided to break this rule and deploy pre-recording as well. This came out of several years spent dreaming up a form whereby one performer could deliver all roles.”
Williams explains that the choice of technology across the trilogy worked to mirror key elements of the stories being presented. “They manifested in several different ways, and it’s what I refer to as ‘cine-theatre’; a synthesis of live video, live performance and pre-recordings. Each show in the trilogy has its own particular relationship with the technology being used. Dorian Gray is the founding work of the three, using screens but also pushing into mobile phones, which makes sense given the nature of the story. It looks at our cultural obsession with image, youth and beauty, paired with contemporary technology allowing it to grow at an alarming rate.”
Over the course of the entire show, the audience witnesses hundreds of different shots and angles. This includes six LED screens suspended from above, three Steadicam operators, three tripod cameras and four mobile phones.
“I’m having to simultaneously make a feature film and a full-length piece of theatre in the same timeframe you would usually have to make a standard piece of theatre.
“There’s the technical complexity of bringing that to the theatre itself, where you have the camera operators, and Sarah having to hit marks on the stage with micrometre-level precision in order for the live and the pre-recorded shots to line up perfectly. The stage manager has to call hundreds of cues to make the screens, cameras, sound and lighting all line up perfectly.”
Then comes the acting challenge of not just performing 26 characters, but interacting with them in their various live and virtual formats. “There’s a club scene where all the characters come through via Snapchat filters,” Williams offers as an example, “which Sarah has to respond to with minute precision.”
When it comes to directing such a feat, William says “Sarah and I come together to find the psychological landscape of the piece, and then we start to layer the technical elements on top of that bit by bit. One of the biggest challenges she faces is acting opposite the pre-recorded content; if she’s slightly too long or short with her line, then it’s going to talk over her, or there will be an awkward pause.
“Sarah is virtuosic in her musical ability to effortlessly feel like she’s interacting in a way that is live and spontaneous.”
The Washington Post, in its review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, describes it as being “so revolutionary, remarkable and dazzling you’ll think you’re gazing into theatre’s future.”
Skating through soundscapes
One of theatre’s biggest names, composer and musician Andrew Lloyd Webber, has been behind some of the world’s most beloved musicals. From The Phantom of the Opera to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat to Cats – which infamously led to one of Hollywood’s most viral flops, featuring an unsettlingly furry James Corden. Webber has nevertheless undoubtedly made his mark in the world of stage, owning seven theatres across London and having several musicals run for over a decade in the West End and on Broadway.
Starlight Express is yet another of these achievements, with the show first running in 1994, featuring music by Webber and lyrics by Richard Stilgoe.
It tells the story of Rusty, a young but obsolete steam engine who decides to race in a championship against modern locomotives – diesel and electric engines – in hopes of impressing a first-class observation car, Pearl. Most notably, the entirety of the bright, spacey show is performed in roller skates.
With 7409 performances in London, Starlight Express is the ninth-longest-running West End show. It’s the most successful musical in Germany, where it has been performed in a purpose-built theatre since 1988 – now holding the Guinness World Record for most visitors to a musical in a single theatre. Webber is best known for musical composition, so it should come at little surprise that sound is the focus for this example.
Last year marked its 40th anniversary, and the famed musical is currently running at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre. Celebrated sound designer Gareth Owen stepped up to the task and created an impressive installation of four d&b DS100 processors driving d&b’s Soundscape system through a collection of more than 350 loudspeakers. This latest project stands as one of his most intricate sound system designs to date.
Owen first used Soundscape back in 2019 for the high-profile rejuvenation of Starlight Express in Bochum, Germany. He has since become a key exponent of this immersive sound technology.
“I have this great story of when Andrew Lloyd Webber went to see the German production of Starlight,” Owen begins. “He went backstage to the orchestra pit and asked them what they were playing, as it wasn’t what he wrote. He asked to see the scores, and they replied that they’d been playing it for 30 years and so didn’t need them. He then decided that the show needed a complete refresh in music, sound, lighting – everything.
“They closed the show for a couple of weeks, and we went in and replaced the entire sound system. That was our first outing with the d&b Soundscape system, which had only been used once in theatre up until that point. “It was a big success, and Andrew was very happy with it. When it came to doing the new production in London, we were asked to deliver Soundscape for that too.”
Having now employed d&b Soundscape on more than a dozen musical theatre sound designs, Owen has been integral to the development of the system. The result of a collaboration between Gareth Owen Sound Design and d&b, En-Snap is a cue automation software that provides significant show control workflow features.
“Soundscape is part of this new generation with the buzzword of immersive audio,” continues Owen, “but the reality is that it’s essentially using the cocktail party effect. This is where you can pick out sounds from the mix and allow audiences to hear things in a way that a traditional sound system doesn’t.”
This arena-style configuration – with performer action and audience listening zones in all directions – presented some considerable challenges for coverage and coherence. Owen concludes, “In what is a very complicated room, with such a complex seating plan and performance area, we’ve achieved everything we could possibly achieve.”
Up close and personal
A wildly popular genre, and often tricky to get right, crime is a popular subject of choice for stage, having been covered in a plethora of ways throughout theatre’s history. An Interrogation explores the crime thriller in a novel way by using a unique technical innovation, and was heralded as Summerhall’s fastest-selling show in eight years at the Edinburgh Fringe 2023, with the entire run selling out before its opening performance.
This award-winning investigative drama is now transferring to London for a limited five-week run at Hampstead Theatre. It’s the debut play from Jamie Armitage, Tony Award-nominated co-director of Six: The Musical, and is a gripping piece about power, deception and individual perspectives of the truth. “Writing is something I’ve always loved, but it was actually my directing which took off first,” introduces Armitage.
“After spending a couple years of my life focusing on making the beautiful show that is Six, I decided to get back to writing, which coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic, and eventually I had a draft of the play which would go on to become An Interrogation.”
The show places the audience inside a police interview room, as a detective works against the clock to try and solve a missing persons case. She sits down for a voluntary interview with someone who seems like the least likely person to be linked to the crime – a very respectable member of society – and as it’s voluntary, he has the ability to walk out at any moment he likes.
“The detective has to play this very tricky game of speaking to somebody who she suspects might be linked to this case, while also having to maintain a friendly atmosphere.” Armitage explains how the story is based on video of a case in Canada, in which a detective called Jim Smyth interviews a seemingly respectful member of society named Colonel Russell Williams, who was the commander of an Air Force base.
“It was an astonishing video which struck me in that it wasn’t hyper-confrontational, or macho. It was incredibly calm and measured, but under the surface there was so much tension. I was intrigued by the theatrical possibilities of that.”
Ultimately, Armitage decided to steer towards a non-verbatim adaptation, stressing that “so much context would have been needed to make sense of what the detective and suspect were talking about, but I also have a feeling of ickiness when it comes to having someone play a real-life murderer.”
Boldly breaking the mould by bringing the audience closer to the actor than ever before, An Interrogation offers an innovative exploration of technology versus reality. The production cleverly uses livestream cameras to manipulate the audience’s point of view.
“One reason for this is very practical,” Armitage highlights. “90% of the show involves just two people sat at a table, which made me think we needed some more visual interest.”
It didn’t take long for Armitage to realise that not only did the introduction of livestreaming cameras offer a practical solution, but they were in fact symbiotic with the play’s nature.
“Usually, when we think of a police interview, we think of an objective camera in the sky watching from above. I did some research and discovered that there have been studies into why they’re shot from that very objective angle.
“It’s because, if you go into angles that are too close up, people’s viewing of the evidence could be swayed. Even a minute shift in body language could make a jury question whether or not someone is guilty.
“Given that the show is fascinated by perspective, I thought we could have some fun by playing around with certain moments. This included pushing the video angles closer to the actors’ faces to encourage the audience to try and notice anything in their expressions that might seem suspicious.”
This approach makes the show a particularly thrilling and claustrophobic cross-examination and exposure of society’s preconceived ideas about the kinds of people who commit crimes.
“Having a camera set up below the table allows a character to appear calm while revealing that their hand is tapping on their knee or that they’re fidgeting,” Armitage adds.
Latency is often one of the biggest concerns for the broadcast industry, but with the heightened convergence of broadcast and live entertainment in recent times, Armitage highlights that his team also found itself grappling with the age-old issue of delay.
“It’s something the audience spots so quickly,” adds Armitage, “because the actors can’t do any clever tricks to sync up their moving mouths with the screen. It meant we had to figure out how to keep our networks and cabling system as simple as possible.”
The use of screens on stage has seen some criticism: “Claims that it’s not real theatre, it’s live or badly edited cinema. But then you get amazing shows like The Picture of Dorian Gray, for which the use of cameras and screens are so integral to that story about image and the concept of ourselves.”
Armitage concludes that: “Theatre’s willingness to experiment has always been great. So, as these new kinds of technologies become more readily available, we should definitely keep looking at integrating them. I’m especially interested in seeing what the future will hold for things like holograms, for example.
“There will be shows that get it right – and that will be amazing – and there will be ones that get it wrong. But it’s not the technology’s fault, it’s about the skills of the people utilising it and about how they make it feel integral to the story.”
Learn more about the importance of technical support in theatre productions with a focus on Starlight Express here.
This feature was first published in the Jan/Feb 2025 issue of LIVE.
