Bright Star by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell
Brooks Center for Performing Arts, February 2020
Director: Shannon Robert
Lighting Designer: Kimberley Porth
Costume Designer: Kendra Johnson
Set Designer: David Hartmann
Mixing the Show
Our production of Bright Star used an 8-piece band and 19 wireless actors, 3 of whom also played instruments throughout the show. I used our theater's Digico SD5 console to mix and process the audio every night, as well as operating Qlab to fire the sound cues I designed.
​
This clip is a board recording from our final performance night of the song "At Last", where Alice finally realizes what happened to the son she presumed dead many years ago and delivers a powerful solo backed by the majority of the rest of the cast and members of the band.
​
​
Working
with the band
The Shiny Penny
Last Summer Bash
The song "A Man's Gotta Do - Reprise" takes place on a moving train, and begins with a very rhythmic instrumental intro that gradually gets faster before hitting a set tempo. The director and I had the idea to utilize the sound of an actual train starting up and gaining speed to set the scene and provide a moving metronome of sorts for the band before fading out the cue.
Upon finding a clip that had a similar tempo to the song and editing it to match the track the band had been rehearsing with, I worked with the fiddle and mandolin players as well as the cast to coordinate their playing and choreography. In this video I use the talk-back microphone by the board to count out the beats for the fiddle and mandolin players, Ceili and Will.
Billy arrives at The Shiny Penny, "A lively cafe-bar" where the citizens of Asheville and employees of The Southern Journal newspaper go to cut loose.
​
In order to support the cast in portraying the excited atmosphere of the bar, I layered together two lengthy "bar" ambient recordings, the sounds of a party, and intermittent glass clinking sound effects and laughter to create this cue.
The town of Zebulon gathers at the park for Couples' Day, a party at the end of the summer.
​
This cue served several purposes: establishing our setting as a nice day outdoors; showing that this is an event that the whole community bought into and brought their kids; and supporting the cast in portraying the joy that the town feels that day.
​
To create this, I layered together two recordings of outdoor parties, the sounds of an elementary school playground, two recordings of birdsong, and a recording of young people cheering that played when a character called for the crowd to grab a partner.
​
Production Photos by Ken Scar.