Orbital Sound supplied the sound system for the Dutch production of hit musical Jersey Boys, featuring sound design by Steve Canyon Kennedy.

The set-up includes MICA compact high-powered curvilinear array speakers from Meyer Sound, as well as d&b audiotechnik’s E0 compact loudspeakers.

With it being the first foreign language version of the show, which opened recently at the Beatrix Theatre in Utrecht, the sound team has had to cope with its own set of unique challenges, other than the conventional issues of the venue.

"Jersey Boys today is in a place that we couldn’t have dreamed of eight years ago when it first opened on Broadway. There have been some fairly seismic shifts in terms of the equipment available to us, and we have undergone a slow evolutionary march towards this latest production, which is different in virtually all respects," said associate sound designer Andrew Keister. "Each step along the way has given us either a higher degree of quality to the sound or greater degree of control over the performance.

"The majority of the speaker system is a Meyer MICA array, which is an extremely precise and powerful system, which we have been using for the past four years and are very happy with the results. It provides an ideal combination of power and throw for a musical like Jersey Boys without any compromise in terms of output and frequency response. Processing for the audio is all handled via the Meyer’s Galileo system, which has a great set of unique filtering tools and gives us excellent control. We are using a Digico SD7 for front of house duties, taking in around 110 inputs and filtering them down to the Galileo.

"We have a cast of 16 on the show, together with a nine-piece band, and are using Sennheiser 5212 radio mics with 3732 receivers. Most of the band appears on stage wirelessly at some point, and we use DPA 4099 mics – the H variant – for the horns, and a custom-made adapter for the guitars and bass to get the impedance at the correct level to go into the 5212s. The venue is interesting, giving us a bit of a challenge with regard to the balcony – it was added to the theatre at a later date, sits relatively low compared to the stalls level, and then the ceiling above the balcony is quite low too."

The rest of the eight-person sound crew consists of production engineer Hennie Schwithal; Orbital’s Dan Bailey and David Bartholomeusz; head of sound and show mixer Norbert Boekhout; radio mic technician Andre Kijk in de Vegte, plus Thijs Hoonakker and Joost van de Put.

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