Adlib Gets D'Musical for Mrs Brown's Boys posted: 20/05/2019
Pre-show set up
Continuing an excellent working relationship that stretches back nearly 20 years - to 2000 to be precise - Adlib is supplying full technical production - sound, lighting, video and rigging with over 100 points - to the ongoing 2019 arena tour by Brendan O'Carroll and his Mrs. Brown's Boys phenomenon. Presenting its first ever musical tour, Mrs Brown's Boys D'Musical! the show has just finished the first of three one-month segments, each covering four major cities where they play for a week.
Hassane es Siahi is the FOH engineer, the Adlib systems engineer is Alan Harrison, Steph Fleming is the monitor engineer and Shona Steadman is looking after mics and RF. Lighting has been designed by Mike Summerfield. Fiona Gibney & Gareth Woods are the producers.
With up to 18 people onstage at any one time as the cast and creative elements push the envelope, as a technical solutions provider, Adlib ups the ante for this most technically complex Mrs Brown's touring show to date.
Audio
Once again, a comprehensive CODA system was chosen to deliver sound for the tour. Alan Harrison is a big advocate of the brand, especially for theatrical style shows like this.
He's worked on the last four tours dating back to 2012, and it's always been CODA since then providing a winning formula of power, clarity and handleability.
As with any comedy show, precision is the mission so people can hear the enunciation and intonations very clearly, getting every punch line and gag effortlessly and comfortably and the challenge is delivering these levels of intelligibility throughout large cavernous arena spaces.
The cast members all use a variety of DPA headset mics which are sensitive and very transparent sounding. The stage design includes a thrust, another potentially tricky dimension needing careful audio consideration and positioning, so a key for this system design was to have multiple smaller speaker arrays around the rooms, including left-centre-right delays halfway down.
This ensured that enough energy reached all the right places without getting bounced back and reflecting around the place.
The two main PA hangs were smaller than normal - with (max) 12 x CODA AiRAY a side, flown slightly further downstage than the standard positioning.
Hassane at FOH on DiGiCo SD10
The subs were 12 x CODA SCPs, positioned six a side on the floor.
The side hangs were kept as discreet as possible - both for acoustics and sightlines - these comprised of up to 8 x AiRAYs, with four ViRAY downs depending on the venue.
A flown centre cluster of six ViRAY covered the first rows of audience.
CODA APS (array point source) speakers were attached - via special brackets - to the lighting trusses just above the corners of the thrust. These, coupled with more HOPS on brackets on the stage, allowed the focus of the audience in the first rows to be drawn directly towards the actors, keeping the immediacy of the humour.
The delays comprised 8 x ViRAYs each on the left and right, with eight of the little 5-inch TiRAYs in the centre which Alan comments pack a real punch for their tiny size.
Getting it right is something of a black art requiring those multiple fills plus some magic from Alan and Hassane's combined fund of sonic expertise and experience!
All of the flown speakers and those attached to the trusses were powered by 18 amplifiers - 9 a side - and with TiRAYs, APS' and HOPS' being run passive / 1 amp channel each and the AiRAY and ViRAY bi-amped, so 2 channels making an extremely efficient amplification footprint for an arena show, but with absolutely no compromise on the SPL.
The cable infrastructure was also very expedient with one Socapex to each hang, enhancing get in speeds which had to be optimised! With the amount of scenery, props and stage set, the PA crew were under pressure to get all their flown elements floating super-quickly so all the other departments - apart from rigging - could go in underneath'.
Alan reports proudly that this stage of the audio get in - also assisted by CODA's well known quick-rigging capacity - literally flew in and up in around 30 minutes from when they were handed the points!
Shortly after this, their speaker arrays were at trim, ready for the next stage of positioning the speakers on the lighting trusses. The efficiency and smoothness of this prompted many compliments from local crews!
Onstage the cast use side-fills for monitoring rather than IEMs which is proving a better solution for their specific brand of musical comedy. These were an array of 3 flown HOPS each side working in conjunction with two more HOPS on the upstage rail of the front lighting truss, pointing down.
Adlib's new SONY HDC-4300 4K camera with Canon 4K Broadcast Lens
The front monitors were also HOPS attached to the front of the thrust via more custom brackets, and slightly angled up!
Being a musical, the monitoring is loud, especially with multiple cast members onstage.
Alan comments that the gain-before-feedback of the CODA system is astounding I have never found another product that is this tolerant , and in a month of daily shows, they had only one feedback tweak!
The consoles were both DiGiCo's - an SD10 for Hassane at FOH, Steph used an SD12 for monitors, and Shona utilised a DiGiCo S21 to monitor the RF channels.
The cast sing live to playback with the tracks stored on a fully redundant 16-channel QLab system which is at the heart of the performance. Musical director Andy O'Callaghan and Hass spent considerable time on perfecting the transitions and programming during cast rehearsals at LS Live.
A DiGiCo Optocore network was used to connect and deal with all the track signal routing from the QLab, the FOH and monitor consoles and ra
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Adlib Gets D'Musical for Mrs Brown's Boys posted: 20/05/2019 
