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[0:09] Lauren Van Hemert: This is the Beltline to Broadway podcast.

[0:11] Juan Isler: I'm Lauren Van Hemert, your host.

[0:13] Juan Isler: And I'm Juan Isler. And on this episode, we are chatting with Rob Kaplowitz.

[0:29] Juan Isler: Since 1994, Rob Kaplowitz has been a sound designer on art installations, films, opera, and Broadway. In fact, he won a Tony Award for his work on Fela!.

[0:44] Juan Isler: One of his current projects brings him to North Carolina, where he is installing a state-of-the-art sound system for Cape Fear Regional Theater in Fayetteville. I was able to catch up with Kaplowitz along with my friend and colleague Juan Isler to talk about the evolution of sound design and what patrons can expect to hear at Cape Fear Regional Theater down the road. Here's our conversation.

[1:53] Rob Kaplowitz: Like that it went there was amazing. But I never expected to become a regular in that circuit. And so I definitely still I mean design is my primary thing. I love the critical back and forth between me and the composers when there are composers and the director, and that process is what I get most excited about. It's that sort of 12 weeks of conceptualization and creation leading up to production that I love best.

[2:23] Juan Isler: How does the system you are installing here at Cape Fear? How is that gonna compare to the Broadway houses you've worked in?

[2:34] Rob Kaplowitz: Hopefully, pretty well. Um in a Broadway house, there's no house system. When you do commercial theater, when you do Broadway, it's an empty building. It's a four-wall rental. So you literally rent, you're renting four empty walls and some pipes in the grid, and that's it. There's no sound system, they don't even have backstage monitors. It's literally an empty building; you've got to bring everything in. And that's part of the sort of dramaturgically driven sound thing is that if I'm gonna bring everything in, I'm gonna bring in exactly the system that matches rather than a system that matches the venue. Here, because you have a house system, what I've put in is a sort of the closest thing I can come up with to a generically even system everywhere.

We're using the speakers are all, like I said, it's all L-Acoustics, they're Kiva 2s, and they're the point source system, which are the X series is what they're called. These are Broadway level speakers. Um it's a much smaller venue. We have a lot more control in a funny way, in a smaller space. You don't have a balcony, you don't have an under balcony. There's been a great acoustic solution that happened. There used to be in this theater, there used to be these sort of weird soft ceiling jiggy jaggies in the back that created unbearable reflections coming back at you. That's been cleared out. So in a funny way, things will be a little easier than Broadway here. It's certainly not gonna have you don't have the flexibility of a Broadway system, and you don't have you're not gonna have the front end.

The people the mixing console that we're sticking with here is not a Broadway level mixing console, and large that's largely part partially due to the local skill set. Um if you start getting into uh you know the Digico consoles, which are the sort of go-to Broadway desk, you're getting into a console that you need to go spend a week just learning how it works. So we may, after we've got this system up and running and everyone trained on it, we may eventually graduate to the next level up of console. But there's a degree of control you don't have with the Behringer, which is what they've got. Um but you're gonna get pretty close.

[4:46] Juan Isler: What you showed us, you are going deep into solving the problems. Whereas in most of the time, theaters ask for an expert and they get someone who thinks they're an expert and they come in and put some speakers up. What made you decide you were going to go deeper with it and help theaters achieve that?

[5:04] Rob Kaplowitz: Um, are you talking about for this particular project or just overall?

[5:07] Juan Isler: Overall.

[5:07] Rob Kaplowitz: Because I know I know if you're doing it for this project, that's your way.

[5:10] Rob Kaplowitz: It is. Yeah. I build an acoustic model on every single show. Whatever the tools are that I'm gonna have in the theater, I want to use them to the best possible extent that I can use them. So if a theater says I have these nine old speakers and they're all, you know, whatever, I still want to be able to configure them so that I'm walking in with the best baseline that I can. Uh I don't have any, I have no proper academic training in this, right? The I went uh I have an undergraduate degree from NYU, but we didn't actually have a sound design program then. So uh they actually canceled the sound design program while I was studying there due to under enrollment. So I have a bachelor's degree, but it actually says honors in acting.

I've never acted in my life, so that tells you something. But I have a BFA in that. Um and so I did learn, I learned from a lot of uh people, a lot of sound folks who were very much sort of do it by ear, do it by knowledge, do it by experience. What I discovered in those settings was that the second that you ran into equipment you didn't know, or a venue that was arranged in a way that was uncomfortable to you, you were starting from zero, right? Because okay, as long as I can order these specific mics and these specific speakers, and I'm in a proscenium theater, then I know how to do it because I've you know I'm based building it on my experience and on other people's experience. But if I have to apply that to a situation where I don't have those givens, then I'm just guessing.

Right, right? And I'm guessing based on knowledge, but I'm just guessing. So for me to be able to say like I can predict with a reasonable level of certainty, and I'll I'll be honest, I mean, you know this. It's not gonna sound exactly like that. Right. It can't. You know, is the are the speakers gonna be six inches this way or two inches that way? What happens when my audience is half empty? What happens if it turns out that the wavy walls that the architect drew aren't installed exactly the way it's not gonna be exactly that this is a close approximation, and then I depend on that other half. That other half of I've put the speakers up, I'm gonna turn them on, I'm gonna use my ears, and I'm gonna use technology is again I'm gonna use smart, you know, to tune the sound system because I'm not gonna, you know, my ears are also aging, but I'm gonna put this, I'm gonna use pink noise, I'm gonna use reference mics, and then I'm gonna turn all that off and I'm gonna turn on music and I'm gonna say, does it sound good?

If it doesn't, let's see what I fix. So it's definitely about I feel like there's uh you can't be trapped in the technology, but to not use it is to rob yourself of a whole, you know of the whole experience.

[8:06] Juan Isler: One question I have is when I looked at your bio, it said that you connect dramaturgy with sound design. Um I've not heard anyone explain it that way, make that connection. So can you elaborate on that? I'm very interested, and this is both for musicals and plays.

[8:25] Rob Kaplowitz: The shape of the sound system in my book should not be determined by the venue. It needs to encompass the venue, but it should be determined by the way that you want to tell the story. What's the story you're telling and how do you want to tell it? I did a production in Dallas of It's a Bird, it's a Plan, it's Superman, right? This old which is a sort of 80s musical, and the entire conception of the production was very comic book. So the set was almost in panels, right? And so what I wanted to do was create a very flat sound. I actually didn't want, you know, we're all about encompassing and embracing. We but I wanted to create a sound that moved away the comic, and it matched the choreography and it matched the clothing.

The clothing was like block colors, and what I did was I did a big LCR system. And so wherever you were, you know, and it was a lot of panning, a lot of pan automation for the poor, you know. But it was like whatever happened, we were always just moving in that plane, right? And I had to really it's a hard space to do that in, but we managed to pull it off. Um whereas like when I did Fela, we were really interested in this idea of the shrine and of exploding the proscenium. And so using a lot of um, I don't want to get too like nerdy, but the core principle that the first place you hear a sound from is where you imagine it's coming from, right? So it's they call it the Haas effect or precedence effect.

And if you're careful and clever with it, what you can do is you can create zones on the stage that are your zero time, and then you can time align an entire sound system to that, including surrounds, so that what we did was people you rarely will put vocals in a surround, but I built it so that we could image perfectly to a spot on stage while keeping the voice in the full surrounds. So that was about like breaking through the you know, like putting everyone in the audience inside the shrine. I always want to drive my system based on what story we want to tell. And what that means, and you're getting I always get not always, I often get pushback. I'll often get pushback. When I was doing that show.

I would get pushback from some of the sort of traditional Broadway theater people who are like, but that's not the way the sound system should be aligned. Why aren't you making it phase accurate? Why aren't you making it the I wanna I need those phase the I need the mistakes in the system to fool the ear because I got an actor up on stage who everyone thinks is playing the saxophone and he's not playing the saxophone. And I gotta move the sound of the actual saxophone over here. Right. And so I need to make a little smear. Right? I need to make it not, you know. So yeah, I mean uh so I'm always that yes, so I'm very interested in the way sound tells stories.

[11:14] Juan Isler: Have you ever had any issues with any actors who have had a problem with the sound design? Like the sound is too loud or the sound is too soft.

[11:23] Rob Kaplowitz: No, most of the time it's pretty good. The place where it goes wrong for me, and it's happened a few times, is if I am not integrated enough in the rehearsal process, and I'm doing conceptual work. So, for example, I did a production. Um, there's a play by Christina Hamm called Four Women, and it's about the moment, there's a sort of legendary moment that I'm sure you know, where Nina Simone um sort of exploded from a jazz musician to an activist, and it was after the shooting of the you know the Birmingham jail, the brother the bombing of the Birmingham jail, and the idea that the whole event, her personal transformation, took place in one evening, and she wrote her first song that night. Um so I it all the whole play is set in the church in Birmingham, but it's actually set in her studio at the same time.

She never went down there. So I had this idea that everything in the play should be all of this, there's a lot of sound effects described in the play about what's happening outside the rioting and the protests and the police violence and all of that stuff that's happening outside. Um and I wanted to build it all out of a piano, and I had an old piano in my studio that was done for it, it was untunable. So I destroyed it. I recorded myself smashing this piano up to bits and made all of the sound of what was happening out of this piano. And I so that so that all of your crowd sounds, all of your everything was made out of the sounds of this destruction of the piano. I loved it. I thought it was genius.

[12:59] Rob Kaplowitz: Well, the problem is in the rehearsal room that it hadn't gotten communicated. So and the and the stage manager, and it it was uh and I was too busy. This is back this is one of the reasons that I don't do so many shows anymore. I was too busy to be in there. I came into a couple rehearsals, I talked about it a little bit, but I should have had all these sounds in the rehearsal room from day one. Because what happened was the stage manager kept calling out crowd sound, or she would like name the gunshots. And so when we got to the theater and we started tagging this in, and I would play the sound effects, the actors were like, that wasn't a gunshot. That's not a crowd. And I was like, No, the whole point is and because I hadn't embedded I I hadn't done my work, I hadn't embedded the conceptual design in their acting approach, they were looking for, they had imagined a different design.

They had imagined a naturalistic film design, which you know wasn't suited to the production or anything, but that was so and that was my failure. But so yes, absolutely I got pushback from the actors in that, and eventually we sort of made a hybrid design that with some effects and some my thing, and um, but it was very unsatisfying for everyone.

[14:11] Rob Kaplowitz: So usually when I get a uh when I am getting a sort of uh a sort of if if I play a sound cue and it gets that weird uncomfortable giggle, or I play a sound cue and I'm getting a pushback, it usually, when I was younger, I was like, Those archiver forks, but the reality is it's a it's a warning sign. There they have embodied these characters in these roles, same with musicians within the live orchestra. That you know, they've embodied this stuff, and if it's not sitting right with them, then I need to go and re examine. It's the same way, I mean it's the same with anything, right? Like anytime you start when the people that you respect, and I'm not saying everyone, but when the people that you respect give you a push back and say, why are you doing this? Then you gotta go, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this?

[14:58] Rob Kaplowitz: In a post-COVID world when we're dealing with actors and musicians in masks or with shields, how is that gonna impact the future of sound design? It's an interesting question. I mean, uh I I did do we did um this this last fall working with a company in Philadelphia called Shakespeare and Clark Park, we actually created a pageant wagon. We went old school. We were like the the artistic director was like, it's it's a plague, let's go back to the 16th century. And we we built this awesome wagon that could get towed by a van, and all the performers were masked, and we would bring it to people's to block to block. Philly is a city of blocks, so you'd bring it to a block, and people would watch the show from their porches, and everyone was masked.

And what we what I did before we started was I literally just I took a lav and I took an actor and we went into my boot vocal booth and we moved the lav around and around until we found a place where it sounded good as good as it could, right? And we discovered unsurprisingly that actually the center forehead position, which is the position everyone wants in theater, actually was the best sounding option. And then you know, I had and I had to make sure that I had a system that was a little extra crisp, and we had to really, you know, there's a lot of 400 hertz you had to dial out. But like we could make it work.

[16:18] Rob Kaplowitz: I don't know if we're gonna be masked on stage. I think um I mean there's gonna be a lot of questions for equity. There's gonna be a lot of questions, you know. You all both know, and it's interesting because you're doing a podcast which is a non-visual medium, right? In theater, one of the one of the crowning rules is if you can't see their mouths, you can't hear them as well. So you've got to be a little louder, you gotta be a little brighter. We may find that that we're and we may have hybrid stuff. We may have some performers masked and some not. It's gonna be a complicated challenge. I don't know. And are we gonna I mean I think the other honest question is like, okay, we've got the vaccine for this version of SARS-CoV-What what happens when the next iteration comes out?

And are we gonna be just a masked society? Is the audience gonna just be masked? We did when we did the film shoots for the opera, there's a lot of masking. The only people who were on mask were the singers, um, and then there's a lot of set design that involves plexiglass, right? And everyone recording is masked and shielded. And I don't I mean it's it's certainly a uh it's uh obviously a world-changing event and part of the world that's been changed is ours.

[17:26] Rob Kaplowitz: Well, one of my theories is that when we go back to the theater, there's still gonna be a level of of virtual theater being done. What are your thoughts on that as it relates to sound? I I think it's gonna happen. I think based on my conversations with producers, there there are audience members who never want to come back to the theater. Some of it's about fear, some of it's about convenience. Some of it's about like I want you to bring that theater to my living room now that I've had it. Um I think I mean I find that I've actually it's funny, pre-COVID, I actually was talking, I have a friend who does virtual reality for a living, and I was talking to him about like is there a way to add a virtual component?

You put a virtual head in the audience, you know, a 3D audio head and visual head in the audience so that there's a true in audience component. We were talking about it, you know, there's a sorrow to that, which is that if you don't have a live relationship to the stage, you don't have an empathy machine. The empathy machine is about that breath, right? It's about sharing a heartbeat. And it does. We all know audience heartbeats sync up, right? You put people in a room together and their hearts start to beat in rhythm, they start to breathe together, and you can break down, it's what aids. I mean, to me, it's philosophically why theater matters. Because when I see a story performed live in front of me from a different lived experience, I share that lived experience. And that doesn't happen in a movie. You can get close, but it doesn't happen.

[19:00] Rob Kaplowitz: All of which is to say there's still gonna be streaming theater. People are gonna want a virtual component, they're gonna want to be able to say, okay, I have 150 seats in my theater, but I can stream to a thousand people. I honestly think it's gonna become a second job. I think you're gonna have your live design team and you're gonna have your streaming design team. And if you try and combine them, you're gonna have second rate live and second rate streaming. You know, whereas if you bring in a team that is your streaming team, that's gonna, I would think include the visual capture team and the audio capture team, then you have a chance. And I think it's like when we do, I've done a couple of um Broadway Live or Broadway HD projects, and when they do that, you literally we do a complete console split pre-fade.

So when I when I have when I did um my friend uh Daryl Bornstein is amazing, and he does all the PBS ones. And what we do is we literally feed him directly from out of the mics, it goes to his console and it goes to my console. And he's doing a completely separate mix. No, he's you know, I'm gonna send him post-fade reverbs, I'm gonna send him, and and he's I mean, because Daryl's amazing, he'll sit with me and he'll listen to the show three or four times through, so he gets the vibe and he understands it. But he knows that he's mixing for a different environment. There's no live acoustic sound, right? Right? When I'm mixing for live, there's the ground zero is my acoustic source, right? You know, I've never I will never have never end will never put a microphone on an accordion.

Right? Why would you put a microphone on an accordion? I can fill a thousand seat arena with an unmiced accordion, right? But but he needs a mic on the accordion because there's no accordion there, right? There's no there there.

[20:49] Rob Kaplowitz: So I think that that that's gonna be the answer, is if you want and I think there are gonna be there are gonna be people who try and do it on the cheap, they're gonna be people who try and do it on the like, I don't have the labor to do this, and then you're gonna get the equivalent of what we've seen in a lot of the streaming stuff, which is I'm putting my archive on online, right? And it's it's a clo it's a nice approximation. If it's well done, it can be well done. And it's like, oh, I'm watching this and I'm remembering what it was like to see a play live. You're not seeing I'm watching an event that is of an equal quality to a live play, right? I'm not, you know, if you want to complete compete with Netflix, you're gonna need to bring in a team that can do that.

You're gonna need to bring in your team who's gonna say, Okay, I'm gonna hang 30 cameras, and they're all gonna be robot operated, and I'm gonna be able to get you this shot and this shot and this shot, because that's an actual streaming experience.

[21:40] Rob Kaplowitz: One of the things that these virtual streams have done is make theater accessible. Yes, how will going into this new normal, this hybrid, how will that continue to make theater accessible, and how what are the sound challenges to make theater accessible to your deaf and hard of hearing community? Oh, I think this is two awesome questions. I think. Um, one is I think the answer to the first half is if you do it right, like if you bring in that second team, right? If you bring in a team that is dedicated to that streamed experience, so that they're thinking about all of that stuff, right? Your live design team can't, they just don't have the bandwidth to think about it, and so it becomes it's the same thing that when I was talking about the in the presentation when I was talking about the the assisted listening.

I always watch an entire performance using the assisted listening and note the performance that way because because I can't stand it, because I can't stand the fact that it's like, oh yeah, it's the backstage feed, run it through a compressor, it'll be fine. No, that's not fair. Right? Like, if you're gonna hand out, if you're saying I'm complying with the ADA laws by handing this thing out, but that that's all I'm doing, then don't do it, right? If what you're doing is saying I want you to have an amazing experience in my theater, then sit there and listen to that darn mix and make it better and note it and go up at intermission and make the changes you need to to that mix, or you get a remote and get it so that you dial it in so that it's great.

[23:14] Rob Kaplowitz: And in the same way, like if I'm gonna say that I'm gonna use streaming to help people who are either, yes, absolutely medically compromised, who have any impairment at all, like let's get that so that it's of the quality that they deserve. I think that there's a whole world to be explored. And I think that there's um now that the technol the technology is evolving, a rethinking of how we relate. Because again, it's an it's an important, you know, when you have signed shows and you have uh audio described shows and you have there are a lot of theater companies that are doing um sensory-friendly across the board, right? Like more less intense, you know, lighting cues get changed. What is there a way to say we've discovered more ways to make it accessible?

Can we incorporate that into our practice? Because if anything, if we've learned anything in this in this year, it's that when we have time to reflect, we can really reflect across the board. We can reflect on equity across the board and say, like, okay, fine, we've been going along this way because it's the way it's always been done. But when you have um an inset and like an impact that that an incident that impacts you, and you say, okay, we've got a health crisis coming this way, we've got uh long overdue racial equity or awareness growing this way. How can we use both of these things to change the way we interact as as a human culture? In that same way, how okay? We had a pandemic, we have a bunch of theaters trying to connect to audiences. We've suddenly exploded the assumption that the only way to see theater is this way. How can we make it happen? So I think it I think it's an exciting possibility.

[25:01] Juan Isler: Laura and I had a chance to take a tour of Cape Fear Regional Theater's space, which is currently undergoing some major renovations for more information on not only the sound system upgrades, but the entire project.

[25:41] Juan Isler: Until next time, I'll see you at the theater.