Some tidbits from Mark N Grant's "The Rise and Fall of the American Musical":
-- Floor miking goes back to the 30s. Earl Carroll is said to have brought out a Hollywood sound man to "enhance" his revues as early as 1933 (critics Brooks Atkinson and Richard Watts publicly took Carroll to task for doing so in his 1940 revue). "Dubarry Was a Lady" (1939)secretly used amplification because of the heavy brass orchestrations, despite Merman being in the cast.
-- Saki Oura was apparently the first person to receive Playbill credit for "consulting sound engineer" for 1945's "One Touch of Venus."
-- Richard Rodgers said that Carousel was his last show without microphones and Ethan Mordden has said that ironically ex-opera singer Helen Traubel was the first R&H performer to be miked in Pipe Dream (1955).
-- West Side Story (1957) used foot mikes
-- the first show to use a sound mixing console in the back of the theatre was 1957's Jamaica, so that Lena Horne's voice could be heard at the back of the theatre over the heavy orchestrations.
-- Wireless radio microphones were first produced in the early 1960s (one source claims Carol Channing used one in Dolly in 1964), but didn't become widely used until the 1970s. Cats (1982) was probably the first show in which every single performere wore a wireless mike. Even as late as 1981, Dreamgirls only used 5 wireless mikes; when the shows other performers came downstage, the whole orchestra had to come down in volume because the performers were coming off of the foot mikes.
"What a story........ everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end." -- Birdie
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"The Devil Be Hittin' Me" -- Whitney
Updated On: 4/9/06 at 03:11 PM
