The musical center of Shanghai Theatre Academy is developing rapidly as the hotbed of producing large-scale musicals. When Chinese musicals still at a slow stage，there are another group of students have graduated from the musical center of STA with their internship musical GREASE, which is a miracle of American musicals produced by the known playwrights Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey. Its debut at Kingston Mines theatre in Chicago, 1971, brought all Americans back to 50s. The three-day musical GREASE kicked off from 22nd, June at STA. This performance showed audiences the real scenes of 50s high school life by its intuitive music and dance. Of course, HR-30S Wireless Microphone System — RELACART’s professional performance product made its great contribution to this performance, too.
The director of the musical center of STA – Professor Wang Luoyong who is also a famous actor, served as consultant and Wang Chao served as choreographer to this latest musical, which was produced in the venues of STA. This time, GREASE arrived in China presenting the most original American Broadway for Chinese audiences. Except the grand scale of actors, the most extraordinary of this show is it adopted 17 sets wireless microphone simultaneously and the most advanced audio technology in where Relacart HR-30S wireless microphone played an important role.
Responsible for the design of sound system, the senior acoustics teachers who also served as on-site sound amplifying and monitoring engineers who designed the plan transmitting the performance sounds perfectly to hundreds of audiences. Because of the complicated plots in 50s America, the authenticity of voice is far more important than usual. Therefore, STA chose Hr-30s series, the matching antennas and custom-made antenna distributors. All the equipments were designed and set up by Relacart’s technical team and lay the foundation for the successful performance.
I’ve been using HR-30S series since I used it in Sweeney Todd in the end of last year. Since I used series in Sweeney Todd in the end of last year, their extraordinary stability really impresses me.” the consultant of this musical, Professor Wang Luoyong said, “the reason that we chose HR-30S series is that we hope we can interpret the musical more incisively and vividly. And no matter the sound-processing or the portability of equipments, HR-30S microphones of Relacart always give our actors the first-class taste”.
The 17 sets microphones probably pick up some noise we don’t want because of the grand scale of this musical and lots of action include the running, things moving, dancing of the actors on the stage, complicated mobile environment arrangement, numerous equipments using and even a car on the stage. But, Relacart’s HR-30S series means we can have clean and high-quality sound forever in our sound system.
“This is a very good system. I’ve used other brands of microphone to produce some musicals before, but I felt upset by about the radio frequency interference always. However, HR-30S never meet this problem. There is no accidence and RFI, no bodypack transmitter fracture event and tragedy of microphone suddenly failed during each rehearsal and actual performance -- everything goes so well in an orderly way. In addiction, RELACART’s technology Services team also provides us with invaluable strong support. ”
RELACART’s technology Services team designed and built the antenna distribution system. “Overall, we used 5 sets of R-14D antenna distributors with merely 2 Directional antennas. Thanks to this antenna distribution system, we have the guarantee of performance security and equipment stability for this show” director Hong of this musical said, “So many mobile environments and ornaments are in need of this kind of stable equipment and what is more, these environments and ornaments all are metal, which can create a large number of signal reflections. The RF environment in Shanghai is extremely crowed but this musical has to occupy a lot of RAF (radio frequency band-width). Therefore, we set a mode, which allows the equipments switch in a relatively large frequency space that we can change the frequency of the wireless microphone according to the situation. The HR-30S wireless system management software (RWW1.1) adopted in the production process has full control of wireless microphones equipments, too.”
GREASE is a rock musical with plenty of dancing and musical arias. At first, the crew was planed to record the arias and play it during the live performance but after many times of rehearsals, they gave up on this idea. Instead, the crew only prerecorded the bands and the choirs. The stability of RELACART microphone boosted their confidence to sing in live performance, which of course improved the quality of the show and finally gained the praise from the audiences.
The choreographer Mr. Wang commented on it: “The glamour of musical is it values the songs, dialogues, body movements and the acting, etc equally. The most touching musical is the live one. But many times because of the instability of the sound transmission system we need to do the recording just in case. HR-30S completed its task successfully without losing the spirit of the musical. What else? The bodypack transmitter is one of the reasons why I love this set of equipments so much.”
Generally, bodypack has specific constrains to actor. Because during the performance, dance movements and plenty of rushed clothes-changing acting will make the vibration and touch to the bodypack and thereby arouse some faults, like, mute or shutdown suddenly. However, T-30 bodypack transmitter has the most mini size in the world that allows the musical actors show their dance adequately as light as nothing. And, HR-30S is equipped with T-LOCK, which can lock the bodypack so good that it reduces the possibilities of mute or shutdown during the clothes-changing.
You've heard of Murphy's Law, which says that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And it is true for performance, too. So after three staffs from RELACART technical services team finished the dead points test, signal supplement, equipment debugging and maintenance, etc for the performance, they served as executives of emergency plan backstage. Firstly, each side of offstage has a staff waiting there with a backup microphone in case of any faults happen to the equipments. Secondly, battery life the microphone and signal display and so on were monitored the whole time by a staff. Thirdly, a student who was equipped assists us to contact with each equipment room of microphones and mixers. Owning to such seriously attitude for this show, the three-day performance accomplished so well and finally, the three groups of students from musical centre won tremendous accolades.
