Legally Blonde the Musical

SHOW RUN: July 12th - August 17th, 2024

PRODUCER: Zilker Theatre Productions
DIRECTOR: Jason Kruger
MUSIC DIRECTOR: Lyn Koenning
CHOREOGRAPHER: Taylor Rainbolt
STAGE MANAGER: Amy Oxley

SET DESIGNER: Brydon H. Lidle, IV
ASST SET DESIGNER: Jessica Colley-Mitchell
TECHNICAL DIRECTOR: Nick Pascarosa, Aaron Stahlecker
COSTUME DESIGNER: Wayne Fowks
PROPERTIES DESIGNER: Michael Gault
LIGHTING DESIGNER: Kathryn Eader
SOUND DESIGNER: Zia Fox
SOUND ENGINEER: Rodd Simonsen

Ohmigod you guys!

Legally Blonde was my first production at Austin’s infamous Zilker Hillside Theatre, as well as my first outdoor sound design. With the help of my wonderful engineer, Rodd Simonsen, Legally Blonde could be heard on the hillside.

Zilker’s theatre is quite literally on a hillside - a grassy slope perfect for viewing the stage in the valley. The sound, lighting, and stage management team run the show from atop the hill at a building affectionately called “the bunker”. Cables that connect the bunker to the stage run underground, nearly 250 feet.

A big consideration for sound is the amount of dust our equipment picks up for 2 weeks of tech and 6 weeks of show. Good sound boards and all their accessories are expensive, especially when you have a high channel count. Having to replace a sound board on a semi-regular basis is a financial nightmare. Rodd, who had worked Zilker many times before, thought of a solution.

What if we didn’t have a sound board?

Our mixing station was comprised of a Windows, a Mac, two network switches, and two Allen & Heath IP8’s. The Windows computer ran iLive Director - one of Allen & Heath’s offline editors - and connected to a dLive DM0 backstage. The Mac ran QLab alongside the show script. The network switches were Dante Primary and Secondary, run over fiber. We also used two StreamDeck devices to manage QLab and our script.

This mixing setup was devised by Rodd with longevity and cost efficiency in mind. Replacing the A&H IP8’s is certainly much cheaper than replacing an A&H Avantis. He chose fiber runs for Dante for its higher speeds and to run 2110 video with it (which ironically never panned out).

We had two mixers - one for mixing vocals and page turning, and the other for QLab and Band. Our lead mixer, Owen, helped us improve the flow of the setup as we tech’ed.

At first, I was skeptical of our setup. Having no physical board to mix with seemed like a huge risk to take with a show as big as this. I ended up enjoying this quite a bit and, with a few tweaks, I would even recommend it. Since the IP8’s connect to an A&H system as board extenders, they needed to connect to DM0 over network - our Dante Primary. Once they were recognized on the network, the IP8’s were entirely programmable within the iLive Director application. The IP8 on the left was used for vocal DCAs and included the scene advancing buttons. The IP8 on the right was used for band mixing and quickly adjusting individual instrument levels.

Originally we were using a MIDI controller for QLab and page turning. The lack of buttons made it hard to navigate QLab and the script. I’d been looking for a good excuse to try out a Stream Deck for sound so we added a MK.2 for QLab and a Stream Deck Foot Pedal for page turning. Aside from some headaches with my script pdf file getting to large to edit, I found the Mac-side of our show to be relatively painless and thoroughly successful.

On the Windows-side of things, using two touch screens for the iLive Director made our little Frankenstein setup feel less like a computer and more like a sound board. This offline editor has an option in the settings that allows you to connect as a surface to an A&H MixRack and manage a show through it. Though it was designed for monitoring, we found success in using it as our main board. For a while, our biggest problem was occasional lag without interruption of sound while moving between menus. (Going to the EQ menu was a particularly bad culprit.) However, once we moved up to the bunker and started using fiber instead of ethernet, we began to see a bigger issue which I’ll touch on below.

The rest of our system was fairly standard. We routed wireless mics through their own sound board backstage on a smaller A&H board, which made it very easy for our A2s to listen for issues. The band had their own digital setup as well, though I didn’t learn too much about it because I was focusing on other parts of our system.

There were a lot of growing pains, which weren’t helped by the Texas summer heat. Backstage, our A2s were constantly cycling through channels to tackle sweat outs as soon as they happened. We lost a handful of mics - which is inevitable to some degree with outdoor theatre - but that number would have been much greater if not for the diligence of our backstage crew.

Tangentially, we got to a point where we could count on the board crashing once per performance. Rodd’s leading theory for the crashes was the fiber overheating in the network switch. We had backup fiber runs for both primary and secondary, but they all equally disliked the midsummer weather. Because of dust, we were using compressed air to clean the fiber connectors every show day and we put protective caps on them at the end of every show. While the problem could have very much been dust-related, most signs point to heat.

So what could we have done better? We could have run ethernet up the hill alongside fiber, just to narrow down if our problem was with fiber or the network switches. Rodd is pretty sure we wouldn’t have had the same problems with ethernet, considering he’d used ethernet in years prior without problem. Though fans are likely to cause more issues because of all the dust outside, we could have come up with a cooling strategy for the network switches.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and I have learned a lot from this show. One of my main principles as a designer is to innovate, and that we did. I learned that it’s entirely possible to run a show from an offline editor. I learned that, despite what the internet will tell you, fiber can overheat. I was shown again that when a sound team is built on trust, you can overcome even the most terrifying problems, like the mixing board crashing.

Thank you Rodd, Owen, AJ, Nadia, and Jesus - you made this show like so totally awesome.