This week I was at St. Patrick’s Catholic School in Rockville, MD, providing on-site audio consulting and support for their upcoming production of The Jungle Book.
Our good friend Gina Swanda lives in nearby Rockville, MD. A few years back, she enthusiastically set up a meeting with the principal of St. Patrick’s. She told the principal that she had “just the thing we need here at St. Patrick’s.”
I chuckled at Gina’s retelling of this story a few years back, because I can only imagine what the principal thought was coming next. A swimming pool? (don’t knock it…my grade school had one and it was awesome)? After school e-sports gaming league? A petting zoo?
No, silly. A musical.
Ann and I have known Gina since we were all students at USC back in the late 90s. We performed together with a group of our other friends from church as News At Eleven. Gina was studying musical theater while at USC, so it’s not at all surprising that as a parent of 3 kids at St. Patrick’s, she’d want to “use her skills for good.” So a few years back, she and a few other members of the St. Patrick’s faculty (including Jill Fecko, with whom we produced a grid video for the St. Patrick’s Class of 2020 when the pandemic shut down their graduation ceremony that spring) got the green light to put on an annual spring musical in the St. Patrick’s parish center.
The facility, as you can see from the pictures, is your typical Catholic school “gymnasium that doubles as a theater” — an environment I performed in many times during my own days in Catholic school growing up outside Chicago. Everything has to be very flexible, very portable, and very multi-purpose, since the room gets used by a lot of other constituencies throughout the year. But that leads to its own set of problems. When the sound system was installed, the decision was made to install a set of Bose line array speakers on either edge of the stage. These are nice, low-profile speakers, and they were installed on hinges. The idea was, we think, that the speakers could be folded out of the way when not in use, protecting them from errant basketballs thrown at the backboard just a few feet away.
But that little bit of flexibility raised a whole other set of problems for sound reinforcement. The proscenium stage is fairly narrow, and Gina and the other producers made the sensible decision to increase their stage area by nearly 50% simply by adding two platforms as thrusts on either side of the main stage. So far, so good — until you realize that the thrust platforms are each directly in front of a speaker array. With up to 10 performers wearing live wireless microphones at one time, having the speakers hung where they are is a recipe for audio disaster. Any time a performer crosses onto or off of the thrust platform, he/she has to walk directly past the speaker array — resulting in a loud howl of feedback.
That’s when Gina got in touch with us here at ULS. Back in 2019, Gina and the producers hired me to come assess the problems they were having, offer suggestions on how to combat the feedback, and just to generally optimize the audio system for their show. To their great credit, they’re more interested in learning how to do it themselves rather than just having someone come in and fix everything. Having secured the budget to purchase their own audio gear, they were looking for someone to show them how to use it properly.
So I was on site with them for their 2019 production of The Little Mermaid. In 2020, they were in rehearsals for Mary Poppins when covid hit; like a lot of organizations, they first postponed the show, then were ultimately forced to cancel when “two weeks” turned out to be far, far longer than what we were all hoping for.
With covid now (please God) hopefully in the rear view mirror as a pandemic disease, I was very happy to get a call from Gina earlier this spring asking whether I would be available to come consult for St. Patrick’s again this spring — this time for their production of Jungle Book. It’s the same production crew as always, so it was nice to see some familiar faces again. And I had to chuckle as I recognized several younger siblings of the Class of 2020. Several of the performers are the absolute spitting image of older brothers and sisters who appeared in the St. Patrick’s 8th grade grid video I produced for the school back in 2020.
It was really great to see live theater happening in the schools again. As for the St. Patrick’s crew, I’d say everyone, including me, was a little rusty about the details of their system — it having been already three years since the last show went up in May of 2019. We had to chase down some odd problems with stray feedback and microphones cutting out for no apparent reason. But by the time I left after attending rehearsal yesterday, things were looking (and sounding) good. I think everyone is really appreciating the opportunity to perform live for friends and family again. Having done without live theater for a couple of years, I think everyone really appreciates it now.
The Jungle Book runs May 6-7, 2022 at St. Patrick’s in Rockville. A big “break a leg” to all the cast and crew!
