Loud, but Not Too Clear

With or without music it’s a satisfying sound--a strong, rich, unamplified human voice on a big stage.

I miss it already.

Amplification is here. For plenty of theater, all across the economic and stylistic spectra, it’s right. Not just inevitable, but preferable. With other material, it’s wrong. It’s shrill. It’s false. It’s sheet metal instead of hardwood.

Oh, well, better get used to it, I tell myself, coming out of the latest over-amplified pop excursion--”Martin Guerre,” say, or some other Protestant operetta. You liked those Husker Du concerts, yesterday, when you were young. Why is something half as loud 40 times as annoying?

Because we’re cramming new technology onto art forms that may, in many cases, be better off without it. When misapplied, amplification “reinforces the voice” (sound designerspeak) in ways that flatten the aural experience, rather than heighten or clarify. Let’s hear what the performers can do without all that help.

Increasingly, amplification’s a fact of theatergoing life with plays as well as musicals, especially in (but hardly exclusive to) larger auditoriums such as the Ahmanson Theatre. The problem, as I hear it, or try not to hear it, isn’t in the instance of an electronically creative soundscape.

Using layered, even assaultive aural effects, sharp directors and designers can cast a spell and make us listen--surprise us, head-on or more indirectly. Smart actors know how to modulate their performances so that their own instruments don’t compete with the mixer at the board in the back of the theater.

Such was the case with the Mark Taper Forum’s recent and lovely “Metamorphoses.” The soundscape, subterranean and sly, required amplification. The actors worked with it, not against it. The sound of the production, like the production overall, kept you rapt and helped you lean into the stories at hand.

Too often, however, the amplification question has become the amplification problem.

“If you are an actor and you can’t make yourself heard in a thousand-seat house, you’re doing something wrong--you should get off the stage and go home.” So wrote David Mamet in his essay “Against Amplification.” He continued: “The beautiful, trained human voice and its extrapolation, live music, are the most beautiful and perfect sounds we will ever hear. Let us not participate in eliminating, through laziness, this beauty from our lives.”

Mamet wrote this in the 1980s, back when “Cats” was a kitten and the volume levels at the local multiplex were “Top Gun” loud, as opposed to “M:I-2” loud. This was the end of the pre-remote-control era, according to veteran Los Angeles sound designer Jon Gottlieb--an era when, as he puts it, “people listened harder.”

We can thank “Cats” for any number of things, of course, but we can especially thank “Cats” for our modern Era of Loud. The present-day theme-parky vibe of Times Square can be traced directly back to “Cats” opening there in 1982, a year after its London premiere. It was an all-ages show that happened to be quite loud by 1982 Broadway standards.

Since then, across two decades, audio technology has kept pace with scenic and lighting technology. Designers of both “pop” and traditional musicals have relied more and more on automated lighting systems, the hallmark of which is swiveling rock-concert-style equipment.

Whether deployed brilliantly (“Bring In ‘Da Noise, Bring In ‘Da Funk”) or not (“Jekyll & Hyde”), those moving lights brought with them their own unwanted noise. Manufactured under brand names like Vari-lite and High End Systems Inc., the automated instruments contain cooling fans, all too audible. Result: Sound designers amp up the volume to drown out the lights. And audiences get a louder show out of it, at no additional charge.

The new generation of automated lighting equipment is quieter. Now it’s up to the directors and designers to turn the amplification levels back down. Will they?

Another tail is wagging another dog here. Watching an extensively body-miked show, there’s always that second or two when an audience member is forced into the role of voice detective. Wait, who’s singing now? Oh, OK, it’s her, it’s her now, got it. . . .

No big deal on the surface. Yet unless a director goes out of her/his way to visually clarify every single moment of stage time, the risk of locational disorientation runs rampant all evening. With so little directionality at work in most modern musical sound designs, you close your eyes and you have no idea where anyone’s voice is coming from, at any time. Open your eyes, and sometimes it’s still hard to track.

In effect, the newer sound technology encourages directors to over-direct--to stage every moment as obviously and even stupidly as possible, just to avoid confusion.

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A lot of shows should be good and loud; they need to be. “Bring In ‘Da Noise” put the best available technology to full, inspired use. “Rent,” which has a polyglot pop-rock score I love, is loud and good.

Another score about which I am crazy, “The Music Man,” is back on Broadway in a revival directed by Susan Stroman. The production’s up against a revival of “Kiss Me, Kate,” among other shows, in tonight’s Tony Awards.

Meredith Willson’s “Music Man” score is full of barbershop harmony, evergreen ballads and peerless 1912 Iowa patter. At some point the question smacks you right between the ears: Who decided to amplify this thing like it was “Rent”?

You don’t ask that question at “Kiss Me, Kate.” Why? Because sound designer Tony Meola’s work complements musical director Paul Gemignani’s. Gemignani’s complements the orchestrations by Don Sebesky. Sebesky complements the Cole Porter score, a work of great wit and dynamism. Headliners Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie, albeit better singers than comics, have never been supported more beautifully.

“Kiss Me, Kate” is an exception to the general Broadway rule; it’s an amplified revival that doesn’t flatten out and muddy the aural experience. Its orchestrations, dance arrangements and--crucially--its amplification level don’t shove you in a corner and say, in so many words: “Isn’t this GREAT? Are you ENJOYING YOURSELF?”

This is hardly a Broadway-only phenomenon. In a more confidential key, the International City Theatre took a chance on a three-character musical (“Bed and Sofa”) in a medium-sized house. (The show closes today in Long Beach.) The staging featured three singer-actors, navigating some eccentric and slippery material. All three wore body mikes.

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Director caryn morse desai defended her decision to go the amplification route, citing a better mix of four-piece orchestra and three-person cast. Apparently I caught the one bum performance of the run to date, in terms of sound. Even so: Wouldn’t an unmiked presentation of a story about three people sharing a small apartment in 1920s Moscow work better than a miked one? The atmosphere depends on an aura of enforced intimacy, not sonic wallop.

With theaters larger than ITC’s, there’s an appreciable benefit of amplification to those sitting in a balcony. You hear things you might otherwise miss. Simple. More for your money.

“There’s no excuse for not hearing a show anymore,” says sound designer Gottlieb. “Audiences want the same level and quality of sound that they get in other entertainment mediums.”

And yet, he concedes, “it’s so much nicer not to use amplification.”

Sometimes you don’t realize what you’ve been missing until you hear it again. Halfway through a recent, excellent Broadway performance of Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen,” considered the best play front-runner in tonight’s Tonys, something happened to my ears. They relaxed. They thanked me. They thanked me for bringing them to a simply and beautifully staged play featuring three fine actors--Philip Bosco, Blair Brown and Michael Cumptsy--with fine voices, unburdened by electronic amplification of any kind. No floor mikes. No body mikes.

Very 20th century, if not 19th. Maybe it’s time for a pendulum swing in the other direction. Maybe it’s time to reemphasize the training, the glory, the theatrical possibility of the human voice.