I have just returned from designing the sound for The Five Fingers of Funk at The Minneapolis Children's Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The show was written by Will Power with music by Justin Ellington and directed by Derrick Sanders. I have not designed a lot of musicals like this, and it was a blast. The show follows five kids from 1974 to 1978 through all four years of high school. Each of the five characters have their own struggle; Poppo, the singer, has grown up in foster care and has fallen in with the drug dealer that his mother used to run with, and who has possibly killed her; Ruby, the piano player has an over-bearing father who is a preacher, and she "sneak for the funk"; DP, the drummer has to care for his grandmother while earning a living for the family; Falcon, the white member is forced to move after his father deems their area dangerous; and Cedric, who's basement they practice in, is a momma's boy who is a stand in for his father who abandoned them. The story is a beautiful one, and the songs are in the style of some of the great musicians of the 70s, George Clinton, Sly and The Family Stone and James Brown.
The
challenges I found in designing the piece is two fold. The space is the
smaller of the two theatres at The Children's Theatre (CTC), the Cargill space.
It is a big assembly-type room used either for the small shows or for
events. It has risers that can be pushed in and out for this versatility.
The crew at CTC is amazing and knows the room so well, that they are able
to baffle the cement walls to keep the room from being too echo-y, as
well as head off any other unforeseen sound problem like a high ceiling and
grid. The "basement" was in the center of the playing area, and
we tried to create the illusion of the songs being played from that localized
area. The other difficult part of
this musical was that the actors sang and played their own songs. The actors were not musicians and
therefore had to learn their music during the rehearsal process. They turned into total rock stars, they
learned all of their songs, and three of the five musicians learned to play
more than one instrument. I didn’t
have a monitor mixer, someone who could mix what the actors heard, and since we
were relying heavily on their amps to fill the space it was a delicate balance
between blasting out the actors, making sure they could hear themselves and not
getting any feedback. We moved the
speakers nearly every day of our four days of tech to get the sound we
wanted. Again, thanks to the
patience of the CTC crew, we
ultimately were able to get the sound we were looking for, funk played by kids
in a basement, yet full enough to pass as a musical. The show was a hit, and with any luck will have a life after
this run.
Working
at CTC is a wonderful experience, they are one of the top regional children’s
theatres in the country, and the care they put into every detail of their shows
is clearly the reason why.
