In any event, all this thinking about sound got me thinking about sound designers. In the 25+ years I've been making stuff (be it live theatre or canned film), virtually every project has been enhanced by a genius of audio. So I thought I'd do a series of short posts. In each I will profile a different sound designer or sound editor who I feel privileged to have worked with. First up: Alex Frowein.
I had the pleasure of working with Alex in Boston when New Opera Theatre Ensemble embarked on a great adventure in audio. We wrote and produced a full-length radio musical which we performed in the darkness of the Charles Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science. The show also incorporated smells which were piped in via the AC system, but that's a topic for another post.
Blind Trust told a pretty straightforward story. A young woman, new to town goes to the Department of Motor Vehicles to apply for a local drivers' license and through a series of odd mishaps, loses her purse. Because this was a show performed in total darkness, each setting in this young woman's odyssey had to be "painted" with sound.
Alex Frowein was then head of a small company in Boston that specialized in post-production audio. Most of their work, if I recall correctly, was commercial, so the appeal to Alex (a real genius for so many things detail-oriented) was in the challenge of painting with sound from start to finish. Aside from the musical score, the soundscapes would be our primary means for instantly letting the audience seated in total darkness know where we were. Was it the DMV or a pizzeria? A busy street corner at the start of a thunderstorm or a dry cleaners? Or an abandoned walk-up apartment? There were dozens of settings in the tale of this young woman's search for her purse and a kind stranger's simultaneous search for her. And Alex Frowein and his team pulled it off beautifully.
I'll never forget the moment toward the end of the show when the two protagonists shared a love duet on a street corner and it suddenly began to rain. As they took shelter under a storefront awning, the sound of the rain changed accordingly to paint for us the canvas onto which larger and larger drops of rain and then pouring torrential rain fell. At another pivotal point in our story, our heroine visited a floral shop. The sounds of the refrigerators blended with the sound of scissors cutting stems and light traffic through the glass window of the door, on which hung a jangly bell that rang when each new character entered. Much like the olfactory bouquet that was designed for this scene, the aural one was a breathtaking schmorgasbord of sounds... all palpable and plausible details taken from real life. But all constructed in the studio, built like a sculpture, one sound at a time.
It wouldn't have been the same without the precise attention to detail and the vivid imagination of Alex Frowein. What's your favorite tale of heroic sound design? I'd love to hear some of them.
