Natasha, Pierre, the Great Comet of 1812 - SGT Produce

Job title - SOUND mixer/engineer

The Chinese production of Natasha, Pierre, the great comet of 1812 premiered at the Nine Trees Future Art Center in December 2023 in Shanghai, China. It officially opened in January 2024 at the Bank of Communications Qiantan 31 Performing Arts Center in Shanghai, China with Cooper Grodin starring as Pierre

Produced by Shanghai Grand Theatre Production

Credits

Composer, lyrics, playwright: Dave Malloy

Director, Choreograph: Chloe Treat

Music Director: Or Matias

Associate Director: Xiaowei Zhou, Kaixiang Du

Associate Choreograph: Wenting Sun

Music Director: Jerome Zhao

Casting DIrector: Kate Lumpkin

Scene Design: Pilyoung Oh

Associate Scene Design and Set Design: Shiqing Wang

Lighting Design: Bowen Li, Han Zhang

Sound Design: Nick Kourtides, Brendan Aanes

Associate Sound Design: Siqi Ma

Costume Design: Jiawei Liu

Wig and Makeup Design: Yanrong Feng

This production adapted several onstage seating sections, some as orchestra pit, some as audience area, in order to get a better listening experience, our sound team chose Ti-max tracking system, realtime locating tags for actors, hung up to 54 point source plus line arrays loudspeakers over stage, for the audience onstage, actors were constantly moving, but the musicians were fairly fixed and next to the audience which makes it difficult to make it balance in the mix, so that it took unimaginable efforts, calculations, tuning and tryouts during the design and tech phase to make the sound better/ balanced for both the audience onstage, proscenium audience and the mixing position.

To me, mixing Natasha, Pierre, the great comet of 1812 has been the greatest challenge and excitement of my career as well. Live orchestra and each actors as a moving object on stage, also this is a song-thru musical fully in English which is not my native language. I have to be extremely familiar with each line, melody, element, technical cue, sound effect that I need to trigger to mix the show. During daily pre-show audio/ system check, my duty is to stay alert on any signs that might fail the system run and to make sure the system work smoothly before the show opens.

It was such a blessing to work with Nick, Brendan, Siqi and Suzzie from the sound team of the great comet, I learned so much from them!

Click on the “Music Video of Dust and Ashes” button down below to listen to the recording and the direct out mix from the console of the beautiful song of this show:

Recorded by Dian Yu

Equipment: Mics - Show mics, Audio Interface/ Mixing console - DiGiCo SD7T (Processed through UA plugins and internal EQ and Dynamics in the SD7T), DAW - Reaper

Check out the video of me mixing the opening song of the Act 2 “The Letters” during tech, it was such a precious footage, credit to the greatest Brendan Aanes