Gareth Owen: ‘I didn’t get into theatre to do sound effects. I love music’
Gareth Owen at the mixing desk for A Bronx Tale at the Longacre Theatre, New York. Photo: Kal Dolgin
Features Interviews by Nick Smurthwaite - Mar 13, 2017
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Find out what you’re good at and then become the best you can. This simple piece of careers advice could certainly be applied to sound designer Gareth Owen, who discovered in his early 20s that musical theatre was the discipline he found most exciting and inspirational.
“When I started out I realised two things,” says the hard-working 39-year-old. “Firstly, there were an awful lot of people out there who were much better than me at doing sound design for plays, and secondly, I didn’t get into theatre to do sound effects, I went into it because I love music, especially rock’n’roll. I decided I should concentrate on the thing I enjoyed the most.” Now one of the most sought-after sound designers in the world, Owen routinely works on four or five shows simultaneously – “my schedule is absurd” – and his current portfolio includes the revival of 42nd Street in the West End, Bat Out of Hell in Manchester, Come from Away on Broadway and Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame in Berlin.
At any given time, there are up to 70 technicians of various nationalities working on his shows around the globe, and, of that number, about half work exclusively for Owen. “I don’t actually employ people,” he explains, “but they are associates who remain loyal to me. I put their names forward to the producer to work on a particular show with me. That way I can be technically impartial.”
Neil McDermott and the company of The Wind in the Willows at Theatre Royal, Plymouth. Photo: Marc Brenner
What happens with his “associate team”, as he refers to them, is that they do all the preparatory leg- work on replica productions. For example, when one of his Broadway successes, The Little Mermaid, was recreated in Moscow in 2012, Owen’s associates did the fit-up and the sound checks so that he could then turn up at the dress rehearsal and make sure everything was fine and dandy.
“We have very strict guidelines on how we put shows together, so that any one of us can walk into any of our shows and know they are set up and cabled in the same way, which means I can be in New York one day and London the next, walk into the show I’m working on and know precisely how it is configured. It’s all about forward planning, methodology and everybody pulling in the same direction.
“Today you can create sound effects for other members of your team, and for other shows, from the other side of the world. We regularly update the software we need in order to work on several shows at once. It is a common model across big musicals – the senior creative working on new shows, while the associates look after the replica shows. Without my associates, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do.” Owen got into performance tech in his mid-teens, growing up in St Ives in Cornwall. “I did the lighting for a local nightclub and when the owner asked me if I knew anything about sound-mixing live bands, I told him I was an expert, while knowing absolutely nothing about it. I bought Peter Buick’s book Live Sound and taught myself the basics. Then I bought a mixing desk, some microphones, some cable and some effects boxes, and I was ready to go. I did lifeguard work on the beach during the day and mixed bands at night. It was an idyllic life.”
At university, he blagged his way into working part-time for a company that provided sound for rock and pop festivals throughout the country. One of his colleagues who was contracted to work on stage show The Blues Brothers in the West End asked Owen if he would cover for him Summer Strallen and Tom Chambers while he went off on a three-month tour with Deep Purple. “I finished in Top Hat at the Aldwych Theatre, up as head of sound on The Blues Brothers. I didn’t have anywhere to London, in 2011. Photo: Tristram Kenton stay in London, so I bought a tent and lived in the garden of a house in Palmers Green rented by the band from the show. Luckily, it was over the summer.”
The musical director of Blues Brothers put Owen up for sound designer on a UK tour of Godspell. “To this day I’ve no idea how I got it,” he says. “I was in my mid-20s. I must have been really good at blagging, because I had no idea about really basic things, like which was upstage and which downstage. I learned as I went along. I even got a mention in the Guardian review of the show. My mum and dad finally acknowledged that sound design might be more than mucking about at a mixing desk.”
Clearly one of Owen’s strengths is his genuine enthusiasm for the job. He came to Bat Out of Hell as a massive fan of Meat Loaf and composer Jim Steinman, and with a determination to do their legacy justice.
“I really enjoy doing shows like 42nd Street, Top Hat and Singin’ in the Rain, but my first love is big, loud rock’n’roll shows like Memphis, Hairspray and Sister Act,” he says. “So to bring Jim Steinman’s music to the stage was an honour for me and I really wanted to treat it like a rock concert. I’ve tried to create a rock concert environment without scaring off the average musical theatre patron. Basically we ended up with a non-stop soundscape in full surround-sound. I’ve developed a matrix of surround speakers that fit on the roof of the stalls and the circle, so you are enveloped by the music.”
Another “dream gig” for Owen was The Hunchback of Notre Dame, not only because of its director, Scott Schwartz, who gave Owen free rein to do the best job for the show, but also for its sweeping, cinematic ambition. “Everything that happens on stage is punctuated with a sound effect, so when a knife drops on the floor inside the cathedral you hear the noise of metal falling into stone echoing round Beverley Knight in Memphis the Musical the auditorium. In the bell tower, there are seven full-size cathedral at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London, in bells, each embedded with switches and sensors so that, when 2014. Photo: Tristram Kenton Quasimodo pulls the ropes, the bells swing backwards and forwards just as the real ones would; the clappers hit the bells, which transmit to sound-effect engines, emitting the ringing sounds the real ones would.” Owen says he and his team are pushing sound technology forward every day. In the last six months, he has adopted an innovative mixing desk that “enables me to do things other people can’t do”.
The turning point in musical theatre sound tech happened in 2005, he says, when Mick Potter won an Olivier award for his sound design on The Woman in White. “For a long time the attitude to sound design had been to pretend it didn’t exist. It was all about microphones and speakers being invisible. What Mick did was effectively put the audience in the middle of the orchestra. It was a real eye-opener to someone like me. Every time you go to the cinema, the music swells around you, and even the cheapest car has 12 speakers, so the same thing happens when you’re driving and listening to music.
“In short, people’s expectation of sound has dramatically altered in the last decade – almost everyone has a phone with an MP3 player, and great-quality speakers. But so much musical theatre has not evolved in the same way, because, traditionally, amplification has been a dirty word. Slowly but surely, musical theatre is catching up. We’re seeing more and more shows that don’t apologise for having microphones and speakers, and don’t try to hide everything, while allowing the audience to hear every word sung and every note played. The sound designers who can deliver that are the ones taking musical theatre forward.”
CV: Gareth Owen
Born: 1977, Sheffield Training: Self-taught Landmark productions: Disney’s The Little Mermaid, world tour (2007-16), Top Hat, Aldwych Theatre, London (2011), Merrily We Roll Along, Menier Chocolate Factory, London (2012), Harold Pinter Theatre, London (2013), Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, world tour (2013-17), I Can’t Sing!, London Palladium (2014), Memphis, Shaftesbury Theatre, London (2014), A Bronx Tale, Broadway (2016), The Wind in the Willows, Theatre Royal, Plymouth (2016), Come from Away, Broadway (2017), Bat Out of Hell, Opera House, Manchester (2017), 42nd Street, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London (2017) Awards: Olivier for best sound design for Merrily We Roll Along, 2013, Olivier for best sound design for Memphis, 2015 Agent: Creative House
garethowensound.com
Nick Smurthwaite Nick Smurthwaite has been writing about the performing arts for The Stage and other leading publications for more than 30 years.