Sound designer Craig Beyrooti was working in the Orlando warehouse of his audio equipment company when he got a call asking him to drive straight to Vero Beach.
It was fall of 2000, press night for Riverside Theatre’s “Swinging on a Star.” The supplier for the show’s backline – sound equipment, drums and keyboards – pleaded with Beyrooti that the sound really needed help.
“I don’t even know where Vero is,” Beyrooti protested.
“I was in shorts and a T-shirt,” Beyrooti recalls. “He said, ‘Please, you gotta do this.’ He’d given me so much work that I said, ‘Well, OK.’”
After 15 seasons and more than 40 shows as sound designer, Beyrooti marvels at the advances Riverside has made. “It really is amazing – all credit to Allen Cornell,” he says, referring to Riverside’s artistic producing director, who has led the theater to a level of production that fans say rivals any regional theater in the U.S., if not Broadway itself.
Tapping into a talent like Beyrooti was a typical Cornell smart move. Recently relocated from South Africa, Beyrooti brought a resume in sound production that dated back to his school days, when he worked as a club and radio DJ in Johannesburg.
Beyrooti’s career included talent management, studio recording and audio production services. The sound engineer to two top South African pop music acts, he provided equipment for music festivals and concert tours. Branching into theater sound design in the 1990s, he worked with Broadway-style musicals and corporate events for major clients like BP and IBM.
He also sold professional audio equipment, installing sound systems for amphitheaters, civic centers and playhouses.
In 1999, he was asked to relocate to the U.S. to facilitate importation of equipment to South Africa. He went to work for his current company, Atlantic Professional Audio, in Orlando.
A year later, Beyrooti arrived in Vero to find a sound system in Riverside’s main theater that probably wouldn’t pass muster at Riverside Children’s Theatre today.
“There were some homemade speakers and store-bought computer-type speakers. We did the best we could on that.”
Riverside was “way more of a small community theater” then, says Beyrooti. A master electrician was in charge of sound and interns often mixed the shows.
After “Swinging on a Star,” Cornell called Beyrooti back in. He installed a more extensive speaker system and moved the mixing desk from down center to the rear and side of the theater – for the sake of patrons, and ease of access for the engineers.
With Riverside’s major 2007 renovation, new equipment was installed. But after the massive success of “42nd Street” in 2010, Beyrooti and Cornell huddled again: Cornell wanted sound to be comparable to a Broadway or West End experience.
It was just the sort of challenge Beyrooti loved. His next trip to Vero, he brought rental speakers and a singer to test them – his office manager, who happened to have a great voice. Cornell was sold.
Since then, incremental improvements have greatly changed Riverside’s audience experience, most recently, the addition of speakers both in and under the balcony, for years a notorious dead zone.
“I’m pleased,” says Beyrooti. “To get a smooth even coverage: that’s the path that we’re on. We’re trying to make the sound the same in every single seat.”
Beyrooti works closely with Josh Schact, a former lighting intern and now head sound engineer whom Beyrooti calls “fantastic.”
The relationship between sound designer and sound engineer is “probably the most collaborative effort between a designer and an operator,” says Beyrooti.
Beyrooti and Schact start each season analyzing the equipment needs of each upcoming show. Then they do a sweep of the theater, passing a microphone across each seat to analyze the sound from the stage and speakers, making sure the speakers point in the right directions and are correctly equalized.
The two then focus on each show individually, analyzing how many inputs they’ll need – the board can accommodate 72 mics, plus 8 with delay and reverb. A big show like “West Side Story” can use 30 mics, more when the actors wear two mics in case one fails on stage.
Sound effects use a separate computer and Beyrooti and Schact have created a library of sounds, recording new ones when needed. Remember the musical typewriter sounds in “A Secretary is Not a Toy” from “How to Succeed in Business (Without Really Trying)”? Schact recorded the sounds of a manual typewriter and then engineered it to play off a keyboard.
For the Pearl Harbor opening scene In “South Pacific,” they created the sense of incoming planes by programming speakers to crescendo. But the real fun came in creating the illusion of a helicopter starting up on stage in “Miss Saigon” and then flying through the auditorium, banking and finally disappearing.
“We added so many loudspeakers to make the helicopter convincing, and we wanted the audience to feel it. To help the sound move from speaker to speaker required some tweaking, but that was a lot of fun to do.”
The most frenetic action on the board involves the actors’ microphones. Woven into the hairline, attached to a box worn on the body and secured to withstand all the dancing around, the mics have to be opened on actors who are speaking, pulled down on those who are silent, and cut altogether the second an actor leaves the stage. If two actors are talking or singing together, their mics have to be adjusted to accommodate picking up sound from each other. If an actor has a cold, the sound board can help mask a strain in the voice.
“The designer sets everything up, going through the processing of each mic to optimize it to the actor and the space,” Beyrooti explains. “The operator has to learn the show and know every line from every actor to make sure that they’re heard clearly.”
The degree of detail involved in theater sound makes it a far more difficult arena than studio recording or large concerts, he says.
“For the longest time, live sound engineer was in the top five stressful occupations,” Beyrooti says. “Today, digital consoles can aid you greatly. But even rock ‘n roll is relatively easy compared to live theater, where you’re relying on these tiny microphones, and you have to make sense of all this in the relatively small space of the theater. It’s difficult, but it’s also one of the most rewarding things.”
For Riverside’s latest show, “Memphis,” Beyrooti will be merging two bits of his background.
“‘Memphis’ is going to be interesting because it’s rock ‘n roll in a theater environment.”
The show’s score is made up of rock ‘n roll songs, and the orchestra – which includes an electric guitar – doesn’t make room for vocals the way it would in traditional musicals.
“The band is playing at a good healthy level and the singers have to deliver after that,” he says. “It’s going to be challenging and it’s going to be fun.”
And if there was anything he wishes he could have done differently on that 2000 production of “Swinging on a Star,” he’ll get a second chance this fall: Riverside’s got it scheduled for October, with Beyrooti as sound designer.