Jeremy Lowe’s setup for the National Tour of Peter And The Starcatcher.
“Peter And The Starcatcher is a play with music where the two musicians do more foley work than play actual music. Sound effects are made using different techniques such as making whip cracks using actual riding crops, and dropping a metal chain in a bucket to make the sound of glass breaking. The musicians are set up in sound towers suspended about 15 feet above the audience on either side of the stage.
Touring with this setup is great because the layout is almost exactly the same in each city. The clamps and stands are left on the platform when it is traveled so when it arrives in the new city, the instruments are loaded on in the exact same place. So far, the set-up has been drastically changed in only two cities. Loading into The Moore Theater in Seattle proved to be difficult because of the house's small size. Therefore, the towers could not fit in their usual front-of-house position. The musician platforms were removed from the towers and we had to play backstage, looking on monitors to line up our sounds with the show.
The other odd setup was in The Eisenhower Theater at The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. In this theater there was a wall on either side of the stage that would have jutted our towers out too far in front of the stage, covering sight lines from the side balconies and blocking our proscenium. To fix this, the crew had to reverse our towers to fit around the walls. For our three week run here, I had to find new positions for some of my instruments. Andy Grobengieser (the MD) and I had to get used to the new view from opposite sides of the stage.
Some of the more interesting instruments in my set-up include a cuica for gorilla sounds, two pieces of steel for sword fighting sounds and a detuned violin to create the sound of a creaking door."
Peter And The Starcatcher - Tour - Jeremy Lowe
February 2014
