Well… here we are at opening night for Macbeth. It’s been a fairly huge amount of work getting all the new music finished and designing/refining all the sounds effects. As time goes on, I find one of the things that consistently provides joy to me (and hopefully to our audiences) is creating a variety of ambiances that help define where and when a scene is taking place.

The Witches in Macbeth, also referred to as the “weird sisters” are maybe not exactly lovable but they provide a dramatic change of setting from all the castle and battlefield stuff. Act IV Scene 1 has the Witches in their cave wreaking a bit of havoc. This is where they invoke a lengthy incantation around the cauldron and includes the famous “Double, double toil and trouble…”.

I decided early on that I wanted to create a unique sound for the cave. In the older, smaller blackbox theater I had successfully used a technique of “mic’ing the room” rather than the actors to change the “size” of the room. The Mass Arts Center is still relatively small (104 seats) but the ceiling was MUCH higher and I wasn’t sure the same technique would work here. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was less work than I thought to get that same effect again. Our director immediately loved the effect. I’m excited to present to our audiences over the next two weekends.

If you’re interested in learning a little more about the approach, pop back to this post from 2014.