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“We have had a very successful relationship with Theatre Train for several years now, providing reinforcement for the majority of Theatre Train’s London shows” says Darren, “...they like the way we approach things, and so were keen to work with us on this show as well”.

From the inception of the project Darren enlisted the expertise of Sound By Design colleague, Systems Engineer Dave Shepherd, to design the system. As rigging time was extremely limited, being granted access at 6am with rehearsals starting at 11:30am, Dave opted to use the in-house JBL delays to cover the upper levels, and used sixteen boxes of Meyer Sound MICA and twelve boxes of Meyer Sound M1D curvilinear array cabinets to cover the stalls and arena. Four Meyer Sound CQ-1s were used for front-fill and four Meyer Sound 700-HPs provided the sub-bass. The system was managed by two Meyer Sound Galileo 616 loudspeaker management processors, with Smaart real-time sound measurement software being used to line-up the system.

Darren chose to use a DiGiCo D1 for front-of-house duties, whilst monitors were operated from a DiGiCo D5. Monitor wedges were EM Acoustics M-12S’ and Meyer Sound USM-1Ps.

The show consisted of a 5000-piece children’s choir, with a professional west-end band and actors, with some older children providing vocal solos in some of the numbers.

“Micing up a 5000-piece choir would prove near impossible, especially due to health and safety constraints” commented Darren. “As the choir was split in two, I decided to pick a section in each half and use six Audix M1245s on each section, and it worked quite nicely. The nature of the show meant that the choir needed to be quite high in the mix, so getting this right was essential.”