Miss Saigon lands in Brazil

31 August 2007

Brazil - Sao Paulo's Teatro Abril provided the venue for the sixth production of the hit musical Miss Saigon to open this year, as the show started its first ever run in South America last month. Sound design is by Peter Grubb of Melbourne-based theatre sound engineering company, System Sound, with a Cadac J-Type Live Production Console at the heart of the sound system, supplied by local rental company Loudness.

The 1500-capacity Teatro Abril, regarded as one of the city's most beautiful theatres, is the premier venue for large-scale international productions, performed in Portuguese and featuring Brazilian casts. Destroyed by fire in 1969, the theatre was restored to its former glory and reopened in 2001. The venue provided the sound team with a straightforward load-in and set-up, presenting few challenges thanks to the good acoustics.

For Peter Grubb of System Sound, Miss Saigon is a regular in his sound design portfolio. He commented, "When I was asked to design a new production of Miss Saigon for Brazil I was thrilled. Having been involved with Les Misérables at Teatro Abril in 2001, I was happy to be working there once again, this time with one of my own designs. Brazil was my third Miss Saigon design in 12 months and whilst some points of the design have changed to suit the various theatres, as well as Korean, English and Portuguese-speaking audiences, the one undeviating point has been a J-Type. The local sound crew quickly felt at home on the Cadac and were amazed at the ease and flexibility of programming the show with the SAM software."

System Sound has had a 20-year association with Cadac, since importing the first Cadac console into Australia for Les Misérables, regarding them as the benchmark for live theatre sound production. System Sound's designs currently have Cadac desks placed in touring productions as far afield as Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, South America, South Africa, and Japan - in short, across the entire South East Asian and Pacific regions.

Loudness' musical portfolio includes a wide range of hit Broadway and West End shows, including Chicago, Phantom of the Opera, Sweet Charityand A Chorus Line. This is the first time that Cadac has featured in Loudness' equipment list, as Fernando Fortes, Loudness' system engineer on Miss Saigon explains: "We were so excited to be using a Cadac for the first time, and were really impressed during set-up.

Above all, it is the J-Type's sonic quality and noise floor that struck us - I am a real fan of Cadac's Tony Waldron and the company's approach to EMC compliance. We had no problems whatsoever with hum. This was also the first time that the theatre's sound team has used a Cadac, and they got to grips with it really quickly and loved it - it is so intuitive and flexible."

(Jim Evans)