Holland is the latest country to stage the hit musical Jersey Boys, featuring the music and story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons. With sound design by Steve Canyon Kennedy, Orbital Sound was selected to provide the sound equipment for the Dutch production.

The system deploys the Meyer Sound MICA compact high-powered curvilinear array speaker, supported by d&b audiotechnik E0 compact speakers.

This is the first foreign language production of the show, which obviously presents the sound team with its own set of unique challenges over and above the conventional issues of the venue. We caught up with associate sound designer Andrew Keister just after the opening, and asked him for an insight into this production.

"Jersey Boys today is in a place that we couldn't have dreamed of eight years ago when it first opened on Broadway. There have been some fairly seismic shifts in terms of the equipment available to us, and we have undergone a slow evolutionary march towards this latest production, which is different in virtually all respects! Each step along the way has given us either a higher degree of quality to the sound or greater degree of control over the performance.

"The majority of the speaker system is a Meyer MICA array, which is an extremely precise and powerful system, which we have been using for the past four years and are very happy with the results. It provides an ideal combination of power and throw for a musical like Jersey Boys without any compromise in terms of output and frequency response. Processing for the audio is all handled via the Meyer's Galileo system, which has a great set of unique filtering tools and gives us excellent control. We are using a DiGiCo SD7 Live Digital Console on front of house duties, taking in around 110 inputs and filtering them down to the Galileo.

"We have a cast of 16 on the show, together with a 9-piece band, and are using Sennheiser 5212 radiomics with 3732 receivers. Most of the band appears on stage wirelessly at some point, and we use DPA 4099 mics, the H variant, for the horns, and a custom-made adapter for the guitars and bass to get the impedance at the correct level to go into the 5212s.

"The venue is interesting, giving us a bit of a challenge with regard to the balcony – it was added to the theatre at a later date, sits relatively low compared to the stalls level, and then the ceiling above the balcony is quite low too. The result is there are some fairly narrow slots to push the sound through, some of which we could design around with the line array but some needed a more extensive set of delays."

The other members of the sound crew working alongside Andrew were Hennie Schwithal as production engineer, head of sound and mixer Norbert Boekhout, Andre Kijk in de Vegte as the radio mic technician, Thijs Hoonakker, and no 2 mixer Joost van de Put. From the Orbital perspective, the team comprised Dan Bailey and David Bartholomeusz.

On working with Orbital, Andrew commented:
"We gave Orbital a very specific list of kit we wanted, and we were pleasantly surprised with the response – we got everything we asked for, even though some of it wasn't in their regular inventory. Dan and David were very willing to go the extra mile to get the best possible sound system together for us – an excellent result."

Jersey Boys opened in Utrecht at the Beatrix Theatre on 22nd September to great reviews and is set for a successful run.

- Meyer Sound's M Series
Meyer Sound's M Series represents a fully integrated range of self-powered linear array loudspeakers, encompassing critically-acclaimed designs such as the MILO, MICA, M'elodie and MINA. The products cover a broad choice of power-to-size ratios, to suit touring and fixed-install applications in any size or type of venue. As deployed on Jersey Boys, the MICA forms part of Meyer's MILO family, and brings the very high output and extended high-frequency response of the MILO to a smaller package, with a broad 100-degree horizontal coverage. This makes the MICA design ideal for applications that require less power or throw distance compared to MILO, or where weight and size are a particular concern. Sonically compatible with the MILO for seamless integration, for example as a sidefill hang in large venues, MICA offers a peak output of 138 dB SPL and includes the QuickFly rigging system of Meyer's M Series, with captive GuideALinks that simplify use in flown or ground-stacked arrays.