Interview: Palmer Hefferan, Dan Moses Schreier, and Daniel Kluger Discuss Their Unique Tony-Nominated Sound Designs

Jeremy Jordan’s voice echoes through a cave. Lorde’s “Green Light” provides an outlet for the emotions of teenage girls. An authentic 1950s broadcast news studio bustles to life. These are just some of the scenarios created on Broadway this season by sound designers.

Six-time Tony nominee Dan Moses Schreier, whose work currently features in Floyd Collins, says the job of a sound designer, in simple terms, is to oversee how everything sounds, like a record producer on an album. “This is talking in general terms because it’s a combination of work that’s highly technical and highly artistic, but it’s really being overlord of the sonic world,” he says.

What that entails depends on the project, and it can get very specific. A requirement of Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain is that the song “Green Light” by Lorde be used for the climax of the play. A sound designer could play the song and gradually increase the volume, but sound designer and composer Palmer Hefferan, who earned her second Tony nomination for the show, took it further than that.

First, the song starts from a boom box onstage as the characters play it in a classroom. As the scene continues, it starts coming through the main theatrical sound system. She also separated vocals and different instruments from the track and played around with where to place them in the sound system to create the most explosive experience possible. “You feel it in your body,” she says, “even if you don’t recognize that some type of movement is happening in the sound because the exciting thing that sound can do is it can touch and interact with the audience because of how it moves through space.”

In Floyd Collins, how sound moves through space is crucial to creating the environment. In the first 15 minutes, the title character, played by Jeremy Jordan, uses the echoes of his voice to explore the cave where he gets trapped, though we never see the cave. All the echoes are done live in real time. Schreier was also the sound designer for the original off-Broadway production in 1996, and the effect was created with two reverb units feeding into one another. Now it’s done through computer manipulation. Because the Vivian Beaumont is such a large theater, there are more than 140 speakers. “We’re really taking Jeremy’s voice and we’re throwing it around the room,” he says. “If Jeremy were to yelp funnily or differently, that would appear in the echo series throughout the theater.”

Other sound effects, such as a shaft collapsing, also help the audience visualize the setting. “One of the brilliant things about Tina [Landau]’s approach is that the cave is very abstract,” says Schreier. “It’s all done through lighting and through sound and your imagination. Sound is its own character in the show. Reinforcement is a skill and an art, but this is taking [sound design] to another level where it’s part of the storytelling.”

Good Night, and Good Luck also evokes a specific time and place through design, though the set is not so abstract. For the story about reporters in the 1950s in the early days of television news, every detail about the original CBS Studios, down to the microphones, was researched. Sound designer and musical supervisor Daniel Kluger, who was nominated for his fifth Tony for the show, used vintage ribbon microphones, similar to ones that would have been used at the time. “We could have made them props,” he says, “but all the microphones are actually on and working, and that adds a particular vibe and quality to the show.”

This season, Kluger was also the sound designer and composer for Oh, Mary!, which required less of a period-accurate approach. (“[Director] Sam Pinkleton said I think we need to write really melodramatic 1940s style Hollywood underscoring for this drag comedy that’s about the civil war,” Kluger says, “but maybe the music sounds like Gone with the Wind.”) In that show, the main challenge was making the dialogue loud enough to be heard over all the laughter. “The rhythm of the show has to continue, so they can’t hold for laughs every line or it loses its energy,” says Kluger. Since the level of laughter is not always the same each night, he had to build something that could be adaptable to the amount of noise coming from the audience.

Though it’s not a requirement for every show they do, Kluger, Schreier, and Hefferan also compose. “Part of the job is to be able to distill information that you get about someone else’s lived experience and turn it into music,” says Hefferan. In the case of John Proctor Is the Villain, it was intimidating to create music when much of the inspiration is major pop icons of the 21st century. So she embedded a subtle “witchy-ness” through nature sounds into the transitions. “It is a beckoning of the woods to these girls to express themselves and feel freedom,” says Hefferan, “doing what the supposed witches in The Crucible did to reclaim their individuality and freedom from societal constraints.”

Even with accolades and award recognition, sound design can seem almost invisible. Hefferan recalls that in grad school a professor said the greatest compliment you’ll receive is no one knows you did your job. “This is a cliché, but it’s one of these things where when you get it right, people don’t pay attention to it,” says Kluger. “You’re trying to create a state of suspended disbelief, and I’m actually OK if people don’t think about it.”