New Ways to Stream: Sunset Boulevard’s Video Designers on Their Award-Winning Success

It’s the biggest feat of this young theater season — or perhaps any modern theatre season: Tom Francis singing the title number of Sunset Boulevard live while marching down 44th Street, through Shubert Alley and back, in full view of passersby. It may sound simple in theory, but the technological complexity is immense – Francis has to not only be in perfect sync with the orchestra, but the video has to be broadcast live without delay on stage at the St. James Theatre.

Some audience members were skeptical of the liveness when this feat was first performed last year in London, when Jamie Lloyd’s new production debuted at the Savoy Theatre. But as the various clips from outside both the Savoy on London’s Strand and the St. James Theatre in New York can attest, it is not shot in advance (case in point: when Francis accidentally waded into a crowd of audience members leaving Hell’s Kitchen across the street). It leaves most of the chatterati wondering how Lloyd’s team got it together so perfectly.  Even the videographers themselves, Nathan Amzi and Joe Ransom, are still sort of mystified that they managed to pull it off so seamlessly. Because, after all, it’s all live. One hundred percent.

“I think it’s genuinely one of our proudest achievements,” Ransom told our sibling website WhatsOnStage earlier this year. “We do a lot in the film world, and this is our first foray into doing work in the theater in this capacity. When Jamie Lloyd first said to us that this is what he wanted to do, I looked at Nathan and said, ‘That’s not possible.’ If we were trying to do something like that on a film set, we’d do a hidden cut.” They Beta tested it using Ransom’s iPhone camera, which further cemented the idea that it wouldn’t work. But no one was willing to give up.

Finding the right equipment took some doing. Amzi, Ransom, and WhatsOnStage Award-winning sound designer Adam Fisher (another vitally important figure in this process) tested multiple kinds of wireless transmitters — the invisibility of the strings was of vital importance. They spoke to companies all over the world who said that it couldn’t be done without latency. There are indeed companies out there that have built systems to keep the latency and delays as low as possible, but even still, at contemporary concerts, Amzi notes, if there’s a video screen, you can tell that it’s not quite in sync with the performers if you’re up close.

Fisher, for his part, “had to judge the sound to match the cinematic side of it.” That involved creating a way for Francis to hear the orchestra each night as he traipsed around the Strand. “You’ve got to think about how sound and light travel at different speeds,” Amzi adds, “so the calculations were mental. Tom’s got to hear the orchestra, be able to sing in time with the orchestra, and then come back into the auditorium bang on. We had to glue it all together.”

There were other variables at play, too. Amzi remembers thinking, “We went on this crazy journey of ‘It’s raining. What do we do? Do I run to to buy shower caps for the transmitters?’ And then we had to figure it out with crowds of people outside. Everyone’s got phones, which affects your signal.”

Finally, they found a way to make it work, which Amzi came up with in a dream. Neither he nor Ransom are willing to reveal their magical secrets, but the proof is in the pudding.

“We failed a lot,” Amzi remembers. “We had zero back up. We had no other way.” “The fact that it is live,” says Ransom, “the fact that it is theatre, and the fact that it had to be done in one take was just incredible. When they finally got it right, the night before the first preview in England, they celebrated with a lot of Guinness. They earned a WhatsOnStage Award, an even sweeter reward.

For the New York run, Francis has been given “slightly different in-ears which block out more sound,” since obviously, Times Square is far noisier than London. He and his cast members reiterate that no one really, truly believes that it’s live, but they assure us that it is. David Thaxton, who plays Max Von Meyerling, remembers the first preview in the West End. “The moment Tom walked into the auditorium, there was this visceral, guttural reaction, where people stood and applauded and made noise. It was unreal. It was never quite the same again, because from that moment on, everyone knew what was going to happen. The second you walked in, people went ”Jesus Christ, that’s real.’ It was staggering.”

A version of this story was originally posted on WhatsOnStage.com in February 2024.