Martha: A Comedic Opera
Martha is a Comedic Opera about two wealthy sisters who accidentally accept jobs as farmhands for a pair of brothers, with whom they eventually fall in love. I saw it in Mitchell Hall theatre, which is a proscenium stage, as a matinee on April 22, 2018. Due to the style of performance there are several overlapping song lines (sometimes 4 different things being said at the same time) and this made it hard to understand at some points. Because it’s an opera, the staging was designed for the actors to face the audience.
One way I noticed sound reinforcement being used was the “surround sound” created by the speaker direction and theatre shape. Another thing I noticed was the fact that in this show- differently to a musical, it seemed to be boundary microphones rather than wireless microphones picking up sound on stage. I’m pretty sure there were also some hanging microphones, but I couldn’t see well enough from the audience to tell for certain. The sound environment enhanced my experience by having more sound all around. Since I am oversensitive, this was slightly …show more content…
Audience members can be very distracting; in this case their distractions included crinkling wrappers, and noisily consuming liquid and snacks (although I admit, again, that I am quite sensitive to these things). I personally do not have much experience in opera attendance, so I wasn’t expecting such a musically dynamic score for both orchestra and singers. There were points where the orchestra was overpowering, and I could barely hear the ensemble- though I suspect that might have partially been their training and distance from the microphones, in addition to the orchestra’s volume. That said, the leads were a bit easier to understand and hear, which leads to my suspicion that they were mostly vocal or opera