The Picture of Dorian Gray

Overview

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a thoroughly modern adaption of the classic Oscar Wilde tale for the contemporary Broadway audience. Starring Emmy and Tony Award-winning actress Sarah Snook and directed by award-winning writer/director Kip Williams, the show is a brilliant melding of Snook’s tour-de-force performance – embodying all 26 roles of the original story – and dazzling stage production involving extensive video and audio elements. Initially staged by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2020, the show had a successful run in London’s West End before being brought to the Music Box Theatre in New York, NY for an exclusive, limited set of performances on Broadway.

Program

The WSDG Team were brought on as acoustic consultants for the production and collaborated alongside Williams, the show’s sound production team, and U.S. Sound Consultant Jason Crystal to design a completely customized solution for the run of shows at the Music Box Theatre.

Design

The Picture of Dorian Gray makes extensive use of live camera feeds and prerecorded video and audio content for its signature multimedia presentation style. All of these aspects must be carefully timed and controlled to achieve the desired effect of the performance. The smaller size of the Music Box Theatre compared to previous venues introduced some new challenges in acoustics and audio latency that required creative, out-of-the-box solutions to solve.

One of the main challenges facing the production team for the Music Box Theatre shows was achieving less speech intelligibility from the stage as opposed to more, to ensure that Snook’s onstage sound didn’t overpower the microphone mix and compromise the timing of the production.

WSDG’s team analyzed all aspects of the video and audio production of the show – including the audio technology, video technology, stage setup, acoustic conditions of the theatre, and even Snook’s costume and lavalier microphone setup, to offer a creative solution to the problem that achieved the desired effect.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner