When Julius Caesar Augustus built the original Theatre of Marcellus at Emperors Palace, it was the largest and most important theatre in Ancient Rome. As an open-air theatre 13BCE, it provided an arena for locals and visitors to watch breathtaking performances of drama and song. Johannesburg’s modern-day version is no less impressive, accommodating a thousand theatregoers in a 17-tier auditorium.

The theatre recently completed a R6m transformation, including an audio system centred on a DiGiCo SD9 mixing console. ‘This is an exciting upgrade,’ admits DWR’s Jaco Beukes. ‘It gives the theatre 48 mic/line inputs, 16 line outputs and eight AES outputs on stage. At FOH, engineers have 40 local mic/line inputs, four AES inputs, four AES outs and 16 line outs.

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Brooklyn Steel is a new live music venue in East Williamsburg, New York. What was a steel fabrication business is now a 20,000-sq-ft space equipped with L-Acoustics K2 line arrays, plus delays and stage monitors. A gantry crane retained from the former steel fabrication business enables the flown arrays to be repositioned, along with the movable 50,000-pound steel and concrete stage, to scale the audience area according to the expected attendance at each show.

National concert promoter The Bowery Presents (TBP) is behind the venture, with its in-house team designing and installing the loudspeaker system, which is patterned after a similar rig at Terminal 5, a 3,000-capacity venue in Manhattan that the promoter also exclusively operates.

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Among the most anticipated of 2017’s arena tours, Kendrick Lamar is out in support of his double-platinum Damn album, visiting cities in the US, Canada and Mexico. FOH Engineer Kyle Hamilton specified a complete Vue sound reinforcement system for all dates, which was supplied by Sound Image.

Debuting to a packed house at the Gila River Arena near Phoenix, the system comprises 20-element hangs of Vue al-12 line array elements at LR, with two auxiliary side-hangs of eight elements each. Thirty-six VueDrive V3 Systems Engines provide power and processing for the arrays, with a DiGiCo SD7 for the FOH mix where a pair of Vue h-12s serve as monitors.

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Opened in 1911 the Erkel Theatre in Budapest has been Hungary’s largest auditorium since. With a currently audience capacity of 1,819, it has been the Hungarian State Opera’s second performance venue since 1951. Most recently, it was closed for six years until 2013, when it reopened after extensive renovation. This, however, left it with a small sound reinforcement system, and the recent decision to stage musicals and other live music performances meant that a more modern solution was needed.

As the main Opera House prepares to close for its own renovation, the Erkel is preparing for musicals and music concerts, as well as the work of contemporary composers such as Michael Nyman and Hans Zimmer.

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A celebration of UK and international music, comedy and the arts, the Henley Festival attracted more than 25,000 attendees to its 2017 programme, with its longest-serving contractor RG Jones Sound Engineering providing the PA system, and John Harris as Production Manager and Jim Lambert as Technical Managert.

Martin Audio’s MLA Compact system continued to serve the main Floating Stage over the Thames, which has a difficult audience profile being only 30m from front to back but more than 80m wide due. With a change of stage this year, RG Jones’ Simon Honywill – himself a Henley stalwart who was first involved as far back as 1984 – was quickly onsite to design a new PA arrangement to maximise coverage for the principal stage.

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