What is a radio play anyway? In this unique theatrical experience, you’ll see your favorite TAP actors, playing actors, who are playing their roles in A Christmas Carol. The scene you’ll see before you is a 1940’s sound stage complete with art deco styling, microphones, and tables full of items to create live sound effects.
As you settle into your role as the live studio audience, the actors will arrive at the studio for their annual presentation of A Christmas Carol. They are costumed to match the style of the period with some exquisite period details. As they begin to bring the characters of A Christmas Carol to life, they only add a hat or props sparingly for the benefit of the live audience. The real magic happens at the microphones where the characters come to life over the air waves with changes to voice and cadence of speech.
One of the key aspects of a radio play is the inclusion of live sound effects created before your eyes with a variety of objects, tools, and musical instruments. These sound effects are created with the assistance of a foley artist. In A Christmas Carol: A Live Radio Play, our foley artist (musician, and sound designer) is played by Brian Grimm. You may remember their haunting original score for the world premiere production of Ryan’s Pub, Trivia Night.
The art of foley enhances the mood, creates a sense of place, and provides information about the characters and setting to support the action on the stage. A wide variety of props are used to create sound effects, including doors, shoes for footsteps, chains for rattling, and TAP’s custom-built wind machine, one of Grimm’s favorite sound effects. “The wind machine is operated with a handle on the side of a wheel, much like the “water wheel” used for a mill. It rotates slats of wood that drag across a piece of fabric drawn over the top of the wheel. It’s such a cool concept for a noise-making device,” says Grimm, “Very enjoyable to use, and visually quite entertaining. You can’t miss it!”
Grimm first became interested in foley and sound making through music. They spent time studying and performing “extended techniques” being used in twentieth century composition, in free improvisation, and the experimental music scene. All of which used unconventional objects or techniques on musical instruments to create unique new sounds. Grimm was also drawn to “musique concrète” from the 1940s to 50s, an early form of electronic composition which actually incorporated real life sounds into its music textures. All of these inspired Grimm to perform with sounds or sound-making objects like you would with musical instruments. From there, it was a natural jump into live foley mixed with music scores for theatre.
Brian explains that, “Sound design for theatre combines training in many different disciplines. One must become proficient in not only music composition, but also in building sound cues in programs like QLab. It involves many aspects of audio engineering, including live sound skills (recording, editing, and mixing audio in digital audio workstations). There is a strong emphasis on ear training, understanding how acoustics work, creativity, script literacy, ability to collaborate and communicate, and personal experience in live performance.“ Grimm definitely brings those skills to this production of A Christmas Carol, their third live foley artist performance at TAP.
“Ultimately, foley is a fascinating and deeply involved collaboration between sound, props, and the scenic department to bring a live radio drama to life. A lot of planning goes into finding or borrowing, making, repairing, and performance techniques for these sound objects,“ says Grimm. “There is also a lot of fun, playful collaboration between the actors and director in how we are using the foley objects in this specific production!”
A Christmas Carol: A Live Radio Play runs December 3 through 28 at Third Avenue PlayWorks in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. You’ve never experienced Charles Dickens’s holiday classic quite like this, so you’ll want to get your tickets early for this family-friendly production.